Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/32

218 ficed to save the despatcher, who was a son-in-law of the president of the road.

Whoever was to blame, the result was disastrous; for we met the train which we expected to pass at the next siding in a deep cut under a railroad bridge. Both trains were wheeling down under the bridge at a forty-mile gait, so as to have a good headway on to take them out the other side. As the view of both engineers was obstructed by the stone abutments of the bridge, neither doubted for a moment that he had a clear track.

They met exactly under the bridge, with a shock and roar that seemed to shake the solid earth; the locomotives reared up like horses, the cars shoved their tenders under them in such a way as to jack them up and raise the bridge off its abutments; and then as the cars climbed on top of each other, they battered it from its position until it lay nearly at right angles to its own road, like an open draw, resting on top of the wreck.

Our conductors sent flags back both ways to hold all trains; but before the men could get up the bank to flag on the cross-country road, a belated gravel train came hurrying along and plumped in on top of us, helping to fill up the cut still more. Their engine set fire to the wreck, and as we were some distance from a telegraph office, all three trains and engines were entirely consumed before help reached us, nothing remaining but a tangled and twisted mass of boilers, wheels, rods, and pipes, partly covered by the gravel train's load of sand.

I was on the engine, sitting on the fireman's seat, looking out ahead. As it was daylight, there was not even the glare of a head-lamp to give us the fraction of a second's warning, and our own engine made such a roaring in the narrow cut that we could hear nothing else. The first intimation we had of approaching danger was when we saw the front end of the other locomotive not forty feet from us. Neither of the engineers had time to close their throttles—an act that is done instinctively on the first appearance of danger.