The conductor and the engineer and the brakeman and several train-boys and passengers expressed in chorus a strong though condensed opinion of the Orinoco station, and of telegraph operators who fell asleep and left girls to manage affairs. Perhaps it was as well for Phin's feelings that he could not stop to hear it all; there was a call on his office, and he hurried as well as he could to the instrument.
"Stop Ganges branch; tunnel bridge broken!" That was the message.
Phin seized the red lantern, which Mary Jane still held, as she sat, mortified and miserable, upon the door-step, and rushed up the track. The Ganges train had only just started on again, but there was evidently a distrust of Phin's red lantern; by the hootings with which it was greeted, Phin judged that they thought it a bad joke or another mistake. They seemed to mean to run him down. Well, then, they might!
Phin set his teeth, held the lantern aloft, and stood as if he were rooted to the track. He made ready to spring for the cow-catcher; it actually grazed him as he stood before the train stopped.
"Tunnel bridge broken!" he screamed, hoarsely, as he had been screaming incessantly above the rushing of the train and the din of angry voices; but it was mechanically now, and they had to carry him back to Mary Jane. His wrist had been bleeding all the time; the right wrist, too, that swung the lantern; and his head was badly hurt; and—well, it is no disgrace for a boy to faint sometimes.
"THERE WAS AN OLD GENTLEMAN WITH A FUR COLLAR TURNED UP TO HIS EARS WHO MADE FRIENDS WITH MARY JANE."
The passengers poured into the station; there was a great chorus of thanksgiving, and they made what Phin called a great fuss over him and Mary Jane. There was an old gentleman with a fur collar turned up to his ears, who made friends with Mary Jane. He seemed to feel deeply what a narrow escape the train had had, and he sharply rebuked the conductor when he said that the night was so light that they might have seen that the bridge was broken; he "did keep an eye on that bridge as soon as the frost came, because it was old." (It proved to have been a gang of discharged workmen who had wrecked the bridge.) The old man declared it a providential mistake that had stopped the wrong train and let the message arrive in time.
When they were relieved, in the early morning, after all the Ganges passengers had gone on by such conveyances as they could find, Phin and Mary Jane walked homeward together.
"You needn't say a word to Sam," warned Phin. "It would only worry him. I mean about stopping the wrong train, and all that. I've just heard that the old gentleman who talked to you was the president of the road. I hope you didn't tell him anything!"