Willie’s mother was sure it could not be Willie. He was conscious of his infirmity, and so cautious that she had long ceased to be anxious about him. He knew the times of all the trains with nice exactness, also. Yet she started from the house without speaking another word, and ran until she reached the crowd.
The engine stood hissing; it confronted her with the glare of its eye, a horrid and remorseless fate, ready to go its way with bell-clanging and all cheerful noise, no matter who had been ground under its wheels.
The conductor was just stepping on board, for time and orders wait for nothing. The engineer had already climbed back to his cab; he saw a running woman kneel down on the platform and draw the boy up from the boards to rest in her arms. Having seen that much, the engineer turned away his head and wept out loud; and the train moved on, bearing pale faces that looked backward as long as they could discern anything.
Mrs. Harbison had stumbled over Willie’s bent wheel first. When she found him indeed laid in the midst of the crowd, she did not believe it. He was not mangled. His bones were sound—she felt them with a fiercely quick hand. There was no mark about him excepting a dirty-looking spot on one temple.
“Willie,” she cried, shaking him. “Willie! Willie!”
“We’ll have to carry him home,” said her husband at her side, his voice sounding far off as if it came strained through some dense medium.
She looked up, and could not understand it.
“He’s knocked senseless,” she claimed. “Why doesn’t somebody bring water?”
“He never knowed what hurt him,” cautiously said one villager to another. “The train was goin’ so fast, and he come up from among the houses onto it so fast, that it was done in a flash.”
“And I don’t never want to see no better boy than Willie Harbison was,” responded the other.