Chapter XXXVI

On the morning following their arrival at Bristol, John and Dora took the train for New York. "We'll sit in the chair-car," he proposed. "It has revolving fans and is more roomy. They say this train is usually crowded."

Dora smiled expectantly as she followed him into the luxurious coach. She had slept well, had eaten a good breakfast, and seemed brighter than she had the day before. She was still a grotesque-looking creature in the dress which was too long for a child of her age, and the hat that was too large, being one Jane Holder, in one of her rare moments of mild self-reproach, had discarded and hastily retrimmed for her niece. But John Trott was not critical of outward appearances. There was something beneath the surface in Dora--an unspoken reliance on him, a gentle betrayal of pride and confidence in him, not to mention her abject helplessness, which atoned for all external shortcomings. The whole world looked dark to him, but he had determined that Dora should not dwell in the shadow, if he could prevent it.

They were soon well into the state of Virginia. The train was quite crowded and John congratulated himself on securing seats in the parlor-car. From the window Dora listlessly viewed the back-drifting fields and forests, the tobacco which she had never seen growing before, and the old-fashioned houses on the farms as well as in the towns and villages.

It was near night. Washington was only a few hours away.

"We are going to cross a high trestle over a ravine," John explained to his charge. "I heard a man talking about it. There! that is the whistle. I guess they will slow down until we get over it."

But the train was late and the locomotive's speed was not greatly diminished. From the window John saw the line of trees marking the ravine's sinuous course through the fields and told Dora that they would soon be on the trestle. A moment later there was a shriek from the locomotive, a violent jerking of the cars, a distant crashing and grinding of timbers, and a thunderous sound of heavy bodies falling. The coupling was broken and the chair-car lurched forward, left the track, shot its front end against an embankment about twenty feet high and remained poised there. Dora was thrown against a window, the thick glass of which fortunately did not break, and John fell between the chairs to the floor. Everywhere in the car the passengers lay over one another, squirming and screaming in pain and terror.

"Are you hurt?" John asked Dora, as he struggled to his feet and bent over her.

"No." She shook her head, her face blanched, her whole frame quivering.

"Come, let's get out!" he said. He offered to lift her in his arms, for the floor of the car was sharply slanting to one side, but she refused to permit it.

"Oh no. I can get out better by myself," she said, stepping from one seat to another to accelerate their egress.

Some of the passengers around them were injured slightly, some had fainted, and lay prone in the aisle, and these people blocked their progress for a few moments. But when they had finally reached the open a frightful sight met their view. At the bottom of the ravine which the trestle had spanned lay an indiscriminate heap of splintered and telescoped coaches which quite hid from view the locomotive lying beneath. A violent hissing of steam came from the mass which all but drowned out the cries of pain and terror from the imprisoned victims. Now and then men or boys could be seen breaking through the car windows and climbing down to the ground. But hundreds were out of sight. They were doubtless stunned or killed outright.

Fifty or sixty people from the chair-car and the two connected sleeping-coaches, which were the only parts of the train saved from the ruin, gathered on the brink of the ravine and stood spellbound by the sights they beheld in the smoking inferno beneath.

Suddenly a trainman near John raised a cry: "The cars are catching on fire! They are dry as powder and will burn like oil! My God! there are women and children down there!"

"Stay here!" John said to Dora. "I must get down there and try to help."

She nodded mutely, and he darted away. Other men followed him through the weeds and bushes down the rugged declivity. Dora watched him till he had vanished among the trees and boulders. The sound of escaping steam had ceased. Human cries were now audible, groans, prayers, and the pounding of feet and hands against parched car-walls. Faint blows they were and futile--hoarse prayers and unanswered. The highest car in the heap was toppling over and settled down more snugly into the mass. Between the upper coaches blue smoke was issuing, and from the under ones fierce flames were bursting. Dora suddenly descried John. He was on the slanting side of one of the cars, kicking in a wired window. The heart of the child was in her mouth, for he was in the gravest peril. Within twenty feet of him the flames were lapping the paint from the thin woodwork on which he stood.

