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In: Children & Young Adult Reading·Adventure·Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #14175.
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Train No. 6 on the D. & P.W., two hours late at Limon, was rushing and jolting along over its rickety roadbed. The rain fell in torrents, the heavy peals of thunder seemed about to tear the car to pieces, the black and threatening clouds blotted out the landscape, and the passengers could hear nothing but the roar of the thunder and the rattle of the train. The brakeman, shaking the water from his hat as he passed through the aisle, dropped something about it being a "mighty tough day for railroadin'."
Suddenly there was a creaking, a cracking, and then a series of awful jolts. Window glass broke and flew in every direction. Like a mighty monster that had suddenly been frightened by an unseen foe, the train lurched forward, tipped a little, and slowly came to an uncertain stop. People were hurled from their seats with a great violence as the emergency brake was set. A baby cried out from a seat near the front of the car, and a woman screamed as a satchel from the luggage rack above her head dropped down upon her. Willis Thornton raised his arms above his head just in time to save a heavy leather suitcase from striking his mother full in the face. Through the broken windows was heard the shrill warning notes of the engine's trouble whistle, but so intense was the storm that the sound seemed rather a part of the raging gale. The brakeman rushed through the car, and as he passed Willis heard him exclaim half-aloud, "The freight!" Then in a loud, shaky voice, not meant to betray excitement, he shouted, "All out; train off the track!"
He need not have spoken, however, for the people who had not already gotten out were close upon him. First in the rush was the mother of the babe that had screamed when the first jolts came. She was wild-eyed and hysterical. A piece of flying glass had struck her on the face, and the warm, trickling blood had frightened her. She rushed up to the nearest man and shouted, "Is my husband safe?" Just then a sickly, dudish little man, with a lighted cigar in his mouth, rushed toward her.
"Ba Jove, my dear, you are 'urt," he said as she hurried toward him and fainted in his arms.
The word had been passed around that a heavy freight was expected at any moment. The passenger whistle blew in long, shrill tones, while the brakeman hurried up the hill in the direction of the expected freight to give the danger signal. Hardly had he reached the top when there came the faint sound of a whistle. He heard the three blasts. The train had left Eastonville! Could he save a wreck? Lantern in hand, he hurried down the track as fast as he could with the wind and rain beating him back. Suddenly a black form loomed up in the mist ahead. Full blast she came, the black smoke from her stack running ahead as if to coax her on to greater speed. The brakeman waved his red lantern frantically in the air. There was a screeching sound of brake-shoes on the wheels, a long, shrill whistle, and the train sped past him, a misty dull serpent in the storm. He turned and followed as fast as he could.
Women with disheveled hair stood and wrung their hands. Men cursed and swore as they ran back and forth about the derailed passenger. The wind lulled for a second, and in the momentary silence there came the half-smothered cry of a little child from one direction, answered from somewhere in the fog by the rushing of wheels and the faint, weird sigh of a whistle.
Willis's head went up, his eyes flashed, his muscles tightened; then, turning to his mother, he cried, "The baby!" and in an instant was gone. It all happened so quickly there was no time for Mrs. Thornton to think. She saw Willis hasten away and enter the front door of the car they had been occupying; at the same instant she became aware of the approaching train. There was a shrill, angry hiss, and the freight swung into the cut with a terrible roar, then came a crashing of glass and breaking of timbers. The engineer had opened the whistle valve with such a jerk that it had stuck fast, and the whistle did its utmost. It was a doleful sound, pulsating its strange, sharp cry into the storm.
Mrs. Thornton sank to her knees in an attitude of prayer, her head dropped to her breast. The mother that had fainted roused a little and called for her child.
The passengers rushed back and forth in a perfect frenzy, shouting, "The baby! the baby!" Women cried and begged and implored some one to save it; but it was all over before any one could act or before the Englishman realized that it was his child that was in danger. The engines had telescoped. The freight was derailed and the first three cars completely demolished. The crew had all jumped and were uninjured, except the fireman, who had a badly-broken leg and some bruises. Two men came around the end of the Pullman with a boy supported between them. His head hung limp and the blood trickled slowly from nasty cuts on his head and face. Following them came the brakeman with a very frightened but unharmed baby, wrapped in an overcoat. Every one made a rush for the little group. The Englishman was first in line. His eyes opened wide and his cigar fell from his lips. "By Jove, Chauncey!" he exclaimed, "they came near getting you that time," then began to cry like a child.
