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Page 94
Marion was absorbed in the thing; and I understood her anxiety.
But the most pressing danger, she did not seem to realize.
It lay, I thought, in the revenge of a discharged workman.
Clinton Howard had to drop any number of incompetent persons, and
they wrote him all sorts of threatening letters, I had been told.
With all the awful things that happen over the country some of
these angry people might do anything. There are always some
half-mad people.
She went on.
"But Clinton says the public is as just as Daniel. If he has an
accident in the ordinary course of affairs the public will hold
him for it. But if anything should happen that he could not
help, the public will not hold him responsible."
I realized the force of that. What reasonable human care could
prevent he must answer for, but the outrage of a criminal would
not be taken in the public mind against him. On the contrary,
the sympathy of the public would flow in. When the people feel
that a man is making every effort for their welfare, the criminal
act of an outsider brings them over wholly to his support.
Profound interest carried Marion off her feet.
"I was in a panic the other day, and Clinton said, `Don't let
rotten luck get your goat. I'm done if an engineer runs by a
block, but nothing else can put it over on me'!"
She laughed with me at the direct, virile idiom of young America
in action.
An event interrupted the discourse. The motor took a sharp curve
and a young man running across the road suddenly flung himself
face down in the grass beyond the curb.
"Is he hurt?" said Marion to the chauffeur.
"No, Miss, he's hiding, Miss," said the man, and we swept out of
sight.
I thought it more likely that the creature was in liquor. In
spite of the great country-houses, it was not good hunting-ground
for the criminal class, during the season when everybody was
about. The very number of servants, when a place is open, in a
rather effective way, police it. Besides the young man looked
like a sort of workman. One gets such impressions at a glance.
The motor descended the long hill toward the river and the flat
valley. It hummed into the curves and hollows, through the
pockets of chill air, and out again into the soft September
night.
Then finally it swept out into the flat valley, and stopped with
a grind of the emergency brake that caused the wheels to skid,
ripping up the dust and gravel. For a moment in the jar and
confusion we did not realize what had happened, then we saw a
great locomotive lying on its side, and a line of Pullmans, sunk
to the axles in the soft earth.
The whole "Montreal Express" was derailed, here in the flat land
at the grade crossing. The thing had been done some time. The
fire had been drawn from the engine; there was only a sputtering
of steam. The passengers had been removed. A wrecking-car had
come up from down the line. A telegrapher was setting up a
little instrument on a box by the roadside. A lineman was
climbing a pole to connect his wire. A track boss with a torch
and a crew of men were coming up from an examination of the line
littered with its wreck.
I hardly know what happened in the next few minutes. We were out
of the motor and among the men almost before the car stopped.
No one had been hurt. The passenger-coaches were not turned
over, and the engineer and fireman had jumped as the cab toppled.
By the greatest good fortune the train had gone off the track in
this low flat land almost level with the grade. Several things
joined to avoid a terrible disaster; the flat ground that enabled
the whole train to plow along upright until it stopped, the track
lying flush with the highway where the engine went off, and the
fact that trains must slow up for this grade crossing. Had there
been an embankment, or a big ditch, or the train under its usual
headway the wreck would have been a horror, for every wheel, from
the engine to the last coach, had left the rails.
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