"Help! help!"
They beat him frightfully about the head, and he flung it feebly this way and that in the endeavour to escape the cruel blows; but he did not loose his hold of them again. In the blind and dreadful struggle they stumbled wildly about, and suddenly they fell crashing down over an embankment. And still Tom Barley, feeling now that life was ebbing from him, held desperately on to them, and still his cries floated on the air. To the frightful sounds of this contest another was added the moment they reached the bottom of the embankment. They had fallen upon a railway track, and a train was approaching. Two huge fierce eyes glared luridly in the fog. Tom's voice grew fainter and fainter, but he never relaxed his hold of the murderers.
"Help! help! help! I have caught the murderers! Help! help! help!"
The clatter of the approaching train almost, but not quite, drowned his appeals. They fell vaguely upon the ears of the engine-driver, and he instantly slackened steam. But the huge lurid eyes were now very close upon the struggling forms.
"Damn you!" screamed Jeremiah, "will you let go?"
"No," said Tom, through his clenched teeth, "not till I'm dead! And then I won't!"
"Then there's an end of you!" cried Jeremiah, and by a determined and powerful effort he succeeded in throwing the lower portion of Tom's body across the rails. Fortunately Tom's head was off the line, and his left arm was wound tightly round Jeremiah's neck. The train passed over Tom's foot, and cut it clean away, but Tom, although he had swooned, held on like grim death, and did not even feel Jeremiah's teeth fixed in his arm. In this position they were found a moment or two afterward, when the train was stopped, and it was with great difficulty that the engine-driver and passengers could part him who lived from him who looked like dead.
The news ran through the length and breadth of the kingdom the next morning, and telegraph wires flashed it all over the world. Tom Barley did not wake to find himself famous, for the reason that for several weeks he was in delirium, and very, very near to death. But none the less was he made famous and dubbed a hero of heroes for the wondrous battle he had fought. Newspapers and magazines sang his praises, and poets deified him. The days of Homer died not in Homer's verse. We have as glorious heroes to-day as have been handed down, immortalized from those by-gone times. We have hearts as valiant, and souls as noble, and love as sweet and pure, in this age which is dubbed commercial and prosaic; and though Tom Barley has a wooden leg, he is worthy to shake hands with Achilles. No such desire possesses him, or possessed him, when he saw Phœbe sitting by his bedside in the hospital.
"You are getting strong again, Tom?"
"Yes, Miss Phœbe; thank God! Is everybody well?"