Within a dozen yards from the station the engine and three of the front carriages had broken from their couplings and plunged on to the bank. The last four carriages, free of the fatal chain, had kept the rails and were standing unharmed above.
Women who had been dragged through the tops of the overturned carriages fled away with white faces into the darkness of the fields. Men, too, with panic-stricken eyes, sat down on the grass, helpless and useless. Some resolute souls, roused to activity, were pulling at the carriages to set them right. Men from the station came with lanterns, and rescued the injured, and put them to lie out of harm's way.
The scene was harrowing, and only two of its incidents are material to this history. Over all the rest, the clamor, the tumult, the agony, the abject fear, and the noble courage, let a veil be drawn.
Fate had brought together, in that hour of disaster, three men whose lives, hitherto apart, were henceforth to be bound up as one life for good or ill.
Hugh Ritson rushed here and there like a man distraught. He peered into every face. He caught up a lantern that some one had set down, and ran to and fro in the darkness, stooping to let the light fall on those on the ground, holding up the red glare to the windows of the uninjured carriages.
At that moment all his frozen soul seemed to melt. Face to face with the pitiless work of destiny, his own heartless schemes disappeared. At last he saw the face he looked for. Then he dropped the lantern to his side, and turned the glass of it from him.
"Stay here, Greta," said a voice he knew. "I shall be back with you presently. Let me lend them a hand over yonder." The man went by him in the darkness.
Hark!
Hugh Ritson heard a cry from the field beyond the bank. It was there that they had placed the injured.
"Help! help! I am robbed—- help!" came out of the darkness.