mechanical soul and body, and a wrecked train lay tilted at an angle of
forty-five degrees against the bank of the hill-side cutting.

It was a moment for action rather than for words, and when he cleared
the platform hand-rail and dropped, running, Lidgerwood was only the
fraction of a second ahead of Van Lew and Jefferis. With Bradford
swinging his lantern for Williams and his fireman to come on, the four
men were at the wreck before the cries of fright and agony had broken
out upon the awful stillness following the crash.

There was quick work and heart-breaking to be done, and, for the first
few critical minutes, a terrible lack of hands to do it. Cranford, the
engineer, was still in his cab, pinned down by the coal which had
shifted forward at the shock of the sudden stop. In the wreck of the
tender, the iron-work of which was rammed into shapeless crumplings by
the upreared trucks of the baggage-car, lay the fireman, past human
help, as a hasty side-swing of Bradford's lantern showed.

The baggage-car, riding high upon the crushed tender, was body-whole,
but the smoker, day-coach, and sleeper were all more or less shattered,
with the smoking-car already beginning to blaze from the broken lamps.
It was a crisis to call out the best in any gift of leadership, and
Lidgerwood's genius for swift and effective organization came out strong
under the hammer-blow of the occasion.

"Stay here with Bradford and Jefferis, and get that engineer out!" he
called to Van Lew. Then, with arms outspread, he charged down upon the
train's company, escaping as it could through the broken windows of the
cars. "This way, every man of you!" he yelled, his shout dominating the
clamor of cries, crashing glass, and hissing steam. "The fire's what
we've got to fight! Line up down to the river, and pass water in
anything you can get hold of! Here, Groner"--to the train conductor, who
was picking himself up out of the ditch into which the shock had thrown
him--"send somebody to the Pullman for blankets. Jump for it, man,
before this fire gets headway!"

Luckily, there were by this time plenty of willing hands to help. The
Timanyoni is a man's country, and there were few women in the train's
passenger list. Quickly a line was formed to the near-by margin of the
river, and water, in hats, in buckets improvised out of pieces of tin
torn from the wrecked car-roofs, in saturated coats, cushion covers, and
Pullman blankets, hissed upon the fire