It has come at last.
Everybody about the show expects that the show has got to have a
railroad wreck every season, and all hands lay awake nights on the cars
to brace themselves for the shock. Sometimes it comes early in the
season, and again a show goes along until almost the end of the season
without a shake-up, and fellows think maybe there is not going to be any
wreck, but the engineers are only waiting till everybody has forgotten
about it, and then, biff, bang, and they have run into another train, or
been run into, and you have to be pulled out of a window by the heels,
and laid out in a marsh until the claim agents can settle with you.
I always thought in reading of railroad accidents, that the railroad
sent out a special trainload of doctors and nurses, to care for the
injured, but the special train never has a doctor until the lawyers give
first aid to the wounded in the way of financial poultices for the
cripples. People in our business are on the railroads, and we work them
for all there is in it; and the man that is hurt the least makes the
biggest howl, and gets the biggest slice of indemnity. Some circus
people spend all their salary as they go along, and live all winter on
the damages they get from the railroads when the wreck comes.
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