om us. Five or six men, hearin' the brakes,
had followed me out of the culvert and stood by me, wonderin' why the
stoppage was. The rest were dotted about along the slope of th'
embankment. And then the curiousest thing happened--about the
curiousest thing I seen in all my years on the line. A door of the
tail coach opened and a man stepped out. He didn't jump out, you
understand, nor fling hisself out; he just stepped out into air, and
with that his arms and legs cast themselves anyways an' he went down
sprawlin' into the pool. It's easy to say we ought t' have run then
an' there an' rescued him; but for the moment it stuck us up starin'
an',--Wait a bit! You han't heard the end.

"I hadn't fairly caught my breath, before another man stepped out!
He put his foot down upon nothing, same as the first, overbalanced
just the same, and shot after him base-over-top into the water.

"Close 'pon the second man's heels appeared a third. . . . Yes, sir,
I know now what a woman feels like when she's goin' to have the
scritches. I'd have asked someone to pinch me in the fleshy part o'
the leg, to make sure I was alive an' awake, but the power o' speech
was taken from us. We just stuck an' stared.

"What beat everything was the behaviour of the train, so to say.
There it stood, like as if it'd pulled up alongside the pool for the
very purpose to unload these unfort'nit' men; an' yet takin' no
notice whatever. Not a sign o' the guard--not a head poked out
anywheres in the line o' windows--only the sun shinin', an' the steam
escapin', an' out o' the rear compartment this procession droppin'
out an' high-divin' one after another.

"Eight of 'em! Eight, as I am a truth-speakin' man--but there! you
saw 'em with your own eyes. Eight! and the last of the eight scarce
in the water afore the engine toots her whistle an' the train starts
on again, round the curve an' out o' sight.

"She didn' leave us no time to doubt, neither, for there the poor
fellas were, splashin' an' blowin', some of 'em bleatin' for help,
an' gurglin', an' for aught we know drownin' in three-to-four feet o'
water. So we pulled ourselves together an' ran to give 'em first
aid.

"It didn' take us long to haul the whole lot out and ashore; and, as
Providence would have it, not a bone broken in the party. One or two
were sufferin' from sprains, and all of 'em from shock (but so were
we, for that matter), and between 'em they must ha' swallowed a bra'