The lighter portion of the train had struck the embankment of the narrow river. The day cars were piled across the track beyond; the threes Pullmans, smashed and heaped on top of one another, hung on the edge of the broken bridge.
Gordon, with the two women and children, finally found a man who had some sense--a fat drummer seated on his sample-cases calmly putting on his shoes by the light of the burning cars.
He was talking to a younger drummer sitting near, who fidgeted and kept looking about nervously.
"Take it easy, sonny. Put on your shoes," he said, soothingly.
"This is awful!" the young one sighed.
"Well, we"re all right, top side up, marked "with care." Don"t worry. Put on your shoes. You can"t walk in this gla.s.s barefoot."
When he saw Gordon and his party he stopped tying his shoes and laughed.
"Well, partner, you look like a patriarch who"s lost his way. Ain"t none of your family got shoes?"
He looked at Gordon"s bleeding feet and at Kate and Ruth shivering behind him in the rain.
Gordon smiled and shook his head.
The fat man hastily pulled off his own shoes, s.n.a.t.c.hed off those of the younger man beside him and offered them to the ladies.
"They won"t be what you might call a stylish fit, madam," he said gallantly to Ruth, "but they"ll beat broken gla.s.s for comfort."
Paying no attention to their protests, he made them sit down on the sample-cases and put them on.
Turning to Gordon and his companion, he called cheerfully:
"Come, men, that Pullman"s full of blankets; we must get them out for the women and children before it"s too late. It"s too dark to find our umbrellas. I believe that fool conductor"s got mine anyhow and gone home with it. I haven"t seen him anywhere."
In a few minutes, he had blankets for all the pa.s.sengers who had lost their clothes. By daybreak he had found the conductor, counted his tickets, and discovered that out of fifty pa.s.sengers on the train twenty had been wounded, none fatally, and that thirty had escaped without a scratch. The train had dropped most of its pa.s.sengers during the day and had only an average of ten people to a coach, and they were seated and sleeping near the centres of each car. By what seemed a miracle, none were killed.
Just as the sun rose, the drummer formed the pa.s.sengers in line, with the conductor bringing up the rear, and marched them to a cabin where he saw smoke curling up from the edge of a field.
The relief train from Florence, four miles away, arrived at eight, just four hours from the time the accident occurred, bringing the surgeons and new officers to take charge, and the drummer resigned his command.
The new conductor took the name and address of each pa.s.senger as they sat in grim array swathed in blankets in the cabin.
Gordon gave the name of "Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gordon, New York," for himself and Kate, who sat beside him. Ruth, not hearing him, with an absent look gave the address, "Mrs. Frank Gordon, New York."
The conductor looked from one to the other, puzzled, and the drummer grinned.
"A Mormon Elder, by the Lord--and he lives in Gotham!" he whispered to the youngster he had in tow.
Lucy lay in her mother"s lap suffering from an ugly gash across her forehead. Gordon had bathed her forehead as soon as he had discovered it, and carried her to the cabin, with her soft arms clinging around his neck.
He was watching her lips twitch.
She had grown in the three years out of all resemblance to the child he had left. Her eyes now looked at him with the timid light of a maiden.
As she had clung to him while he carried her to the house, he had felt her lips soft and warm with the dawn of s.e.x when she kissed him and murmured:
"Papa, dear, it"s so good to have you carry me. I love you."
For the first time there came into his soul the sweet and terrible realisation that his own flesh and blood had become one with Ruth"s in the greatest miracle of earth, the heart of a woman--a woman who could live and suffer and whose heart could break even as her mother"s! Her eyes were all his, her hair a perfect mixture of the pigments with which theirs had been coloured. The strength of the man trembled with tender pride and wonder as he looked at her--his living marriage vow, written out before his eyes in a beautiful poem of flesh and blood. In the gentle beauty of her face he saw reflected himself blended with the young vision of Ruth as he had first met her a laughing girl--the little stranger a growing woman, himself and his first love dream in one. Her face held him fascinated.
Kate watched him furtively.
The doctor examined and dressed Lucy"s wound, and told Ruth it must be sewed up at once if the child were saved from an ugly scar that would disfigure her for life. He p.r.o.nounced the heart action too weak from the shock to use an anesthetic.
"It can only be done, madam," he gravely said to her, "if you can get her consent to endure the pain."
"Will you bear it, dear?" the mother asked.
She raised herself up and beckoned to her father.
Gordon had heard the doctor"s remark, came at once and bent over her.
"I can if Papa will hold me in his arms and you take one hand and he the other," she said, eagerly.
Gordon took her and told the surgeon to take the st.i.tches without delay.
The first one she bore bravely. But when the steel needle cut the flesh the second time, and the sharp pain sent its chill to her heart, the little face went white and she gasped:
"Kiss me, Papa--Mama, quick--"
They both bent at once, and the blond locks of the man mingled with the dark hair of the woman as their lips touched her face.
The doctor paused, and Lucy smiled faintly.
"I"m better now. I can stand it."
Gordon felt a strange thrill to the last depths of his soul as he sat there holding one of his daughter"s hands while Ruth held the other. A sense of mysterious unity with their life came over him.
The little woman saw his emotion and knew its meaning.
She bent close and, while a smile played around her eyes, whispered softly and triumphantly:
"Frank, I"d go through another wreck for this."
And the man was silent.
At Florence, clothes were brought to the train, and those who had none were rigged out after a fashion for the return home.
Not a pa.s.senger on the train wished to continue his journey except the fat drummer. He went on to the next station where he had intended to stop, as though nothing worth talking about had happened, and sold a bill of goods before dinner.
Ruth and the children returned to New York on the first train, and Gordon and Kate followed on the next.
Kate had scarcely spoken a word since he had lifted her from the wreck. She was in a deep reverie, but from the occasional gleam of her eyes Gordon knew she was pa.s.sing through some great crisis.