Some time elapsed ere I divined where we were, and then I discovered that we had been carried to Mr. Everett’s house and were all lying in the attic over the store. Mildred had been placed on his cot-bed by the book-shelves, and he lay on a lounge a few feet distant.
After a time my straw bed, which had been borrowed from a neighbor, was turned about so that I could see them. I was too weak to talk, but I loved to lie and look at them when the terrible pain gave me a moment’s respite to think of anything beside my own woes.
The little town was crowded; not a spare room but had been gladly given up to the sufferers.
Little by little I learned all that had happened. A tree had been uprooted in the wild storm and had fallen across the track. The engine, the baggage car, and the first car had been derailed. The loss of life had not been great. Poor Hélène, the little German woman and her baby were the only ones who had not been rescued.
But in all the cottages around lay the helpless, wounded people, who had come so far over land and sea only to meet this terrible fate.
The telegraph lines had been thrown down in the storm, and it was two days before word could be sent and the débris cleared away so that trains could come from the west. The little German doctor who had set my bones while I was unconscious, and had left medicine for us all, did not appear but once or twice after the first call, for there were a score or more of poor, maimed creatures, some of them his own countrymen, who needed him even more sorely than we.
What would have become of us during those three days of partial unconsciousness and suffering and impatient waiting for our friends if it had not been for “Jim”!
Jim was a character. Not even the pain could so wholly banish my sense of humor as to prevent my seeing that.
I could not learn whether there was a woman in town or not, but I afterwards heard that Jim had let it be understood that he was commissioned by the “boss” to be his sole attendant, and warn every one else to keep his distance. Half a dozen times a day the big, freckled, red-haired fellow creaked up the stairs in his stocking feet, bringing water and gruel and bouquets of gorgeous nasturtiums and crimson phlox from his little garden patch across the way. Jim had an eye for the beautiful, and thought it a pity that we should have nothing better to look upon than the long rows of sombre books which lined one side of the walls and formed Mr. Everett’s library.
Accordingly the poor man had stripped his own bachelor premises of all the precious adornments sent him by his sweetheart for the last three Christmases. There was a gilded sugar-scoop tied with pink ribbons, and a remarkable landscape painted on the concave surface of the interior. There was also a rolling-pin with a covering of French blue plush, adorned with gilded handles, and bearing on its surface a large thermometer surmounted by a gilded spread eagle.