The danger was past. There was no one killed, and only a few injured. Several people were cut by broken glass and bruised by bumps. The fireman of the freight had broken his leg and cut his shoulder badly in his jump. Willis had reached the opposite platform, with the baby in his arms, just as the trains collided. The jar had thrown him from his feet and broken the glass in the door behind him. The jolt threw him, baby and all, out against the side of the cut into the wet sand. Outside of the ugly cuts and bad bruises he was unharmed, but was the hero of the day.
Mrs. Thornton sat by her boy, tenderly caring for his every need. He had swooned at the sight of his own blood and had not yet returned to consciousness. In the next seat the injured fireman was propped up on pillows, watching the boy.
"There's a piece of real stuff," he said to the engineer as they sat talking together. "Looks just like my old pard. It took real pluck to go after that baby. If Bill'd a been here he would have gotten enthusiastic over that lad."
An open fire had always been tremendously fascinating to Willis Thornton, and on winter evenings, when his chores were done and supper over, he would pile the big fireplace high with maple logs, then sit and dream as the flames danced and the fire roared. He was a sturdy lad, healthy, cheerful, wholesome, and tonight he was thinking.
The snow-laden wind was sweeping across the "Flat Bush." At every fresh gust the fire would crackle and the little blue flames start up along the none-too-well seasoned logs. Outside the old farmhouse the great dead limb of a monstrous white oak moaned and sighed, while the usual sounds from the barnyard were lost in the patter of the icy snowflakes that rattled against the window pane. From the open door of the kitchen came faint odors of freshly-popped corn and the monotonous hum of the old sewing-machine. Willis was hardly aware of any presence in the room save his own until a warm hand was laid gently on his and a dish of snowy popcorn set in his lap. He had been so engrossed with his own fancies that he had not seen his mother enter the firelit room and come toward him.
"Well, my boy; what are you dreaming of tonight?" she asked, as she seated herself in her accustomed place on the arm of his chair and placed her arm gently on his shoulder.
"O, I've just been planning a bit, mother," he said with a smile. "Sometimes when I sit here by this old fire I forget myself. I travel to the strangest lands and think the strangest thoughts. Still, they all seem so very real to me that when I try not to think of them a peculiar restlessness comes over me. I can hardly wait for summer and the great big out-of-doors. Did you ever think, mother, what life would be if we didn't have the birds and the bees and the flowers? Are people in the cities happy and contented without them? I've often wondered. I suppose some day I'll be going to the city to live, as all the other boys have done; but when I think of it it makes me sad. I don't believe I'd ever be happy in the city, mother, unless--"
He paused long enough to stir up the fire and put on another log.
"Unless what, Willis?" his mother inquired.
"Unless--" he hesitated as if thinking. "I could go West to where father was."
His mother listened as he went on. "The schoolmaster was telling us today about the wonderful Rocky Mountains. He was there last summer on his vacation, you know. We were studying about Pike's Peak and the Garden of the Gods, so he told us all about his trip there. He went from Colorado Springs to somewhere away up in the mountains to a great gold camp. He told us of the queer little shanties the people live in, and of the great piles of waste ore outside of each mine. He went through one mine, the Independence, I think he called it, or the Portland--I don't remember which now; but he said the machinery used in hoisting the ore was wonderful. It all set me to thinking of father--I've been thinking of him all day. Mother, it's mighty hard for a fellow like me not to have any father, only just a dead one."
He arose a second time to replenish the fire, but remained standing, facing his mother. He was too deeply interested in his own thoughts just then to notice the tears that were slowly stealing down his mother's face, and the light was too dim for him to see her sad, care-worn expression. She was not old, but fate had not been kind to her. She was a slender little woman, with a heavy mass of what had once been brown hair, but it was now streaked with gray. Her eyes were large and brown, and the intermingled expression of love and sadness made her face one of tender beauty, lighted as it was by the rosy tints from the open fire. As the boy talked on in his manly way she suddenly became aware of a change in him. She noticed the well-built and symmetrically developed body, the broad shoulders, the short, stocky neck, and the head covered with brown ringlets. She could not see the face, but she knew only too well of whom it reminded her, for of late she had often found herself saying, "Just like the father--just like the father."
It was during such winter evenings as this that she had come to know her son best, as she sat on the arm of his chair and listened with tactful sympathy to his stories of the big black bass that kept house in the pool at the end of the lake, or of the downy woodpecker's nest in the old hickory, or, perhaps, of the big hoot owl that perched on the granary warm nights to watch for mice. It was with a certain feeling of sadness, as well as of pride, that she watched him grow older, lose his boyhood ways, and become more and more of a man--a man just like his father!
"I get so lonely for some one to teach me things, and go with me into the big woods, and help me skin my rats in season," he was saying, "and to teach me to use tools and to understand the books and--"
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