Читать книгу Vassall Morton - Francis Parkman - Страница 17

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* * * One fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessened by another's anguish; Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another's languish. Take thou some new infection to thine eye, And the rank poison of the old will die.—Romeo and Juliet.

All day the train whirled along, and Morton's troubled thoughts found no rest.

"Matherton!" cried the conductor, opening the door of the car, as the engine stopped in a large station house, at five o'clock in the afternoon. Several passengers got out; two or three came in; the bell rang, and with puffing and clanking, the train was on its way again. A newsboy passed down the car with a bundle of newspapers and twopenny novels. Morton bought one of the latter as an anodyne; but even "Orlando Melville, or the Victim of the Press Gang," failed to produce the desired soporific effect, and his thoughts soon recurred to their former channel. Suddenly a violent concussion, a crashing, thumping, and grating sound, the outcries of a hundred passengers—the women screaming, and some of the men not silent—with a furious rocking and tossing of the car, ejected every thought but one of his personal safety. All sprang to their feet, he among the rest. The first distinct impression which his mind received was that of the man in front of him making a flying leap out of the open window of the car, carrying the sash with him—a dexterous piece of gymnastics, only to be accounted for by the fact that the performer was a distinguished artist of the Grand National Olympic Circus. His boots twinkled at the window, and he was gone, alighting on his feet like a cat, but Morton was too much frightened to laugh. In a few moments the car came to a rest, without being overturned, though the front was partly broken in, and the whole swung off the rails to an angle of forty-five degrees. On looking out at the window, the first object that met Morton's eye was the baggage car, thrown on its side, with the door uppermost. As he looked, the door opened, and a head emerged—like a triton from the deep, or Banquo's ghost from a trap door—white with wrath and fright, and swearing with wonderful volubility. Then appeared another, rising by the side of the first, equally pallid, but much less profane. The heads belonged to two men, who had been seated in the compartment of the baggage car allotted to the mails, and when it was flung off the track, had been rattled together like dice in a box, suffering various bruises, but no serious harm. The breaking of the defective cast iron axle of the tender had caused the whole disaster, which would doubtless have produced fatal consequences had not the train been moving at a very slow rate. As it happened, a few contusions were its worst results, and one of the morning papers,