engineer had got his steam up, and was
leaning out of the cab impatiently. In a moment they were off. The run
to Saxony took forty minutes. Thea sat still in her seat while Dr.
Archie and her father talked about the wreck. She took no part in the
conversation and asked no questions, but occasionally she looked at Dr.
Archie with a frightened, inquiring glance, which he answered by an
encouraging nod. Neither he nor her father said anything about how badly
Ray was hurt. When the engine stopped near Saxony, the main track was
already cleared. As they got out of the car, Dr. Archie pointed to a
pile of ties.

"Thea, you'd better sit down here and watch the wreck crew while your
father and I go up and look Kennedy over. I'll come back for you when I
get him fixed up."

The two men went off up the sand gulch, and Thea sat down and looked at
the pile of splintered wood and twisted iron that had lately been Ray's
caboose. She was frightened and absent-minded. She felt that she ought
to be thinking about Ray, but her mind kept racing off to all sorts of
trivial and irrelevant things. She wondered whether Grace Johnson would
be furious when she came to take her music lesson and found nobody there
to give it to her; whether she had forgotten to close the piano last
night and whether Thor would get into the new room and mess the keys all
up with his sticky fingers; whether Tillie would go upstairs and make
her bed for her. Her mind worked fast, but she could fix it upon
nothing. The grasshoppers, the lizards, distracted her attention and
seemed more real to her than poor Ray.

On their way to the sand bank where Ray had been carried, Dr. Archie and
Mr. Kronborg met the Saxony doctor. He shook hands with them.

"Nothing you can do, doctor. I couldn't count the fractures. His back's
broken, too. He wouldn't be alive now if he weren't so confoundedly
strong, poor chap. No use bothering him. I've given him morphia, one and
a half, in eighths."

Dr. Archie hurried on. Ray was lying on a flat canvas litter, under the
shelter of a shelving bank, lightly shaded by a slender cottonwood tree.
When the doctor and the preacher approached, he looked at them intently.

"Didn't--" he closed his eyes to hide his bitter disappointment.

Dr. Archie knew what was the matter. "Thea's back there, Ray. I'll bring
her as soon as I've had a look at you."

Ray looked up. "You might clean me up a trifle, doc. Won't need you for
anything else, tha