I don’t know anything about the wreck of September ninth last.  You who swallowed the details with your coffee and digested the horrors with your chop, probably know a great deal more than I do.  I remember very distinctly that the jumping and throbbing in my arm brought me back to a world that at first was nothing but sky, a heap of clouds that I thought hazily were the meringue on a blue charlotte russe.  As the sense of hearing was slowly added to vision, I heard a woman near me sobbing that she had lost her hat pin, and she couldn’t keep her hat on.

I think I dropped back into unconsciousness again, for the next thing I remember was of my blue patch of sky clouded with smoke, of a strange roaring and crackling, of a rain of fiery sparks on my face and of somebody beating at me with feeble hands.  I opened my eyes and closed them again:  the girl in blue was bending over me.  With that imperviousness to big things and keenness to small that is the first effect of shock, I tried to be facetious, when a spark stung my cheek.

“You will have to rouse yourself!” the girl was repeating desperately.  “You’ve been on fire twice already.”  A piece of striped ticking floated slowly over my head.  As the wind caught it its charring edges leaped into flame.

“Looks like a kite, doesn’t it?” I remarked cheerfully.  And then, as my arm gave an excruciating throb—­“Jove, how my arm hurts!”

The girl bent over and spoke slowly, distinctly, as one might speak to a deaf person or a child.

“Listen, Mr. Blakeley,” she said earnestly.  “You must rouse yourself.  There has been a terrible accident.  The second section ran into us.  The wreck is burning now, and if we don’t move, we will catch fire.  Do you hear?”

Her voice and my arm were bringing me to my senses.  “I hear,” I said.  “I—­I’ll sit up in a second.  Are you hurt?”

“No, only bruised.  Do you think you can walk?”

I drew up one foot after another, gingerly.

“They seem to move all right,” I remarked dubiously.  “Would you mind telling me where the back of my head has gone?  I can’t help thinking it isn’t there.”

She made a quick examination.  “It’s pretty badly bumped,” she said. 
“You must have fallen on it.”

I had got up on my uninjured elbow by that time, but the pain threw me back.  “Don’t look at the wreck,” I entreated her.  “It’s no sight for a woman.  If—­if there is any way to tie up this arm, I might be able to do something.  There may be people under those cars!”

“Then it is too late to help,” she replied solemnly.  A little shower of feathers, each carrying its fiery lamp, blew over us from some burning pillow.  A part the wreck collapsed with a crash.  In a resolute to play a man’s part in the tragedy going on around, I got to my knees.  Then I realized what had not noticed before:  the hand and wrist of the broken left arm were jammed through the handle of the sealskin grip.  I gasped and sat down suddenly.