They were soon well into the state of Virginia. The train was quite crowded and John congratulated himself on securing seats in the parlor-car. From the window Dora listlessly viewed the back-drifting fields and forests, the tobacco which she had never seen growing before, and the old-fashioned houses on the farms as well as in the towns and villages.
It was near night. Washington was only a few hours away.
"We are going to cross a high trestle over a ravine," John explained to his charge. "I heard a man talking about it. There! that is the whistle. I guess they will slow down until we get over it."
But the train was late and the locomotive's speed was not greatly diminished. From the window John saw the line of trees marking the ravine's sinuous course through the fields and told Dora that they would soon be on the trestle. A moment later there was a shriek from the locomotive, a violent jerking of the cars, a distant crashing and grinding of timbers, and a thunderous sound of heavy bodies falling. The coupling was broken and the chair-car lurched forward, left the track, shot its front end against an embankment about twenty feet high and remained poised there. Dora was thrown against a window, the thick glass of which fortunately did not break, and John fell between the chairs to the floor. Everywhere in the car the passengers lay over one another, squirming and screaming in pain and terror.
"Are you hurt?" John asked Dora, as he struggled to his feet and bent over her.
"No." She shook her head, her face blanched, her whole frame quivering.
"Come, let's get out!" he said. He offered to lift her in his arms, for the floor of the car was sharply slanting to one side, but she refused to permit it.
"Oh no. I can get out better by myself," she said, stepping from one seat to another to accelerate their egress.
Some of the passengers around them were injured slightly, some had fainted, and lay prone in the aisle, and these people blocked their progress for a few moments. But when they had finally reached the open a frightful sight met their view. At the bottom of the ravine which the trestle had spanned lay an indiscriminate heap of splintered and telescoped coaches which quite hid from view the locomotive lying beneath. A violent hissing of steam came from the mass which all but drowned out the cries of pain and terror from the imprisoned victims. Now and then men or boys could be seen breaking through the car windows and climbing down to the ground. But hundreds were out of sight. They were doubtless stunned or killed outright.
Fifty or sixty people from the chair-car and the two connected sleeping-coaches, which were the only parts of the train saved from the ruin, gathered on the brink of the ravine and stood spellbound by the sights they beheld in the smoking inferno beneath.