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Updated: June 22, 2025
Then her thought was derailed by one of the sudden jerks that crossed the line so often in these days. Chat with herself must needs turn on the mistakes she had made in not borrowing that letter to enclose with her next one to Adrian, for him to ... to what? There came the jerk! What could he see?
Once again the players were on their way, and this time they were not to stop until they reached Rocky Ranch, unless something occurred to make it necessary. The remainder of the trip was uneventful, if we may except a slight accident by which the train was derailed. No one was hurt, however, and it gave Russ a chance to make a little film.
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.
As the crowd looked, they saw the derailed and helpless engine give a sort of shudder and shake, mount the inclined pieces of iron, and then slide upon the rails, settling down where it belonged. "Hurrah!" cried the passengers, in recognition of a hard task well accomplished. "Well, I'm glad that's over," announced the foreman.
Certain of the cars to the windward were not burnt; these lay capsized beside the track, bent and twisted, and burst athwart, fantastically like the pictures of derailed cars as Matt had seen them in the illustrated papers; the locomotive, pitched into a heavy drift, was like some dead monster that had struggled hard for its life.
The engine which had drawn our train from Puebla hither, after doing so, managed to get derailed, and a Mexican crowd spent hours in an ineffectual attempt to get the iron horse once more upon the track. As the day drew to its close our party was prepared to return to Puebla; but there was the engine stubbornly fixed upon the sleepers of the track, and the wheels partially buried in the ground.
Towards evening the thunder-heads shifted and finally dissipated, to be sure, but the portent was there. Hamilton's papers began to tell of disturbances in the South and West. A washout in Arkansas derailed a train; a cloud-burst in Texas wiped out a camp; the cities along the Ohio River were enjoying their annual flood with the usual concomitants of floating houses and boats in the streets.
These leaped from one to another of the derailed cars, until a dozen belonging to both trains, as well as the west-bound locomotive, were enveloped in their cruel embrace. Conductor Joe escaped somehow, but he was bruised, shaken, and stunned by the suddenness and awfulness of the catastrophe. In spite of his bewilderment, however, his years of training as a brakeman were not forgotten.
We had the right-of-track over every other train upon the line, and with six powerful engines pushing a snow-plow at full speed ahead of us, we reached our destination in almost record time, where we were put to work clearing away a serious wreck, which had been caused by a heavy passenger train running into a snow drift during a blinding blizzard, and having at the same time been derailed from the tender back to the rear truck beneath the last sleeper.
By this time tee-hees from the children and chuckles from some of the older members interfered with Mr. Badger's fervent but jerky discourse. Captain Eben struck the table smartly. "Silence!" he thundered. "Silence! Brother Badger, I beg your pardon for 'em. Go on!" But Josiah's train of thought had evidently been derailed by the interruption.
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