"That man that was with you is a fool!" a stylishly dressed woman said to Dora. "He will be burned to death."

"He is a workman--a brick-mason," Dora said, "and able to--"

"I don't care what he is--he is crazy, simply crazy!"

What had become of John, Dora did not know, for in a cloud of swirling smoke and flames she suddenly lost sight of him. Also the men who had descended with him could not be seen, and the whole mass of cars were now aflame. The blaze and heat drove the awed spectators back farther from the edge of the fiery gorge. Some were moving away to look after their belongings in the undestroyed cars. Dora wondered what she ought to do. She began to fear the worst in regard to John. She wanted to cry, but the tear-founts seemed to have dried up. The sun was down. The thickening darkness made the flames in the ravine all the brighter.

Presently she felt some one grasp her arm. It was John. He was covered with black as to his hands, face, and neck. His clothing was torn and scorched; there was a bleeding scratch across his right cheek and chin which had been made by a piece of flying glass. He was now mopping it with a soiled handkerchief.

"It is hell!" she heard him say, more to himself than her. "It is hell!"

Dora clung to him joyously.

"Think of it," he panted. "I got one woman out at a window and was reaching down for a little boy. I could see him holding up his hands from the burning seats, but he could not reach me. God! I'll never forget that kid's eyes and his last scream as he fell back into the fire!"

A locomotive drawing flat-cars loaded with people from a near-by town had stopped just beyond the sleeping-cars, and the crowd sprang down and gathered on the brink of the ravine up the side of which remains of the trestle hung, slowly burning.

"Come," John said to Dora. "I'll get our things out of the car, and then we'll get a place to spend the night. I'm sure we'll not get away till morning. I saw a hotel down the track as we came along."

He left her and returned in a moment with the valises. Then they went back along the railway to a crossing where stood a hotel of the very crudest rural type. Going into the office, he secured a room for Dora; but could get none for himself. Returning to her, he said:

"We'll have supper pretty soon. Go to your room and wash the dust off your face and hands. You are a sight to behold."

She followed an attendant up the single flight of stairs, though it looked as if she were averse to being separated from John even for so short a while. Indeed, she was wondering if he did not intend to undertake something else in which danger was involved. However, he did not keep her waiting long. He came up to her room. He had washed his face and hands in the barber shop, and had had his clothing and shoes brushed. He led her down to the dining-room. It was packed with passengers from the remaining coaches of the train who were bent on getting something to eat, and as for the adjoining office, it was literally jammed by an ever-growing throng of curious and horrified spectators, who were arriving by train, by private conveyance, and on foot from all directions.

They had secured seats at a table and given their order when an excited man of middle age, without hat or coat on, rushed up to John, holding out his hand.

"They tell me you are the man who saved my wife!" he cried. "My God! sir, I want--"

"Not me." John smiled blandly. "Must have been some other chap."

"Oh, I beg your pardon," the man said, slightly taken aback. "I see I am mistaken."

He disappeared in the office and Dora looked up at John inquiringly. "Didn't you say back there that you got a woman out of--"

"'Sh!" John said, glancing furtively at the adjoining table and lowering his voice to a whisper. "Yes, I said so, but we have to be careful. That man would have wanted my name and address and I don't know what else. You see, kid, you and I are trying to cover our tracks. If we got our names in a paper the people in Ridgeville would know as much about our business as we do ourselves. There are several reporters here jotting down names and telegraphing them. I made a point of not registering just now--paid in advance to get around it."

Young as she was, Dora understood what he meant. The supper came, was eaten, and they gave their places to other applicants for seats at the table. Dora looked tired and he sent her to her room. He had decided to sit up all night, but he did not tell her so. He saw a stream of sight-seers going toward the flaring gorge, and he joined them. More than a thousand persons were now massed along the brink of the ravine, in the depths of which lay a vast heap of coals, red-hot iron, twisted steel rails, and the burly outlines of the unconsumed locomotive, over which the ashes and coals had settled like a pall of scarlet.

