he word that a man's hurt always hits me in the same
place. Slipping into an ulster, I pulled a storm-cap over my ears and
hurried down stairs buttoning my coat. The arc-lights, blinded in the
storm, swung wild across the long yard, and the wind sung with a scream
through the telegraph wires. Stumbling ahead, the big car-tink, facing
the storm, led me to where between the red and the green lamps a dozen
men hovered close to the gangway of a switch engine. The man hurt lay
under the forward truck of the tender.

"They had just got the wrecking train made up, and this man, running
forward after setting a switch, had flipped the tender of the backing
engine and slipped from the footboard. When I bent over him, I saw he
was against it. He knew it, too, for the minute they shut off and got
to him he kept perfectly still, asking only for a priest.

"I tried every way I could think of to get him free from the wheels.
Two of us crawled under the tender to try to figure it out. But he lay
so jammed between the front wheel and the hind one, and tender trucks
are so small and the wheels so close together that to save our lives we
could neither pull ahead nor back the engine without further mutilating
him.

"As I talked to him I took his hand and tried to explain that to free
him we should have to jack up the truck. He heard, he understood, but
his eyes, glittering like the eyes of a wounded animal with shock,
wandered uneasily while I spoke, and when I had done, he closed them to
grapple with the pain. Presently a hand touched my shoulder; the
priest had come, and throwing open his coat knelt beside us. He was a
spare old man--none too good a subject himself, I thought, for much
exposure like that--but he did not seem to mind. He dropped on his
knees and, with both hands in the snow, put his head in behind the
wheel close to the man's face. What they said to each other lasted
only a moment, and all the while the boys were keying like madmen at
the jacks to ease the wheel that had crushed the switchman's thigh.
When they got the truck partly free, they lifted the injured man back a
little where we could all see his face. They were ready to do more,
but the priest, wiping the water and snow from the failing man's lips
and forehead, put up his fingers to check them.

"The wind, howling around the freight-cars strung about us, sucked the
guarded lantern flames up into blue and green flickers in the globes;
they lighte