Ta-ra! ta-ra! ta-ra-ra-ra! ta-rat!

---

Professor Krenner took the silver bugle from his lips while the strain echoed flatly from the opposite, wooded hill. That hill was the Isle of Hope, a small island of a single eminence lying half a mile off the mainland, and not far north of Freeling.

The shore of Lake Huron was sheathed in ice. It was almost Christmas time. Winter had for some weeks held this part of Michigan in an iron grip. The girls of Lakeview Hall were tasting all the joys of winter sports.

The cove at the boathouse (this was the building that some of the Lakeview Hall girls had once believed haunted) was now a smooth, well-scraped skating pond. Between the foot of the hill, on the brow of which the professor stood, and the Isle of Hope, the strait was likewise solidly frozen. The bobsled course was down the hill and across the icy track to the shore of the island.

Again the professor of mathematics— and architectural drawing— put the key-bugle to his lips and sent the blast echoing over the white waste:

Ta-ra! ta-ra! ta-ra-ra-ra! ta-rat!

The road from Lakeview Hall was winding, and only a short stretch of it could be seen from the brow of Pendragon Hill. But the roof and chimneys of the great castle-like Hall were visible above the tree-tops.

Now voices were audible— laughing, sweet, clear, girls’ voices, ringing like a chime of silver bells, as the owners came along the well-beaten path, and suddenly appeared around an arbor-vitae clump.

“Here they are!” announced the professor, whose red and white toboggan-cap looked very jaunty, indeed. He told of the girls’ arrival to a boy who was toiling up the edge of the packed and icy slide. Walter Mason had been to the bottom of the hill to make sure that no obstacle had fallen upon the track since the previous day.

“Walter! Hello, Walter!” was the chorused shout of the leading group of girls, as the boy reached the elevation where the professor stood.

One of the girls ran to meet him, her cheeks aglow, her lips smiling, and her brown eyes dancing. She looked so much like the boy that there could be no doubt of their relationship.

“Hello, Grace!” Walter called to his sister, in response.

But his gaze went past the chubby figure of his shy sister to another girl who, with her chum, was in the lead of the four tugging at the rope of the gaily painted bobsled. This particular girl’s bright and animated countenance smiled back at Walter cordially, and she waved a mittened hand.

“Hi, Walter!” she called.

“Hi, Nan!” was his reply.

The others he welcomed with a genial hail. Bess Harley, who toiled along beside her chum, said with a flashing smile and an imp-light of naughtiness in either black eye:

“You and Walter Mason are just as thick as leaves on a mulberry tree, Nan Sherwood! I saw you whispering together the other day when Walter came with his cutter to take Grace for a ride. Is he going to take you for a spin behind that jolly black horse of his?”

“No, honey,” replied Nan, placidly. “And I wouldn’t go without you, you know very well.”

“Oh! wouldn’t you, Nan? Not even with Walter?”

“Certainly not!” cried Nan Sherwood, big-eyed at the suggestion.

“Only because Dr. Beulah wouldn’t hear of such an escapade, I guess,” said the wicked Bess, laughing.

“Now! just for that,” Nan declared, pretending to be angry, “I won’t tell you— yet— what we were talking about.”

“You and Walter?”

“Walter and I— yes.”

“Secrets from your chum, Nan! You’re always having something on the side that you don’t tell me,” pouted Bess.

“Nonsense! Don’t you know Christmas is coming and everybody has secrets this time of year?”

“Hurry up, girls!” commanded the red-haired girl who was helping pull on the rope directly behind the chums. “I’m walking on your heels. It will be night before we get on the slide.”

“We’re in the lead,” Bess flared back. “Don’t be afraid, Laura.”

“That may be,” said Laura Polk, “but I don’t want Linda Riggs and her crowd right on top of us. They’re so mean. They came near running into us the other day.”

“But the professor called ’em down for it,” said the fourth girl dragging the bobsled, who was a big, good-natured looking girl with a mouthful of big white teeth and a rather vacuous expression of countenance when she was not speaking.

“He ought to send Linda Riggs and her friends down first,” Nan Sherwood suggested.

“No, ma’am!” said Bess Harley, shrilly.

“We’re here ahead of ’em all. We can go first, can’t we, Professor Krenner?”

“Certainly, my dear,” responded the professor. “Look over the sled, Walter, and see that it is all right.”

The handsome sled was almost new and there could be nothing the matter with it, Walter was sure. Other parties of girls from the Hall, dragging bobsleds, were appearing now. They were all the bigger girls of the school, for the younger ones, or “primes,” as they were designated, had their own particular hill to slide on, nearer the Hall.

