They can never reach
us!"
She seated herself on a fragment of the broken carriage, and buried
her face in her hands once more in silence. Her heart was full.
Her head was very heavy. She gasped and struggled. Then a sudden
intuition seized her, after her kind. If the rail could carry the
sound of a tap, surely it might carry the human voice as well.
Inspired with the idea, she rose again and leant forward.
A second time she knocked two quick little taps, ringing sharp on
the rail, as if to bespeak attention; then, putting her mouth close
to the metals, she shouted aloud along them with all the voice that
was left her--
"Hallo, there, do you hear? Come soon, come fast. We're alive,
but choking!"
Quick as lightning an answer rang back as if by magic, along the
conducting line of the rail--a strange unexpected answer.
"Break the pipe of the wires," it said, and then subsided instantly.
Cyril, who was leaning down at her side at the moment with his ear
to the rail, couldn't make out one word of it. But Elma's sharp
senses, now quickened by the crisis, were acute as an Oriental's
and keen as a beagle's.
"Break the pipe of the wires," they say, she exclaimed, starting
back and pondering.
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