ot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded
drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he
recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt
moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a
disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store.
For there lay scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars,
type-writers, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of
silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen
finely moulded hard-wood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with a
solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and
microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged
dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive
toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from
nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen,
armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the
freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands
in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the
corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little
later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused
Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels
shrieking: "'T was his hog done it--his hog done it! Let me kill him!
Let me kill him!" Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his
head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But .007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it
frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same
time; and 007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the
Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front
of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the
derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while .007 was hitched on
to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled
clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men were at work, replacing
and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By
daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco;
the track was freed for traffic; and 007 had hauled the old Mogul over a
small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once
more, and he settled down with a clan