Winter was still on the Jersey flats on the last day of March; but Horace, waiting at a little “flag station,” found the air full of crude prophecies of spring. He had been searching titles all day, in a close and gloomy little town-hall, and he was glad to be out-of-doors again, and to think that he should be back in New York by dinner time, for it was past five o’clock.
But a talk with the station-master made the prospect less bright. No train would stop there until seven.
Was there no other way of getting home? The lonely guardian of the Gothic shanty thought it over, and found that there was a way. He talked of the trains as though they were whimsical creatures under his charge.
“The’s a freight comin’ down right now,” he said, meditatively, “but I can’t do nothin’ with her. She’s gotter get along mighty lively to keep ahead of the Express from Philadelphia till she gets to the junction and goes on a siding till the Express goes past. And as to the Express—why, I couldn’t no more flag her than if she was a cyclone. But I tell you what you do. You walk right down to the junction—’bout a mile ’n’ a half down—and see if you can’t do something with number ninety-seven on the other road. You see, she goes on to New York on our tracks, and she mostly’s in the habit of waiting at the junction ’bout—say five to seven minutes, to give that Express from Philadelphia a fair start. That Express has it pretty much her own way on this road, for a fact. You go down to the junction—walk right down the line—and you’ll get ninety-seven—there ain’t no kind of doubt about it. You can’t see the junction; but it’s just half a mile beyont that curve down there.”
So there was nothing to be done but to walk to the junction. The railroad ran a straight, steadily descending mile on the top of a high embankment, and then suddenly turned out of sight around a ragged elevation. Horace buttoned his light overcoat, and tramped down the cinder-path between the tracks.
Yes, spring was coming. The setting sun beamed a soft, hopeful red over the shoulder of the ragged elevation; light, drifting mists rose from the marsh land below him, and the last low rays struck a vapory opal through them. There was a warm, almost prismatic purple hanging over the outlines of the hills and woods far to the east. The damp air, even, had a certain languid warmth in it; and though there was snow in the little hollows at the foot of the embankment, and bits of thin whitish ice were in the swampy pools, it was clear enough to Horace that spring was at hand. Spring—and then summer; and, by the sea or in the mountains, the junior partner of the house of Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather might hope to meet once more with Judge Rittenhouse’s daughter.
The noise of the freight-train, far up the track behind him, disturbed Horace’s springtime revery. A forethought of rocking gravel-cars scattering the overplus of their load by the way, and of reeking oil-tanks, filling the air with petroleum, sent him down the embankment to wait until the way was once more clear.
The freight-train went by and above him with a long-drawn roar and clatter, and with a sudden fierce crash, and the shriek of iron upon iron, at the end, and the last truck of the last car came down the embankment, tearing a gully behind it, and ploughed a grave for itself in the marsh ten yards ahead of him.
And, looking up, he saw a twisted rail raising its head like a shining serpent above the dim line of the embankment. A furious rush took Horace up the slope. A quarter of a mile below him the freight-train was slipping around the curve. The fallen end of the last car was beating and tearing the ties. He heard the shrill creak of the brakes and the frightened whistle of the locomotive. But the grade was steep, and it was hard to stop. And if they did stop they were half a mile from the junction—half a mile from their only chance of warning the Express.