Ask the disappointed vulture and the mouth of the muttering earth to tell you, gentlemen passengers! There is no other lip to answer.
Yes, there is one; a little, trembling, ashy lip--a child's--scarcely able to articulate for grief or terror, and pouring forth confused cries that nobody can understand. The passengers have left the train, and are making their way cautiously homeward down the devastated road-bed, where the track had lain. It is hurled now to every point of the compass in the wild night.
They come to a halt suddenly, before a little huddling figure, with its face hidden in its arms, crouched beside a crooked rail. An old horse, with traces hanging and harness a wreck, stands snorting beside the boy.
The crowd parts for a thin, white-faced man,--the passenger who had been heard to say upon the way, "My little son is coming to meet me. I hope these shocks do not extend to the Summerville station."
There is one other little wild call, "Papä! Papä!"--a tremendous effort to be manly, and not cry before strangers--and the boy melts into his father's arms, and wonders whose tears they are which rain upon his cuddling face.
But who saved the train? Where is he? How did he do it? Who took that noble risk? Where is the hero? Here?
Then Donny raised his awestruck face from his father's quick-beating heart, and standing among the strangers and the neighbors, told the story,--all that he knew; all that he could tell.
[Illustration: "A LITTLE HUDDLING FIGURE."]
"I only remembered the torpedoes, sir. The old man did the rest."
"Why, the old colored man! Haven't you seen him? The old colored man who ran ahead and put them on the track. _He_ saved the train."
The engineer took his lantern and silently went back and swung the spot of fire in the black, cold air. It had not rained, as we have said, for many weeks, but his feet splashed into deep pools and running rivulets, and sank into crevices and gashes in the trembling earth.
A few of the passengers followed the engineer. The locality where the train stood was examined thoroughly. Again, the same result,--no human creature, dead or living, was to be seen. The pauper dog sat just where they had left him. The engineer went up and patted him. At the touch he fell over--dead of fright.