A QUICK SHUDDER OF FEAR,
and with a world of pity in her startled eyes.
“Oh, sir, don’t tell them, they would take my baby away, and he would never see it.”
“Who would never see it?”
“It’s her husband she manes,” said the sympathetic emigrant at my side. “He sint fur her from Michigan. The wee choild was born after he left, and she wants to bring him his baby dead or alive, poor craythur.”
“When did it die?”
“This soide of Kingston, sor. Shure the railway min don’t know it yit, and there she has been houldin’ that dead baby in her arrums ever since.”
“I want t’ let him see it, sir; I want t’ let Miles see his baby,” and bending over the little dead body the hot tears fell on the somber shawl.
In a far corner with their arms about one another, and with her head lying on his breast, sat a young married couple who were going west to seek their fortune. What a strange bridal trip! She was in a troubled slumber, but he was painfully awake. Finally she awoke and looked about her with an expression of alarm on her tired face, but when her eyes met his a swift smile of gladness chased all fear away, and she nestled her face on his shoulder again, and clasped her arms about his neck.
“Jim,” she said, softly, “I was dreaming of home—I thought I saw the old bridge, and the chapel on the hill where we were married, and I thought I saw mother comin’ down past the boreen, and she was callin’ to me, ‘Katie, Katie, where are you, asthore?’ and it wakened me.”
The girl sat erect, looking straight in her husband’s eyes. “Jimmy,” she cried, “take me home again.” A look of pain swept over his face. She saw it, and with a woman’s swift repentance she flung herself upon his breast and was silent.
A look of utter weariness bordering on misery sat on one and all.
“Well, this is the divil’s own counthry, to be sure,” said a very surprised and somewhat frightened-looking immigrant to me.
“How’s that?”
“Ye see that wee gurrul sittin’ there?”
He pointed to a Swedish girl who looked as if she had been crying very recently.
“Well, be me sowl, it’s no loi, but a mon kem aboard awhile ago, and while the craythur was asleep he stole her beyootiful yellow hair wid a pair of shayers, be gob!”
“It seems to have frightened you?”
“Thrue for you. I saw a man on the platform above wid only wan leg, an’ bedad it wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to shtale one av moine.”
I jumped off, laughing at the fellow’s downright uneasiness, and in a few moments the train drew out from the sheds.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE WRECKING TRAIN.
In the morning, as I have watched the conductors, engineers, and trainmen trooping down to the Union station, and marked one of them, a fine, hearty, lusty, fellow, I have wondered if he would ever come back. A collision, a pitch-in, a broken rail, or a low bridge are possibilities always before them. I was in the Union station one afternoon when a wrecking train came in from the east, bringing the crew and portable parts of a train which had been wrecked by a pitch-in away down the line. Four of the train-hands, including the engineer, had been hurt, some of them seriously, and to see the fine young fellows, all broken and hurt, lifted out of the car to be sent to the hospital, was most sad. On the platform stood an old woman, who, on seeing her boy borne out, broke into bitter weeping.
“Oh, Johnny, Johnny, my boy, my boy! Didn’t I always want you to keep away from them awful trains? Don’t take my Johnny to the hospital. I’ll nurse him—indeed, indeed, good gentlemen, I can nurse my Johnny better than anyone.” Then the subtle woman rose up in her. “Is his face hurted? Will he be disfigured? No, thank God! Oh, but he was a pretty boy.”
“How did it happen?” I enquired.
“Freight train ahead of us lost her grip on a grade. The brakes wouldn’t hold and she broke away and run back and we pitched into her.”
“I suppose your engineer stuck to his place?”
The train hand smiled a superior smile.
“You bet he did; catch Bill leaving his post while there is any show to do anything.”
One man had his leg broken, another had his breast crushed, the engineer had sustained fatal internal injuries, and Johnny had his shoulder crushed. These things don’t bother railway men much. In a few months after all hands, with the exception of the engineer, were back at their work again as devoid of fear and careless of consequences as ever.