These arrangements were next day carried into effect, and as he must start at once if he would be there in time for the party, he took the night express for Albany, having left his feline family to the care of the boy Sandy. The second night found him on the train between Buffalo and Cleveland, and as the weather was very cold and the seat near the stove unoccupied, he appropriated it to himself, and was just falling away to sleep, when a lady, wrapped in velvet and furs, with a thickly dotted vail over her face, came up to him, and said, rather haughtily:
“Can I have this seat, sir? I prefer it to any other.”
“So do I,” returned Ben; “but bein’ you’re a woman, I’ll give it up, I guess.”
And he sought another, of which there were plenty, for it was the last car, and not one-third full.
“Considerable kind o’ toppin’,” was his mental comment, as he coiled himself in his shaggy overcoat for a second time, sleeping ere long so soundly that nothing disturbed him, until at last, as they turned a short curve, the car was detached from the others, and, leaving the track, was precipitated down an embankment, which, fortunately, was not very steep, so that none were killed, although several were wounded, and among them the lady who had so unceremoniously taken possession of Ben’s comfortable seat.
“Wall, now,” said Ben, crawling out of a window, and holding fast to his hat, which being new, was his special care, “if this ain’t a little the imperlitest way of wakin’ a feller out of a sound sleep, to pitch him head over heels in among these blackb’ry bushes and stuns; but who the plague is that a screechin’ so?—a woman’s voice, too!”
And with all his gallantry aroused, Ben went to the rescue, feeling his way through briars and grass and broken pieces of the car, until he reached the human form struggling beneath the ruins, in close proximity to the hissing stove.
“Easy, now, my gal,” he said, lifting her up. “Haul your foot out, can’t you?”
“No, no, it’s crushed;” and Ben’s knees shook beneath him at the cry of pain.
Relief soon came from other sources, and as this lady seemed more seriously injured than either of the other passengers, she was carried carefully to a dwelling near by, and laid upon a bed, before Ben had a chance to see her features distinctly.