CHAPTER II
DOWN AT THE WRECK
Claster was a thriving town of four thousand inhabitants, with several churches and schools, a bank, two weekly newspapers, and six blocks of stores. There was a neat railroad station at which two score of trains stopped daily, bound either north or south, for the line ran from Philadelphia to Jersey City.
Barber’s Cut was a nasty curve on the line, just south of the town. Here there was a rocky hill, and in one spot the cut was twenty feet deep. At the end of the cut was a hollow where a railroad bridge crossed Claster Creek.
Frank and his mother found a great many of the townspeople hurrying to the scene of the wreck. All sorts of rumors were afloat, and it was said the passenger cars were on fire, and the helpless inmates were being roasted alive. The local fire department was called out, but fortunately the fire was confined to a freight car loaded with unfinished wagon wheels, so but comparatively little damage was done through the conflagration.
The rumor that a dozen passengers had been killed or hurt was false. But four people on the passenger train had been injured, and only one severely—this man having several ribs crushed in and an arm broken.
“I don’t see anything of father,” said Frank, after he and his mother had looked at three of the injured persons. “I guess he wasn’t on this train after all.”
“It is very fortunate.”
“Your father was on this train,” said a man standing near. “I was talking to him just a short while before the smash-up occurred.”
“Oh!” ejaculated Mrs. Hardy. “Then where is he now?”