The following dispatch from Mankato, Minn., is given by the Baltimore Sun:
With one foot cut off and his legs mangled, Rudolph Elmquist, an eighteen-year-old railroad operator, crawled a mile to his operating station and sounded a warning to Mankato, which saved probably one hundred lives.
Elmquist tried Friday night to get on the evening freight-train caboose for Mankato, where he boarded. He slipt and fell beneath the wheels. The freight crew saw him fall and feared he had been hurt. The train stopt about a mile away and began to back up to investigate.
The St. Paul passenger train was nearly due and the track was supposed to be clear for it. As one side of the curved track is along a high embankment and river, a disastrous crash was imminent.
Elmquist saw the train backing up the track and tried, waving his arms, to stop it. Failing to find him in the night, the freight crew prepared to go forward again.
Elmquist again tried to attract attention, but in vain. He then began dragging himself over the grass along the track to his station and reached his key about half an hour later, suffering torture.
He wired the Great Western operator at Mankato: “My foot is cut off and No. 271 is coming back to pick me up. She will have to have help against No. 142, which is due at Mankato in a few minutes.”
Then he fainted and fell across his desk. He was hurried to a hospital, where it was said both legs would have to be amputated.
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