It was really but the work of a moment. Jim Podmore being on duty, suddenly felt a shock--then heard a crash, followed by screams and shouts, and what seemed to be the muffled sound of a myriad of voices. He knew that an accident had occurred, and he ran forward, and saw carriages overturned on the line, and huge splinters of wood lying about. "Who did it?" he cried. "Dick Hart!" a voice replied; and then he heard Dick's voice crying, "O, my God!" The busy hands were at work clearing the wreck, and the few passengers--happily there were but few--were assisted out. Most of them had escaped with a bruise or a scratch, but one man, they said, looked in a bad state, and at his own entreaty they allowed him to lie still upon the platform until doctors, who had been promptly sent for, had arrived; and one little child was taken into a room, and lay like dead. Jim Podmore was in the room, and he saw Dick Hart brought in between two men. Dick, when his eyes lighted on the piteous sight of the little girl lying like that, trembled as if ague had seized him, and began to sob and cry. "_I_ did it! _I_ did it!" he gasped. "Why don't some one strike me down dead?" As he uttered these words, and as he stood there, with a face whiter than the face of the child who lay before him, a woman rushed in and cried in a wild tone, "Where's the man that killed my child?" Upon this, with a cry wilder than that to which the poor woman had given vent, Dick Hart wrested himself free from the men, whose hands (in their grief at what had occurred) were only lightly laid upon him, and rushed out of the room like a madman. The men followed him, but he was too quick for them, and before they could lay hands on him again, he had jumped from the platform on to the line, dashing aside the persons who tried to stop him. His mad idea was to run forward on the line until he saw a train coming, and then to throw himself before it and be crushed to pieces. But he was saved from the execution of this piteous design; the men reached him and seized him, and carried him back by main force. When he was in the room again, his passion being spent, he fell upon his knees, and looked round with a scared white face, waiting for what was to come. "Poor Dick!" murmured Jim Podmore. And then the men whispered to each other how Dick Hart had been worked off his legs lately; how the accident was nothing more than was to be expected; and how Dick's wife was near her confinement with her second. "Poor Dick!" murmured Jim Podmore again, for the thought of Dick Hart's one little girl at home, and the other child that was soon expected, brought Pollypod to his mind.