The men in the car arose from their seats and went out to discover the cause of the alarm.  Ralph went also.  The train had narrowly escaped plunging into a mass of wrecked coal cars, thrown together by a collision which had just occurred, and half buried in the scattered coal.

To make the matter still worse the collision had taken place in a deep and narrow cut, and had filled it from side to side with twisted and splintered wreckage.

What was to be done? the passengers asked.  The conductor replied that a man would be sent back to the next station, a few miles away, to telegraph for a special train from Wilkesbarre, and that the passengers would take the train from the other side of the wreck.  And how long would they be obliged to wait here?

“Well, an hour at any rate, perhaps longer.”

“That means two hours,” said an impatient traveller, bitterly.

Ralph heard it all.  An hour would make him very late, two hours would be fatal to his mission.  He went up to the conductor and asked,—­

“How long’d it take to walk to Wilkesbarre?”

“That depends on how fast you can walk, sonny.  Some men might do it in half or three quarters of an hour:  you couldn’t.”  And the man looked down, slightingly, on the boyish figure beside him.

Ralph turned away in deep thought.  If he could walk it in three-quarters of an hour, he might yet be in time; time to do something at least.  Should he try?

But this accident, this delay, might it not be providential?  Must he always be striving against fate? against every circumstance that would tend to relieve him? against every obstacle thrown into his path to prevent him from bringing calamity on his own head?  Must he?—­but the query went no further.  The angel with the flaming sword came back to guard the gates of thought, and conscience still was king.  He would do all that lay in his human power, with every moment and every muscle that he had, to fulfil the stern command of duty, and then if he should fail, it would be with no shame in his heart, no blot upon his soul.

Already he was making his way through the thick underbrush along the steep hill-side above the wreck, stumbling, falling, bruising his hands and knees, and finally leaping down into the railroad track on the other side of the piled-up cars.  From there he ran along smoothly on the ties, turning out once for a train of coal cars to pass him, but stopping for nothing.  A man at work in a field by the track asked him what the matter was up the line; the boy answered him in as few words as possible, walking while he talked, and then ran on again.  After he had gone a mile or more he came to a wagon-road crossing, and wondered if, by following it, he would not sooner reach his journey’s end.  He could see, in the distance, the smoke arising from a hundred chimneys where the city lay, and the road looked as though it would take him more directly there.  He did not stop long