"The railroad cars!" gasped the countryman.
"They'll all go to smash, and no mistake."
"Fact, mister. Some born devil has been and sawed the bridge timbers most through in the middle."
"Sure as I stand here! I seen the heaps of sawdust on the road. That's the way I come to take notice. The minute the locomotive gets on the bridge, down she'll go, and no two ways about it."
Morton had no doubt that the man was right. The newspapers, within the last few weeks, had contained various accounts of impediments, great and small, maliciously placed on railroads. It was a species of villany which was just then having its run, as incendiarism will sometimes have; and a like case of a bridge partly sawed through had lately occurred in a neighboring state.
"You fool!" exclaimed Morton, in anguish and despair; "why didn't you get on the track, and stop the train?"
"I'd like to see you stop the train!" retorted the man.
Morton turned to run for the road, bent on stopping the engine, or letting it pass over him. But as he turned, a new arrival caught his eye. This was the cavalier who had baited his horse at the inn, and who, seeing the excited looks of the two men, had checked his pace, and was looking at them with much curiosity.
Crazed with agitation, and hardly knowing what he did, Morton leaped towards him, seized his horse, a powerful and high-mettled animal, by the head, and, with a few broken words of explanation, called on him to dismount. The astonished collegian did not comply. Morton bore back fiercely on the bit; the horse plunged and snorted; the rider clutched the pommel; Morton took him by the arm, drew him to the ground, mounted at a bound after him, and, as he touched the saddle, struck his whalebone walking stick with all his force over the horse's flank. The horse leaped forward frantically, and rushed headlong down the road. His discarded rider saw his hoofs twinkling for an instant out of the cloud of dust, and thought he had had a Heaven-directed escape from a madman.
The small village above Steuben, at which Miss Leslie and her friend were to take the train, was three miles off. The road ran almost directly towards it for more than three fourths of the way, when it made a bend to the right. Morton, with his furious riding, very soon reached this point. He could see the station house before him, on the left, and not more than a third of a mile distant. The space between, though uneven, had no visible impediments but a few low fences and scattered clumps of bushes. Morton pushed through the barberry growth that fringed the road, galloped over the hard pasture, leaped one fence, passed a gap in another, and half way to his goal, found himself and his horse in a quagmire. At this moment, straining his eyes towards the cluster of houses, he saw, with agony at his heart, a white puff of vapor rising above the trees beyond. Then the dark outline of the train came into view, checking its way, and stopping, half hidden behind the buildings.