The track at this point ran in a sharp curve about a wooded hillock; all of the near side was heaped with the wreckage of the Bournemouth train; that of the express was mostly hidden by the trees; and just at the turn, under clouds of vomiting steam and piled about with cairns of living coal, lay what remained of the two engines, one upon the other. On the heathy margin of the line were many people running to and fro, and crying aloud as they ran, and many others lying motionless like sleeping tramps.
Morris suddenly drew an inference. ‘There has been an accident’ thought he, and was elated at his perspicacity. Almost at the same time his eye lighted on John, who lay close by as white as paper. ‘Poor old John! poor old cove!’ he thought, the schoolboy expression popping forth from some forgotten treasury, and he took his brother’s hand in his with childish tenderness. It was perhaps the touch that recalled him; at least John opened his eyes, sat suddenly up, and after several ineffectual movements of his lips, ‘What’s the row?’ said he, in a phantom voice.
The din of that devil’s smithy still thundered in their ears. ‘Let us get away from that,’ Morris cried, and pointed to the vomit of steam that still spouted from the broken engines. And the pair helped each other up, and stood and quaked and wavered and stared about them at the scene of death.
Just then they were approached by a party of men who had already organized themselves for the purposes of rescue.
‘Are you hurt?’ cried one of these, a young fellow with the sweat streaming down his pallid face, and who, by the way he was treated, was evidently the doctor.
Morris shook his head, and the young man, nodding grimly, handed him a bottle of some spirit.
‘Take a drink of that,’ he said; ‘your friend looks as if he needed it badly. We want every man we can get,’ he added; ‘there’s terrible work before us, and nobody should shirk. If you can do no more, you can carry a stretcher.’
The doctor was hardly gone before Morris, under the spur of the dram, awoke to the full possession of his wits.
‘My God!’ he cried. ‘Uncle Joseph!’
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