The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-11-20
4 GIRLS IDEA.
She Had It When Men Were Too Fright
 ened to Think.

| ened to Think.
 GErom the Washington Evening Star.l
 Speaking of the experiences on the railroad" said New York travelling man, q had slight scrape one time on @ mountain road in Tennessee that may be worth the hearing. We were coming down a long grade of ten miles in a mixed train That is, we had 8 gondola loaded with ties as the end car, with our two passenger coaches and baggage car, and should say we were making about twenty miles an hour on a track that would be treating us very kindly if it didn't sling us into eternity if We dared to add five miles an hour to our speed, when I happened to look out of the rear door and saw a wild train of loaded coal cars swinging down after us. They had evidently started at a tipple which we had passed only a few minutes before, and when l saw them they were going so fast that they distanced the men on the ground, who made run to get on and stop their further flight. I made q wild rush for the conductor, but be- fore I reached him he had ordered the engineer to let out his engine for all she was worth, and in this way keep ahead of our chasers. Fortunately we had no women aboard, and the men could be kept in better control, though it was all we could do to keep them from jumping off.
 Tt was only a short time until we began to see that our salvation lay in the pursuing train flying the track, be- cause we had reached our limit, and our train was swaying and tossing so that everybody was scared out of his wits. I know I was, and just sat in my seat and held on, waiting and list ening to the thunder of the train be- hind us, which was not five hundred yards away, and gaining every second. It was far heavier than ours, and I knew that If anybody went off the track 1t wasn't going to be the coal train. I said moment ago we had no women aboard. I meant we had none to speak of
 llGlt WdS ulltJ puL ollC Wclo sh liplhp~ ly mountain girl, who didn't seem to know anything and because she sat quiet in the corner and didn't scream. we thought she didn't amount to enough to count I was looking at her in a dazed kind of a way, when all of a sudden she lit out of her seat as if she had been shot out of it, and. knocking everybody out of the way, she dashed out of the rear door before anybody could touch her, and we thought she jumped off, but she hadn't. She jumped for the car door hanging on like cat, until she got to the far end of it, and in second she was tum- bling those ties off at the rate of a dozen a second.
 "They would hit the track and bounce every which way, but she kept piling them off, the coal train getting closer every second, and at last cou- pie of them stuck up in a cattle guard, and the next thing we knew there was terrific crash rails and ties and tracks, and coal cars flew, and the coal train rolled over itself and went down the hill in heap. By George, as that girl stood there in her plain calico dress, and her old sunbonnet and watched that train pile up at her feet, I thought that Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Queen Eliza beth, Grace Darling, and the lot of them weren't a patching to her, and, as far as we were concerned, they weren't.
 "She had saved our train and our lives, and we took her on with us in triumph Then we made up a purse for her big enough to buy farm with, and I'll bet she's got more clothes and jewe1ry and books and trinkets and things than any girl in the mountains, for we never forget her. She doesn't quite appreciate some of the fine things she has, but what do we care for that; we appreciate her just the same.'