Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/40

32 face with drowned, staring eyes—all he saw in that moment go by like chips of wood on the great river. But more than this he saw, and most terrible—the long railway bridge had given way! The central buttress had crumbled, and the iron rails trailed twisted to the water. At the middle of the great bridge nothing remained to cover a gap of over ninety feet but the handrail, which somehow had loosened from its hold on the broken bridge and swung across—no, not as a tight-rope, but more like a ladder with rungs, which the stanchions made, half a man’s height apart. The second wire, one could see, had broken on the further side, and this caused the whole fence to swing as if it might give way at any moment. In one second the man had seen all this; in the next he had remembered that the train would pass this way in an hour. An hour! What a little time when there is much to do! What an eternity when one waits!

"‘My God, the train!’ he gasped. ‘A hundred people—a hundred——’

"He looked into the rushing torrent, black with its force.

"The woman grasped his hand, and her