In a Little Town Part 30

Irene laughed at her escape, with an unusual mirth for her. She explained it by seizing Crosson's sleeve and exclaiming:

"Oh, Eddie, such good news from Drury you never heard! He's got a position with a jewelry-store, the biggest in Chicago. And they put him in the designing department at ten dollars a week, and they say he's got a future. Isn't it simply glorious?"

She held Crosson while she read the young man's hallelujahs. They sounded to Crosson like a funeral address.

Irene's mother was even prouder of Drury's success than the daughter was. She bragged now of the wedding she had dreaded before. Finally Irene proclaimed the glorious truth that Drury's salary had been boosted again and they would wait no longer for wealth. He was awful busy, and so he'd just run down for a couple of days and marry her and run back with her to Chicago and jewelry. This arrangement ended Irene's mother's dreams of a fine wedding and relieved the townspeople of the expense of wedding-presents.

The sudden announcement of the wedding shocked Crosson. He endured a jealousy whose intensity surprised him in retrospect. He endured a good deal of humor, too, from village cut-ups, who teased him because his best girl was marrying the other fellow.

Crosson felt a need of solitude and a fierce desire to kill something.

He got his abandoned gun and went hunting to wear out his wrath. He wore himself out, at least. He shot savagely at all sorts of life. He followed one flitting, sarcastic blue-jay with a voice like a village cut-up, all the way home without getting near enough to shoot.

He came down the long hill with the sunset, bragging to himself that he was reconciled to Irene's marriage with anybody she'd a mind to.

He could see her from a distance, sitting on the porch alone. She was all dressed up and rocking impatiently. Evidently the train was late again, as always. From where he was, Crosson could see the track winding around the hills like a little metal brook. The smoke of the engine was not yet pluming along the horizon. The train could not arrive for some minutes yet.

To prove his freedom from rancor and his emanc.i.p.ation from love, but really because he could not resist the chance to have a last word with Irene, he went across lots to her father's back yard and came round to the porch. He forgot to draw the sh.e.l.ls from his gun.

In the sunset, with his weapon a-shoulder, he must have looked a bit wild, for Irene jumped when he spoke to her. He sought an excuse for his visit and put at her feet the game he had bagged--a squirrel, a rabbit, and a few birds--the last he ever shot.

The moment the dead things were there he regretted the impulse. He was reminded of his previous quarry and its ill success. Irene was reminded, too, for she thanked him timidly and asked if he had left any wounded birds in the field. He laughed "No" with a poor grace.

She said: "I'd better get these out of sight before Drury comes. He doesn't like to see such things."

She lifted them distastefully and went into the house. She came out almost at once, for she heard a train. But it was not the pa.s.senger swooping south; it was the freight trudging north. There was only a single track then, and no block system of signals.

Irene no sooner recognized the lumbering, jostling drove of cattle-cars and flats going by than she gasped:

"That freight ought not to be on that track--now!"

She was frozen with dread. Crosson understood, too. Then from the distance came the whistle of the express, the long hurrah of its approach to the station. The freight engineer answered it with short, sharp blasts of his whistle. He kept jabbing the air with its noise.

There was the grind of the brakes on the wheels. The cars tried to stop, like a mob, but the rear cars bunted the front cars forward irresistibly. The cattle aboard lowed and bellowed. The brakemen, quaint silhouettes against the red sky, ran along the tops of the box-cars, twisting the brake-wheels.

Irene stumbled down the steps and dashed across the pastures toward the jutting hill that she had so often seen the express sweep round. Crosson followed.

They came to a fence. She could not climb, she was trembling so. Crosson had to help her over. She ran on, and as he sprawled after, he nearly discharged the gun.

He brought it along by habit as he followed Irene, who ran and ran, waving her arms as if she would stop the express with her naked hands.

But long before they reached the tracks the express roared round the headland and plunged into the freight. The two locomotives met and rose up and wrestled like two black bears, and fell over. The cars were scattered and jumbled like a baby's train. They were all of wood--heated by soft-coal stoves and lighted by coal-oil lamps.

