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But none of the train-hands nor did the party in the private car notice the boy and girl who had so incautiously left the train. "Come back!" commanded Ruth, so much interested in following Fred that she did not notice the lantern of the rear brakeman bobbing along beside the ties. In a moment he swung himself aboard the private car and his lantern described half an arc in the dusk.
Ben wasn't any novelist and wouldn't be one if you give him a chance. He was just a brakeman, with a bright future before him. Ben was quite indignant himself by this time thinking of two days' pay lost, and Ed could hardly believe his own ears. He just set there, swelling up like a toad in a very feverish way. "But 'some distance," says Ed in low tones of awe.
The station passed, the brakeman did not return, perhaps because he found some other listener, perhaps because he was afraid of boring this pleasant young fellow. Albert shuddered with a sympathetic pain as he thought of the heroic fellows on the tops of icy cars, with hands straining at frosty brakes, the wind cutting their faces like a sand-blast.
"He claims," volunteered Scott, speaking to Stanley, "he could have stood them off all day." Francis's eyes fell regretfully on the dead brakeman. "If that boy had minded what I said and come with me he would have been alive now."
A brakeman descended, the conductor strode stiffly to the telegrapher's window, two trunks came out of the baggage car, and a tall man of fifty alighted and was folded into Sheila's welcoming arms. For a moment the two stood thus, while the passengers smiled sympathetically. Then the man held Sheila off at arm's length and looked searchingly at her. "Crying?" he said. "What a welcome!"
They came together, lifted the dead man and carried him away to the baggage car. A brakeman came with a cloth and wiped up the red pool, and Thurston pressed his lips tightly together and turned away his head; he could not remember when the sight of anything had made him so deathly sick.
The brakeman, coming out of the car door with his lantern, dragged him to his feet, brushed him off, and scolded him vigorously. The young man hurried through the car, oblivious of the eloquent harangue, happy only to feel the floor jolting beneath his feet and to know that he was safe on board.
With that Reade got started. He soon had his two friends started as well. They laughed until the brakeman at last thrust his head in and called: "Next station, Wilburville!" "Stop and get out, young man!" called Tom. "Do you think we don't know our way?" Then into another story plunged Tom Reade. He spun it out, purposely, until the train slowed up at Wilburville.
The nearer the train came to Oak Creek, the smaller and rougher the houses seemed, until the guard called out: "Oak Crick! Here's your station!" The girls gazed at each other in consternation, for the place was little more than a rough mining settlement, or ranch-town. The brakeman caught up the leather bags and jumped from the slowing train.
"Had we not been running an hour late this train would in all probability, have plunged through the trestle." "Was anybody hurt?" asked the girl. The train conductor nodded toward the heap of debris. "No'm, the crew jumped. The fireman an' head brakeman broke a leg apiece, an' the rest got bunged up a little; but they wasn't no one hurt.
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