The crowd on the station platform had seen it all--had seen him, as the engine rounded the curve, turn to Annie and push her off the track, thus saving her life at the cost of his own.
The townspeople persuaded his parents to let them give him a public funeral, to which all Tobin turned out, with tears and flowers and resolutions praising the little boy in high-sounding words for his heroic deed. A public subscription was taken up for the benefit of Wing's parents, to which Annie's father and lover and all her friends and everybody who had liked and petted the child contributed so liberally that his father and mother took his remains and sailed back to China.
When Ellison, from the platform, saw Annie's danger everything left his heart save absorbing love for her, and with a white face and alarm-distended eyes he dashed across the track and had her in his arms before the others had recovered from their brief paralysis of horror.
They were married as soon as Wing's obsequies were over. And now, if you ever pass through Tobin and will look for that sunny hillside with the olive and orange trees climbing its slope and the pretty cottage on its crest, you will see a home in which Wing's memory is enshrined with all possible love and honor and gratitude.
You see, they do not know that it was all on account of his "bug." Neither do they know that, small, brown, Chinee Kid though he was, he had stood in their lives for Fate.
"Sympathy with his kind and well-doing for its welfare, direct or indirect, are the essential conditions of the existence and development of the more complex social organism; and no mortal can transcend these conditions with any success."--HENRY MAUDSLEY.
Our party was going from the Yosemite Valley to Lake Tenaiya--that beautiful bit of shining, liquid sapphire ringed by its mighty setting of granite peaks and domes--by the long and roundabout way of Cloud's Rest. It would be an all-day trip, but we knew that at the end would be the cabin of Henry Moulton, a lone mountaineer, to receive us, with such comfort as it could give, and Henry Moulton himself to cook for us a supper of fresh fish and game. The thoughts of the whole party began to turn longingly in that direction as the afternoon of the late summer day waned, and in straggling, silent file we hurried our horses, with such speed as was possible, over the blind trail. The Artist, who was next in front of me, turned in his saddle and said: