"For God's sake, hurry," one of them said. "It's getting too hot to stand here."
A blistering puff of smoke enwrapped her as she went down. She saw a face blackened and ghastly advance in the flaring light of a lantern. Hands that seemed to come out of a cloud and a great darkness helped and sustained her, until she was out of the instant press beside the burning car. When once she was free and stood upon her feet, she regained something like self-possession. Her head swam, but she realized the situation and felt that she was able to help herself.
"I am not hurt," she said to those who would have assisted her. "Don't mind me."
As she spoke, the body of a man was passed out of the smoke close to her, and she saw that it was Wynne. Instantly she remembered being flung into his arms, although what followed she could not recall. She looked at him now with a piercing conviction that he was dead. His cassock hung about him in rags, his face was smeared with blood and grime, his arm hung limp and bleeding. The words of the rescuer on the car-roof came to her, and she saw in the disfigured form of the young deacon the body of the man who had given his life for hers. Instantly all her powers rallied to help and if possible to save him.
"Bring him this way," she said, stepping forward eagerly, her weakness forgotten. "I'll take care of him."
She moved out of the smoke without any clear idea where she was going or what she could do. The hurt man was brought after her, one of the many that were being carried as dead weights among the confused and agonized crowd. At a short distance from the track there were hastily arranged car-cushions, coats, and loose coverings thrown down on a bank half covered with snow. Here the bearers laid Wynne, hurrying back to their work with a precipitancy which seemed to Berenice heartless.
The scene which Berenice took in at a glance was so wild and terrible that it stamped itself on her brain in a flash. Lanterns were burning all about, dancing and flitting to and fro like fireflies in a mist. The eye caught everywhere glimpses by their light of disordered groups, dim and dreadful as a nightmare. Close about her were the victims heaped as if from a battlefield, the wounded moaning in pain, the women wailing over the dying or the dead, each with cruel egotism intent upon her own, and seizing upon any helper with terrible eagerness of despair. A hundred feet away, lighted by the flames which were beginning to thrust quick tongues through the smoke and the darkness, was a long heap of shapeless wreck, about which dark figures were swarming like midges about a bonfire. She could distinguish in the middle of the line the two locomotives silhouetted against the darkness, standing half on end like two grotesque monsters rearing in deadly conflict. Every moment the flames became fiercer, and the hurrying lanterns moved more wildly.
It was Wynne, however, that claimed her attention. One swift glance took in the awful picture, and then she sank down on her knees beside him as he lay, bleeding and insensible, perhaps dead. For a moment she was ready to cast herself down on the snow in helplessness and in terror at the horrors of the situation; but the grit of stout Puritan ancestors was in her fibres, the moral endurance which finds in the sense of a duty to be done an inspiration that lifts above all difficulties. Her work was before her; to abandon it impossible.
The flames of the burning car brightened with appalling rapidity. Shrieks arose so piercing that they wrung her heart as if with a physical agony. It was the car from which she and Wynne had been taken which was now that hell of fire. Its glare lit up the pale and bleeding face beside her, and she realized that at that minute they might have been in that awful agony. She began to sob wildly, but she began, too, to try to bring Wynne back to consciousness. She took snow in her hands and put it to his forehead; she twisted her handkerchief about his arm to stop its bleeding. She tried to recall what she had heard at Emergency Lectures, with a strong determination forcing herself to remember. Kneeling in the snow, in the light of the burning car, her heart torn by the cries of the suffering, trembling with excitement, fear, and the shock she had undergone, sobbing almost hysterically, she yet constrained herself to do her best, binding up his arm with strips of her clothing, and trying to bring back his senses.
A physician came to her without her knowing until he was at her side. He bent to examine Wynne, and Berenice tried to repress her sobs that she might talk to him, and take his directions. The life of Wynne might depend upon her calmness. She caught up more snow, and pressed it to her own temples.