figure; beside him other passengers were clinging to the handrail and staring down in awestruck fascination. The lowest steps had been crushed back and half up-torn; some monstrous, inanimate thing was battering about below; but the space at the foot of the steps was clear at that moment. Alan leaped over the ruin of the steps and down upon the car deck.
A giant iron casting six feet high and yards across and tons in weight, tumbled and ground before him; it was this which had swept away the steps; he had seen it, with two others like it, upon a flat car which had been shunted upon one of the tracks on the starboard side of the ferry, one of the tracks on his left now as he faced the stern. He leaped upon and over the great casting, which turned and spun with the motion of the ship as he vaulted it. The car deck was a pitching, swaying slope; the cars nearest him were still upon their tracks, but they tilted and swayed uglily from side to side; the jacks were gone from under them; the next cars already were hurled from the rails, their wheels screaming on the steel deck, clanging and thudding together in their couplings.
Alan ran aft between them. All the crew who could be called from deck and engine room and firehold were struggling at the fantail, under the direction of the captain, to throw off the cars. The mate was working as one of the men, and with him was Benjamin Corvet. The crew already must have loosened and thrown over the stern three cars from the two tracks on the port side; for there was a space vacant; and as the train charged into that space and the men threw themselves upon it, Alan leaped with them.
The leading car—a box car, heavily laden—
