ow many minutes he lay there Mr. Trimm didn't know. It may have been
the shrieks of the victims or the glare from the fire that brought him
out of the daze. He wriggled his body to a sitting posture, got on his
feet, holding his head between his coupled hands, and gazed full-face
into the crowning railroad horror of the year.

There were numbers of the passengers who had escaped serious hurt, but
for the most part these persons seemed to have gone daft from terror and
shock. Some were running aimlessly up and down and some, a few, were
pecking feebly with improvised tools at the wreck, an indescribable
jumble of ruin, from which there issued cries of mortal agony, and from
which, at a point where two locomotives were lying on their sides,
jammed together like fighting bucks that had died with locked horns, a
tall flame already rippled and spread, sending up a pillar of black
smoke that rose straight, poisoning the clear blue of the sky. Nobody
paid any attention to Mr. Trimm as he stood swaying upon his feet. There
wasn't a scratch on him. His clothes were hardly rumpled, his hat was
still on his head. He stood a minute and then, moved by a sudden
impulse, he turned round and went running straight away from the
railroad at the best speed his pudgy legs could accomplish, with his
arms pumping up and down in front of him and his fingers interlaced. It
was a grotesque gait, almost like a rabbit hopping on its hindlegs.

Instantly, almost, the friendly woods growing down to the edge of the
fill swallowed him up. He dodged and doubled back and forth among the
tree trunks, his small, patent-leathered feet skipping nimbly over the
irregular turf, until he stopped for lack of wind in his lungs to carry
him another rod. When he had got his breath back Mr. Trimm leaned
against a tree and bent his head this way and that, listening. No sound
came to his ears except the sleepy calls of birds. As well as Mr. Trimm
might judge he had come far into the depths of a considerable woodland.
Already the shadows under the low limbs were growing thick and confused
as the hurried twilight of early September came on.

Mr. Trimm sat down on a natural cushion of thick green moss between two
roots of an oak. The place was clean and soft and sweet-scented. For
some little time he sat there motionless, in a sort of mental haze. Then
his round body slowly slid down flat upon the moss, his head lolled to
one side and, the reaction having come, Mr. Tr