Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island | Page 2

coherently.
"Oh, Tom! what is it?" gasped Helen, seizing his arm with both hands.
It took but a single glance to discover the relationship between them. Twins never looked more alike--only Tom's features lacked the delicacy of outline which belonged to his sister.
"Tom!" cried Ruth, on the other side of the excited youth, "don't keep us on tenter-hooks. Surely nothing has happened to Jane Ann?"
"I don't know! They won't tell us much about it at the station," exclaimed the boy.
"There hasn't been a wreck?" demanded Ruth.
"Yes. At Applegate Crossing. And it is the train from the west that is in trouble with a freight. A rear-end collision, I understand."
"Suppose something has happened to the poor girl!" wailed Helen.
"We must go and see," declared Ruth, quick to decide in an emergency. "You must drive us, Tom."
"That's what I came back for," replied Tom Cameron, mopping his brow. "I couldn't get anything out of Mercy's father----"
"Of course not," Helen said, briskly, as Ruth ran to the house. "The railroad employes are forbidden to talk when there is an accident. Mr. Curtis might lose his job as station agent at Cheslow if he answered all queries."
Ruth came flying back from the house. She had merely called into the kitchen to Aunt Alvirah that they were off--and their destination. While Tom sprang in and manipulated the self-starter, his sister and the girl of the Red Mill took their seats in the tonneau.
By the time old Aunt Alvirah had hobbled to the porch, the automobile was being turned, and backed, and then it was off, up the river road. Uncle Jabez, in his dusty garments, appeared for a moment at the door of the mill as they flashed past in the big motor car. Evidently he was amazed to see the three--the girls hatless--starting off at such a pace in the Camerons' car.
Tom threw in the clutch at high speed and the car bounded over the road, gradually increasing its pace until the hum of the engine almost drowned out all speech. The girls asked no questions. They knew that, by following the river road along the placid Lumano for some distance, they could take a fork toward the railway and reach Applegate Crossing much quicker than by going through Cheslow.
Once Tom flung back a word or two over his shoulder. No relief train had gone from their home station to the scene of the wreck. It was understood that a wrecking gang, and doctors, and nurses, had started from the distant city before ever the Cheslow people learned of the trouble.
"Oh! if Jane Ann should be hurt!" murmured Helen for the twentieth time.
"Uncle Bill Hicks would be heartbroken," agreed Ruth.
Although the crossroad, when they struck into it at the Forks, was not so smooth and well-built as the river highway, Tom did not reduce speed. Mile after mile rolled away behind them. From a low ridge they caught a glimpse of the cut where the two trains had come together.
It was the old story of a freight being dilatory in getting out of a block that had been opened for the passage of an express. The express had run her nose into the caboose of the freight, and more harm was done to the freight than to the passenger cars. A great crowd, however, had gathered about.
Tom ran the car into an open lot beside the tracks, where part of the railroad fence had been torn away. Two passenger cars were on their sides, and one or two of the box cars had burst open.
"Look at that!" gasped the boy, whose bright eyes took in much that the girls missed, for they were looking for Jane Ann Hicks. "That's a menagerie car--and it's all smashed. See! 'Rival's Circus & Menagerie.' Crickey! suppose some of the savage animals are loose!"
"Oh! don't suggest such a thing," begged his sister.
Tom saw an excited crowd of men near the broken cage cars of the traveling menagerie. Down in the gully that was here crossed by the narrow span of the railroad trestle, there was a thick jungle of saplings and brush out of which a few taller trees rose, their spreading limbs almost touching the sides of the ravine.
It must be confessed that the boy was drawn more toward this point of interest than toward the passenger train where Jane Ann might possibly be lying injured. But Ruth and Helen ran toward this latter spot, where the crowd of passengers was thickest.
Suddenly the crowd parted and the girls saw a figure lying on the ground, with a girl about their own age bending over it. Ruth screamed, "Jinny!" and at the sound of the pet name her uncle's cow punchers had given her, the girl from Silver Ranch responded with an echoing cry.
"Oh, Ruth! And Helen! I'm not hurt--only scratched.