“'Sure, Mike,”' I said, “is the spirit in which the world is conquered.”
And then the strange attraction of these two persons for one another
arose before me; this big, crude, virile, direct son of the hustling
West, and this delicate, refined, intellectual daughter of New England.
The ancestors of the man had been the fighting and the building pioneer.
And those of the girl, reflective people, ministers of the gospel and
counselors at law. Marion's grandfather had been a writer on the law.
Warfield on Evidence, had been the leading authority in this country.
And this ambitious girl had taken a special course in college to fit
her to revise her grandfather's great work. There was no grandson to
undertake this labor, and she had gone about the task herself. She would
not trust the great book to outside hands. A Warfield had written it,
and a Warfield should keep the edition up. Her revision was now in the
hands of a publisher in Boston, and it was sound and comprehensive, the
critics said; the ablest textbook on circumstantial evidence in America.
I looked in a sort of wonder at this girl, carried off her feet by a
tawny barbarian!
Marion was absorbed in the thing; and I understood her anxiety. But the
most pressing danger, she did not seem to realize.
It lay, I thought, in the revenge of a discharged workman. Clinton
Howard had to drop any number of incompetent persons, and they wrote him
all sorts of threatening letters, I had been told. With all the awful
things that happen over the country some of these angry people might do
anything. There are always some half-mad people.
She went on.
“But Clinton says the public is as just as Daniel. If he has an accident
in the ordinary course of affairs the public will hold him for it. But
if anything should happen that he could not help, the public will not
hold him responsible.”
I realized the force of that. What reasonable human care could prevent
he must answer for, but the outrage of a criminal would not be taken in
the public mind against him. On the contrary, the sympathy of the public
would flow in. When the people feel that a man is making every effort
for their welfare, the criminal act of an outsider brings them over
wholly to his support. Profound interest carried Marion off her feet.
“I was in a panic the other day, and Clinton said, 'Don't let rotten
luck get your goat. I'm done if an engineer runs by a block, but nothing
else can put it over on me'!”
She laughed with me at the direct, virile idiom of young America in
action.
An event interrupted the discourse. The motor took a sharp curve and a
young man running across the road suddenly flung himself face down in
the grass beyond the curb.
“Is he hurt?” said Marion to the chauffeur.
“No, Miss, he's hiding, Miss,” said the man, and we swept out of sight.
I thought it more likely that the creature was in liquor. In spite
of the great country-houses, it was not good hunting-ground for the
criminal class, during the season when everybody was about. The very
number of servants, when a place is open, in a rather effective way,
police it. Besides the young man looked like a sort of workman. One gets
such impressions at a glance.
The motor descended the long hill toward the river and the flat valley.
It hummed into the curves and hollows, through the pockets of chill air,
and out again into the soft September night.
Then finally it swept out into the flat valley, and stopped with a grind
of the emergency brake that caused the wheels to skid, ripping up
the dust and gravel. For a moment in the jar and confusion we did not
realize what had happened, then we saw a great locomotive lying on its
side, and a line of Pullmans, sunk to the axles in the soft earth.
The whole “Montreal Express” was derailed, here in the flat land at the
grade crossing. The thing had been done some time. The fire had been
drawn from the engine; there was only a sputtering of steam. The
passengers had been removed. A wrecking-car had come up from down the
line. A telegrapher was setting up a little instrument on a box by the
roadside. A lineman was climbing a pole to connect his wire. A track
boss with a torch and a crew of men were coming up from an examination
of the line littered with its wreck.
I hardly know what happened in the next few minutes. We were out of the
motor and among the men almost before the car stopped.
No one had been hurt. The passenger-coaches were not turned over, and
the engineer and fireman had jumped as the cab toppled. By the greatest
good fortune the train had gone off the track in this low flat land
almost level with the grade. Several things joined to avoid a terrible
disaster; the flat ground that enabled the whole train to plow along
upright until it stopped, the track lying flush with the highway where
the engine went off, and the fact that trains must slow up for this
grade crossing. Had there been an embankment, or a big ditch, or the
train under its usual headway the wreck would have been a horror, for
every wheel, from the engine to the last coach, had left the rails.
We were an excited group around the train's crew, when the trackman
came up with his torch. Everybody asked the same question as the man
approached.
“What caused the accident?”
“Spread rails,” he said. “These big brutes,” he pointed to the mammoth
engine sprawling like a child's top on its side, the gigantic wheels
in the air, “and these new steel coaches, are awful heavy. There's an
upgrade here. When they struck it, they just spread out the rails.”
And he pushed his closed hands out before him, slowly apart, in
illustration.
The man knew Marion, for he spoke directly to her in reply to our
concerted query. Then he added “If you step down the track, Miss
Warfield, I'll show you exactly how it happened.”
We followed the big workman with his torch. Marion walked beside him,
and I a few steps behind. The girl had been plunged, on the instant,
headlong into the horror she feared, into the ruin that she had lain
awake over--and yet she met it with no sign, except that grim stiffening
of the figure that disaster brings to persons of courage. She gave no
attention to her exquisite gown. It was torn to pieces that night; my
own was a ruin. The crushing effect of this disaster swept out every
trivial thing.
In a moment we saw how the accident happened, the workman lighting the
sweep of track with his torch. Here were the plow marks on the wooden
cross ties, where the wheels had run after they left the rails. One saw
instantly that the thing happened precisely as the workman explained
it. When the heavy engine struck the up-grade, the rails had spread,
the wheels had gone down on the cross-ties, and the whole train was
derailed.