atalities, when the long cars turn over, take fire, and roast the
luckless occupants alive. To seven out of the ten you shall find
appended the cheerful statement: "The accident is supposed to have been
due to the rails spreading." That means the metals were spiked down to
the ties with such versatility that the spikes or the tracks drew under
the constant vibration of the traffic, and the metals opened out. No one
is hanged for these little affairs.

We began to climb hills, and then we stopped--at night in darkness,
while men threw sand under the wheels and crowbarred the track and then
"guessed" that we might proceed. Not being in the least anxious to face
my Maker half asleep and rubbing my eyes, I went forward to a common
car, and was rewarded by two hours' conversation with the stranded,
broken-down, husband-abandoned actress of a fourth-rate, stranded,
broken-down, manager-bereft company. She was muzzy with beer, reduced to
her last dollar, fearful that there would be no one to meet her at
Omaha, and wept at intervals because she had given the conductor a
five-dollar bill to change, and he hadn't come back. He was an Irishman,
so I knew he couldn't steal, and I addressed myself to the task of
consolation. I was rewarded, after a decent interval, by the history of
a life so wild, so mixed, so desperately improbable, and yet so simply
probable, and above all so quick--not fast--in its kaleidoscopic changes
that the _Pioneer_ would reject any summary of it. And so you will never
know how she, the beery woman with the tangled blond hair, was once a
girl on a farm in far-off New Jersey. How he, a travelling actor, had
wooed and won her,--"but Paw he was always set against Alf,"--and how he
and she embarked all their little capital on the word of a faithless
manager who disbanded his company a hundred miles from nowhere, and how
she and Alf and a third person who had not yet made any noise in the
world, had to walk the railway-track and beg from the farm-houses; how
that third person arrived and went away again with a wail, and how Alf
took to the whisky and other things still more calculated to make a wife
unhappy; and how after barn-stormings, insults, shooting-scrapes, and
pitiful collapses of poor companies she had once won an encore. It was
not a cheerful tale to listen to. There was a real actress in the
Pullman,--such an one as travels sumptuously with a maid and
dressing-case,--and my draggle-tail thought of app