Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories

by Florence Finch Kelly

Instantly all of Annie's pride gave way. She was in the wrong, she told herself, and she would ask him to forgive her. She would send a note to him at the station and ask him not to go away without seeing her.

"I 'll have time," she thought, "for they said the train is a few minutes late to-day and I 'll get Wing to carry it over to the station. There he is now, waiting at the curve."

She hurriedly pencilled a few words upon a scrap of paper and, folding it as she went, ran down the steps and up a side street parallel with the railroad, and then climbed the low embankment upon which the boy stood.

Wing was waiting in the middle of the track for the train and the ecstasy of his daily performance. In the meantime he was holding out at arm's length and considering with proud and satisfied eyes a big, artificial spider and web which had that morning been given to him by one of the ladies at the hotel.

"Wing," she called, "I want you to run back to the station and give this note to Mr. Ellison. You 'll see him there on the platform, or, perhaps, in the baggage room. You 'll have plenty of time, for the train 's late today. Please go quickly, Wing, for I want him to have the note at once."

The train was already rumbling in the deep cut just beyond the turn, but the wind was blowing strongly toward it, and neither of them heard the fateful sound. The high wind caught her dress and blew it against the spider in the boy's hand. It tangled the toy in the folds and wrenched it from his fingers and then caught the hem of her gown upon the splitting edge of a worn rail. As she stooped to loose it the terrible front of the engine appeared, rounding the curve.

Wing looked in blank amazement at his empty fingers and then, as he saw his plaything hanging to the folds of her dress, he sprang after it exclaiming, "My bug! My bug!" As he seized it again he saw the approaching train, and, his mind bent on what he was intending to do, turned to begin his usual backward race. Annie, stooping to loose her dress, with her back to the approaching train, was not yet aware of the oncoming doom. Her gown blew again across his legs, and to free himself he gave her a little push. With the warning shriek of the engine in her ears and darkness surging over her brain she fell just outside the track and rolled down the sloping embankment as far as her skirt, held beneath the wheels of the engine, allowed.

But for the Chinee Kid there was no such escape. The iron hoof of the engine was upon him as he made his first backward leap. When they picked up his little, mangled body the spider was still grasped in his brown fist.

The crowd on the station platform had seen it all—had seen him, as the engine rounded the curve, turn to Annie and push her off the track, thus saving her life at the cost of his own.

The townspeople persuaded his parents to let them give him a public funeral, to which all Tobin turned out, with tears and flowers and resolutions praising the little boy in high-sounding words for his heroic deed. A public subscription was taken up for the benefit of Wing's parents, to which Annie's father and lover and all her friends and everybody who had liked and petted the child contributed so liberally that his father and mother took his remains and sailed back to China.