On, on, on it came. It was so big and Hervey was so insignificant! Roaring and rushing it bore down upon him. Then suddenly, the sound of its onrush seemed to change. It was less aggressive, less appalling. Was it slowing down? Presently his terrified gaze beheld that area of light standing stationary and up the line he could hear a restless pulsating. The train had stopped, perhaps a hundred yards from him. The blazing light was steady; it did not grow larger; it was not moving. He was sure. It was not moving. It illumined a certain crooked tree and continued to illumine the same crooked tree. And the many toned woodland orchestra of the dying summertime could be heard again; low, drowsy, incessant.
Then, slowly, with a kind of diabolical politeness, the gripping switch opened and Hervey felt the balm of infinite release from pain as he lifted his foot out from between the iron jaws which had held it. There followed an interchange in the language of the railroad, an interchange fraught with sure meanings which the unnerved boy did not understand. Four piercing screams from the restive engine, the sudden appearance of a white light in the other direction, toward Tanner’s Corners, then two more deafening screams. Then the sound of jostling cars and a long, slow puff as the monster strained under the initial pull of starting. Then long, slow, steady puffing. The illumined tree withdrew into the bordering darkness; the big headlight was moving along.
And the boy stood watching as the train moved slowly along the main line southward toward Tanner’s Corners. What was it all about? Why had the switch closed in the first place? He only knew that he was free. Bruised, suffering, but free. Soon he was quite alone in the quiet woods. A cricket was chirping close at hand as if nothing whatever had happened. They are such preoccupied creatures, these little crickets.
CHAPTER XII
HELD
Hervey never knew that it was a special train to which he owed his life. Twelve minutes after it had passed southward along the main line, the regular Wainboro train passed over the reclosed switch and off to the southeast along the branch. On any other night our blithesome wanderer would have been left mangled, probably dying, beside the tracks. As it was, his foot was sorely bruised and he was thoroughly shaken from his experience.
Crippled as he was, the balance of his journey home seemed long and wearisome. When he passed through the little village of Weston’s Green, he knew he was more than half way. Yet here he must pause in limping pursuit of a cat that scampered under the milk can platform. For five minutes he poked his stick under this refuge for no better reason than to see the cat make a frightened exit. He threw his stick after the startled fugitive and replaced it with a rail which he wrenched out of a picket fence. Having completed this nocturnal assault on the sleeping village, he set forth again along the tracks for Farrelton.
It was midnight when he limped into the living room of his home where his stepfather sat beside a marble-topped center table at which he had been reading fitfully during the long hours of waiting.
“Well, Hervey,” he said, with a note of discouragement in his voice, “your mother has only just gone to bed; wait here a minute.”
He went quietly upstairs and presently returned, closing the door. It seemed to Hervey that this had been to announce his own return to a worried mother.
“Well, Hervey, where have you been?” Mr. Walton resumed his seat, speaking not unkindly, but with a look of patient resignation at his stepson.