The wreck was the usual horror, the usual chaos of wanton destruction and mysterious escape. The engineers stuck to their engines and were involved in their ruin somewhere. The pa.s.senger-train was crowded, and destruction showed no favoritism: old men, women, children, sheep, horses, cows, were maimed, or killed, or left scot-free.

Some of those who were uninjured ran away. Some stood weeping. Some of the wounded began at once to rescue others. Crosson stood gaping at the spectacle, but Irene went into the wreckage, pawing and peering like a terrier.

She could not find what she was looking for. She would bend and stare into a face glaring under the timbers and maundering for help, then pa.s.s on. She would turn over a twisted frame and let it roll back. She was not a sister of charity; she was Drury Boldin's helpmeet.

She kept calling his name, "Drury--Drury--Drury!" Crosson watched her as she poised to listen for the answer that did not come. He gaped at her in stupid fascination till a brakeman shook him and ordered him to lend a hand. He rested his gun against a pile of ties and bowed his shoulder to the hoisting of a beam overhanging a woman and a suckling babe.

The helpers dislodged other beams and finished the lives they had meant to save.

There were no physicians on the train. But a doctor or two from the town came out and the others were sent for. A telegram was sent to summon a relief-train, but it could not arrive for hours.

The doctors began at the beginning, but they could do little. Their own lives were in constant danger from tumbling wreckage, for the rescuers were playing a game of tragic jackstraws. The least mistake brought down disaster.

As he worked, Crosson could hear Irene calling, calling, "Drury, Drury, Drury!"

He left his task to follow her, his jealousy turned into a wild sorrow for her.

At last he heard in her cry of "Drury!" a note that meant she had found him. But such a welcome as it was for a bride to give! And such a trysting-place!

The car Drury was in had turned a somersault and cracked open across another. Its inverted wheels on their trucks had made a bower of steel about the bridegroom. The flames from the stove and from the oil-lamps were blooming like h.e.l.l-flowers everywhere. And the wind that fanned the blazes was blowing clouds of scalding steam from the crumpled boilers of the two engines.

Crosson ran to Irene's side. She was trying to clamber through a trellis of iron and splintered wood. She was stretching her hand out to Drury, where he lay unconscious, deep in the clutter. Crosson dragged her away from a flame that swung toward her. She struck his hand aside and thrust her body into the danger again.

Crosson, finding no water, began to shovel loose earth on the blaze with a sharp plank from the side of a car. Finding that she could not reach her lover, Irene turned and begged Crosson to run for help and for the doctors.

He ran, but the doctors refused to leave the work they had in hand, and the other men growled:

"Everybody's got to take their turn."

Crosson ran back to Irene with the news. Drury had just emerged from the merciful swoon of shock to the frenzies of his splintered bones, lacerated flesh and blistered skin, and the threat of his infernal environment.

The last exquisite fiendishness was the sight of his sweetheart as witness to his agony, her face lighted up by the flames that were ravening toward him, her hands hungering toward him, just beyond the stretch of his one free arm.

Crosson heard the lovers murmur to each other across that little abyss.

He flung himself against the barriers like a madman. But his hands were futile against the tangle of joists and hot steel.

Irene saw him working alone and asked him where the others were, and the doctors.

"They wouldn't come!" Crosson groaned, ashamed of their ugly sense of justice.

The girl's face took on a look of grim ferocity. She said to Crosson:

"Your gun--where is it?"

He pointed to where he had left it. It had fallen to the ground.

She ran and seized it up, and holding it awkwardly but with menace, advanced on a doctor who toiled with sleeves rolled high, and face and beard and arms blotched with red grime.

She thrust the muzzle into his chest and spoke hoa.r.s.ely:

"Doctor Lane, you come with me."

"I'm busy here," he growled, pus.h.i.+ng the gun aside, hardly knowing what it was.

She jammed it against his heart again and cried, "Come with me or I'll kill you!"