As she rushed along wildly, at the top of her speed, her little foot caught on the first rail. Before she knew what had happened, she had fallen with her body right across the line. Faint and terrified already, with a thousand vague alarms, the sudden shock stunned and disabled her. Mad bull or drunken man, they might do as they liked now. She was bruised and shaken. She had no thought left to rise or recover herself. Her eyes closed heavily. She lost consciousness at once. It was a terrible position. She had fainted on the line, with the force of the situation.
As for Ughtred, from his seat on the telegraph post on the side of the line five hundred yards farther up, he saw her pause by the gate, then dash across the road, then stumble and trip, then fall heavily forward. His heart came up into his mouth at once at the sight. Oh, thank heaven he had waited. Thank heaven he was near. She had fallen across the line, and a train might come along before she could rise up again. She seemed hurt, too. In a frenzy of suspense he darted forward to save her.
It took but a second for him to realise that she had fallen, and was seriously hurt, but in the course of that second, even as he realised it all, another and more pressing terror seized him.
Hark! what was that? He listened and thrilled. Oh no, too terrible. Yes, yes, it must be—the railway, the railway! He knew it. He felt it. Along the up line, on which Netta was lying, he heard behind him—oh, unmistakable, unthinkable, the fierce whirr of the express dashing madly down upon him. Great heavens, what could he do? The train was coming, the train was almost this moment upon them. Before he could have time to rush wildly forward and snatch Netta from where she lay, full in its path, a helpless weight, it would have swept past him resistlessly, and borne down upon her like lightning.
The express was coming—to crush Netta to pieces.
In these awful moments men don't think: they don't reason; they don't even realise what their action means; they simply act, and act instinctively. Ughtred felt in a second, without even consciously feeling it, so to speak, that any attempt to reach Netta now before that devouring engine had burst upon her at full speed would be absolutely hopeless.
His one chance lay in stopping the train somehow. How, or where, or with what, he cared not. His own body would do it if nothing else came. Only stop it, stop it. He didn't think of it at all that moment as a set of carriages containing a precious freight of human lives. He thought of it only as a horrible, cruel, devouring creature, rushing headway on at full speed to Netta's destruction. It was a senseless wild beast, to be combated at all hazards. It was a hideous, ruthless, relentless thing, to be checked in its mad career in no matter what fashion. All he knew, indeed, was that Netta, his Netta, lay helpless on the track, and that the engine, like some madman, puffing and snorting with wild glee and savage exultation, was hastening forward with fierce strides to crush and mangle her.
At any risk he must stop it—with anything—anyhow.
As he gazed around him, horror-struck, with blank inquiring stare, and with this one fixed idea possessing his whole soul, Ughtred's eye happened to fall upon the dismantled telegraph post, on which but one minute before he had been sitting. The sight inspired him. Ha, ha! a glorious chance. He could lift it on the line. He could lay it across the rails. He could turn it round into place. He could upset the train! He could place it in the way of that murderous engine.