depot like battering-rams. In the height of
the confusion an oil-tank in the yard took fire and threw a yellow glare
on the ghastly scene.

I saw men get up and fall again to their knees; I was shivering, and wet
with sweat. The stairway was crushed into kindling-wood. I climbed out a
back window, down on the roof of the freight platform, and so to the
ground. There was a running to and fro, useless and aimless; men were
beside themselves. They plunged through wheat up to their knees at every
step. All at once, above the frantic hissing of the buried Sky-Scraper
and the wild calling of the car tinks, I heard the stentorian tones of
Neighbor, mounted on a twisted truck, organizing the men at hand into a
wrecking-gang. Soon people began running up the yard to where the
Sky-Scraper lay, like another Samson, prostrate in the midst of the
destruction it had wrought. Foremost among the excited men, covered
with dirt and blood, staggered Dad Hamilton.

"Where's McNeal?" cried Neighbor.

Hamilton pointed to the wreck.

"Why didn't he jump?" yelled Neighbor.

Hamilton pointed at the twisted signal-tower; the red light still burned
in it.

"You changed the signals on him," he cried, savagely. "What does it
mean? We had rights against everything. What does it mean?" he raved, in
a frenzy.

Neighbor answered him never a word; he only put his hand on Dad's
shoulder.

"Find him first! Find him!" he repeated, with a strain in his voice I
never heard till then; and the two giants hurried away together. When I
reached the Sky-Scraper, buried in the thick of the smash, roaring like
a volcano, the pair were already into the jam like a brace of ferrets,
hunting for the engine crews. It seemed an hour, though it was much
less, before they found any one; then they brought out 55's fireman.
Neighbor found him. But his back was broken. Back again they wormed
through twisted trucks, under splintered beams--in and around and
over--choked with heat, blinded by steam, shouting as they groped,
listening for word or cry or gasp.

Soon we heard Dad's voice in a different cry--one that meant everything;
and the wreckers, turning like beavers through a dozen blind trails,
gathered all close to the big fireman. He was under a great piece of the
cab where none could follow, and he was crying for a bar. They passed
him a bar; other men, careless of life and limb, tried to crawl under
and in to him, but he warned them back. Who but a man baked