“Now go ahead, Johnson,” he called to the engineer, “but you’d better run slow—maybe there’s another rail loose somewhere,” and he swung himself up the steps of the pay-car and sat down by Allan’s cot, with a very grim face.
But let Johnson, the engineer, tell the rest of the story, as he told it to a group of interested auditors the very next day in the roundhouse office.
“I tell you, I run over that trestle mighty cautious-like,” he said, “an’ it give me a turn when I looked down into that ditch an’ thought of what would have happened if th’ boy hadn’t flagged us. But we got across all right, an’ started through th’ cut, still runnin’ slow, fer I didn’t know but what there might be a rock on the track, when I heard somebody hollerin’ at me, an’ in a minute up comes Reddy Magraw climbin’ into th’ cab, lookin’ crazier ’n ever.
“‘How did I git out here?’ he asked, wild-like. ‘Who fetched me out here? What ’m I doin’ ’way out here?’
“‘If you don’t know, I don’t,’ says I. ‘Set down there an’ rest. What’s th’ matter with your head?’ I asked, fer I saw it was all bloody on one side.
“Reddy put his hand up and felt of his head; then he took his hand down an’ looked at the blood on it.
“‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘Mebbe th’ engine hit me. Where’s Welsh an’ the rest o’ th’ gang? They oughtn’t to have gone off an’ left me layin’ out here like this,—I didn’t think they’d do that!’
“‘What engine hit you?’ I asked.
“‘Why, th’ engine o’ Number Four,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have time t’ git out of th’ road after I threw th’ switch. But I didn’t think th’ boys’d ’a’ left me layin’ out here like this. Why, I might ’a’ died!’
“Well, sir, it come to me all in a minute that somehow Reddy Magraw had got his senses back, an’ I tell you it set me a-tremblin’ jest like th’ time my wife had her first baby. I was purty nigh scared to death!