In the light of a lantern held by a trainman a reporter on the steps of the chair-car sat rapidly making notes on a pad with a pencil. Suddenly he saw a man passing and called out to him:

"Hey, Timmons!" he cried. "Any more names?"

"Oh yes! I was looking for you," the man addressed answered, and he drew a slip of paper from his pocket. "Here you are. Take 'em down quick. I have to wire my own list in right away. T. B. Wrenshall, wife and child, St. Louis. Got that? Begins with a W, not an R. They say he was a traveling-man, but that doesn't matter. It is the list my people want. Here is another: Mrs. Marie Dugan, Nashville, also Miss Satterlee, Atlanta--a school-teacher, they say, but I'm not sure, so leave that out."

"All right. Thank you, Timmons," and the two reporters parted.

John paused, leaned against the car near the man with the pad, and idly watched his rapidly moving pencil. Something, he knew not what, seemed to hold him there as for some occult purpose. A conductor of one of the sleeping-cars approached. "Press?" he asked, hurriedly.

"Yes, here I am," muttered the reporter.

"Here is a complete list of all my passengers," the conductor said, "all alive and checked up."

"All right, but it is the dead ones I'm after," the reporter said, taking the paper and pinning it to his notes.

John moved a few feet away. Again he viewed the red ruins, peering over the brink as into the heart of an active volcano. A thought had come to him, but he was irresolute. He looked back at the reporter. The man was still on the steps at work.

"It would be easy," John mused. "The simplest thing in the world, and I ought to do it. That would settle it for good and all. It would free Tilly completely, and give Dora her chance, too. Yes, I ought to do it-- I really ought."

He walked about on the edge of the throng for several moments undecidedly. "What the hell is the matter with me?" he muttered. "Why can't I decide on a thing as simple as that and be done with it? It is for Tilly's lasting good. It would wipe the whole rotten thing out at once, and stop the damned wagging tongues sooner than anything else. It would sting sharply, like a doctor's knife, but it would cure the trouble. If I don't do something it will hang over her as long as she lives. I spoiled her chances by dropping into her life--here is a chance to drop out of it. I'm leaving her for good and all, anyway, so why not make a clean job of it?"

He felt that he had decided at last, and he went back to the reporter.

"Are you taking names?" he asked, in a voice the matter-of-fact tone of which surprised himself.

"Yes. Got any?" The writer did not look up from his rapidly moving pencil.

"Two friends of mine."

"All right, wait a minute."

The pencil was now rapidly producing shorthand dots, curves, and dashes. The red sky above the gorge held John's eyes. As in a picture of radiating flame he saw his little wife as he had seen her the morning he had unknowingly kissed her farewell forever on the door-step of the cottage as he stood, dinner-pail in hand, the sun just rising above the hills. In spite of his self-control and a belief in his stolidness, a lump swelled in his throat.

"She deserves a better deal out of the deck than to be tied to the memory of a man like me," he thought. "When she reads my name in the papers I'll be dead to her, dead and cremated. After all, it can't be worse than the other."

"Well, well," the reporter said, looking up, "you say you have lost some friends?"

"Yes, two--a man and a little girl, in the coach just ahead of this one."

"Their names and addresses, please. I'm in a devil of a rush--using railroad telegraph, and it is packed with official business. Got an opening now, but may lose it any moment. Mention ages and business, if you know them."

"John Trott, twenty years old, Ridgeville, Georgia, brick-mason."

"All right--two t's in Trott, eh? Well, and the other one?"

"Dora Boyles--B-o-y-l-e-s," slowly spelled John; "age about nine, orphan, same town--Ridgeville, Georgia."

"Thanks. Is that all?" asked the reporter.

"That is all," and, afraid of being further questioned, John turned and stalked away.