Dr. Beulah Prescott, principal of Lakeview Hall, believed in out-of-door sports for her girls; but they were not allowed to indulge in coasting or sleighing or skating or any other sport, unattended. Professor Krenner had general oversight of the coasting on Pendragon Hill, because he lived in a queerly furnished cabin at the foot of it and on the shore of the lake.

He marshalled the sleds in line now and took out his watch. “Three minutes apart remember, young ladies,” he said. “Are you going with your sister’s sled, Walter?”

“This first time,” said the boy, laughing. “Grace won’t slide if I don’t, although Nan knows how to steer just as well as I do.”

“Of course she does,” said Bess, with assurance. “We don’t need a boy around,” she added saucily.

“They’re very handy animals to have at times,” said the professor, drily. “Wait a bit, Miss Riggs!” he added sharply. “First come, first served, if you please. You are number three. Wait your turn.”

“Well, aren’t those girls ever going to start?” snapped the tall girl, richly dressed in furs, who had come up with a party of chums and a very handsome “bob.”

Professor Krenner was quite used to Linda’s over-bearing ways, and so were her fellow-pupils. They made the rich and purse-proud girl no more beloved by her mates. But she could always gather about her a few satellites— girls who felt proud to be counted the intimates of the daughter of a railroad president, and who enjoyed Linda Riggs’ bounty.

Not that there were many girls at Lakeview Hall whose parents and guardians were not well off. The school was a very exclusive school. Its course of instruction prepared the girls for college, or gave them a “finish” for entrance upon their social duties, if they did not elect to attend a higher institution of learning.

On this occasion Professor Krenner paid no further attention to Linda Riggs. Walter Mason had already taken his place on his sister’s sled at the steering wheel in front, with his boots on the footrests. His sister got on directly behind him and took hold of his belt. Behind her Nan, Bess, little, fair-haired Lillie Nevins, who was Grace’s particular chum, and who had ridden over on the sled from the Hall, Amelia Boggs, the homely girl, and Laura Polk, the red-haired, sat in the order named. There were rope “hand-holds” for all; but Grace preferred to cling to her brother. The first trip down the hill was always a trial to timid Grace Mason.

“All ready?” queried Walter, firmly gripping the wheel.

“Let her go!” cried Laura, hilariously.

“And do give somebody else a chance!” exclaimed Linda.

Professor Krenner’s watch was in his hand. “Go!” he shouted, and as the red-haired girl’s heels struck into the hard snow to start the creaking runners, the old gentleman put the bugle to his lips again and blew another fanfare.

“We’re off!” squealed Bess, as the bobsled slipped over the brow of the descent and started down the slippery slide with a rush.

Fifty feet below the brink of the hill a slight curve in the slide around a thick clump of evergreens hid the sled from the group at the top. They could hear only the delighted screams of the girls until, with a loud ring of metal on crystal, the runners clashed upon the ice and the bobsled darted into view again upon the frozen strait.

The first bobsled ran almost to the Isle of Hope before it stopped. By that time Professor Krenner had started the second one, and the impatient Linda was clamoring for what she called her “rights.”

“We’ll show ’em how to speed a bobsled, if you’ll give us a chance,” she complained. “That thing of the Mason’s didn’t get to the island. We’ll show ’em!”

Nan Sherwood and her friends piled off the first sled upon the ice with great delight and much hilarity.

“I declare!” gasped Laura. “I left my breath at the top of the hill. O-o-o! What a ride!”

“It’s ju-just like swinging too high!” burst out flaxen-haired Lillie.

Nan and Bess had brought their skates slung over their shoulders by the straps. Before getting up off the sled the chums put these on and then were ready to draw the heavy sled back across the ice to the shore.

“Get aboard— all of you!” Bess cried. “All you lazy folks can have a ride!”

“And do hurry!” added Nan. “Here come some more bobs.”

The second sled did not gain momentum enough to slide half-way across the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Hope. But now appeared the “Linda Riggs’ crew,” as Laura called them, and their shiny, new sled. Out of the enveloping grove which masked the side of Pendragon Hill it came, shooting over the last “thank-you-ma’am” and taking the ice with a ringing crash of steel on crystal.

“Got to hand it to ’em!” exclaimed Walter, with admiration. “That’s some sled Linda’s got.”

“So’s ours,” Bess said stoutly. “See, they’re not going to run farther than we did.”

“I don’t know about that,” murmured Nan, honestly.

“Come on!” Bess cried. “Let’s get back and try it again. I know those horrid things can’t beat the Sky-rocket.”

The other girls had already piled upon the bobsled. Walter started them with a push and called a “good-bye” after them. He was going to put on his own skates and skate up the strait to the Mason house. The family was staying here on the shores of Lake Huron much later than usual this year.

Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley had no trouble at all in dragging their mates across the ice upon the Sky-rocket. Linda’s sled, the Gay Girl, did go farther than the first-named sled, and Bess was anxious to get to the top of the hill to try it over again.

“It will never do in this world to let them crow over us,” Bess declared.

She and Nan slipped off their skates at the edge of the ice and all six laid hold of the long rope to pull the Sky-rocket up the hill.

A fourth bobsled rushed past them, the girls screaming and laughing; and then a fifth flew by.

“Mrs. Gleason said she would come over before supper time,” Laura Polk said. Mrs. Gleason was the physical instructor at the Hall.

“Let’s get her on our sled!” cried Bess.

“Let’s!” chorused the others.

But no teacher save Professor Krenner was on the brow of the hill when the Sky-rocket was hauled into position again. This time Nan steered, with firmly braced feet, her mittened hands on the wheel-rim, and her bright eyes staring straight down the course.

“Are you ready?” cried the professor, almost as eager as the girls themselves. Then he blew the warning blast to tell all below on the hillside that the Sky-rocket was coming.

Ta-ra! ta-ra! ta-ra-ra-ra! Ta-rat!

With a rush the sled was off. It disappeared around the evergreen clump. The hum of its runners was dying away when suddenly there sounded a chorus of screams, evidently from the Sky-rocket crew. Following this, a crash and a turmoil of cries, expressing both anger and fright, rang out upon the lower hillside.

Nan Sherwood had steered this big bobsled down Pendragon Hill many times. She had no fear of an accident when they started, although the rush of wind past them seemed to stop her breath and made her eyes water.

There really was not a dangerous spot on the whole slide. It crossed but one road and that the path leading down to Professor Krenner’s cabin. At this intersection of the slide and the driveway, Walter Mason had erected a sign-board on which had been rudely printed:

Stop! Look! Listen!

Few people traversed this way in any case; and it did seem as though those who did would obey the injunction of the sign. Not so a heavy-set, burly looking man who was tramping along the half-beaten path just as Nan and her chums dashed down the hill on the bobsled. This big man, whose broad face showed no sign of cheerfulness, but exactly the opposite, tramped on without a glance at the sign-board. He started across the slide as the prow of the Sky-rocket, with Nan clinging to the wheel, shot into view.

The girls shrieked in chorus— all but Nan herself. The stubborn, fat man, at last awakened to his danger, plunged ahead. There was a mighty collision!

The fat man dived head-first into a soft snow bank on one side of the slide; the bobsled plunged into another soft bank on the other side, and all the girls were buried, some of them over their heads, in the snow.

They were not hurt—

“Save in our dignity and our pompadours!” cried Laura Polk, the red-haired girl, coming to the surface like a whale, “to blow.”

“Goodness— gracious— Agnes!” ejaculated the big girl, who was known as “Procrastination” Boggs. “What ever became of that man who got in our way?”

Nan Sherwood had already gotten out of the drift and had hauled her particular chum, Bess Harley, with her to the surface. Grace Mason and Lillie Nevins were crying a little; but Nan had assured herself at a glance that neither of the timid ones was hurt.

She now looked around, rather wildly, at Amelia Boggs’ question. The fat man had utterly disappeared. Surely the bobsled, having struck him only a glancing blow, had not throw him completely off the earth!

Bess was looking up into the snowy tree-tops, and Laura Polk suggested that maybe the fat man had been only an hallucination.

“Hallucination! Your grandmother’s hat!” exclaimed Amelia Boggs. “If his wasn’t a solid body, there never was one!”

“What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” murmured Laura.

“Both must be destroyed,” finished Bess. “But I see the tail of our bob, all right.”

Just then Nan ran across the track. At the same moment a floundering figure, like a great polar bear in his winter coat, emerged from the opposite drift. The fat man, without his hat and with his face very red and wet, loomed up gigantically in the snow-pile.

“Oh! Nan Sherwood!” cried Laura. “Have you found him?”

The fat man glared at Nan malevolently. “So your name is Sherwood, it is?” he snarled. “You’re the girl that was steering that abominable sled— and you steered it right into me.”

“Oh, no, sir! Not intentionally!” cried the worried Nan.

“Yes, you did!” flatly contradicted the choleric fat man. “I saw you.”

“Oh, Nan Sherwood!” gasped Amelia, “isn’t he mean to say that?”

“Your name’s Sherwood, is it?” growled the man. “I should think I’d had trouble enough with people of that name. Is your father Robert Sherwood, of Tillbury, Illinois?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the wondering Nan.

“Ha! I might have known it,” snarled the man, trying to beat the snow from his clothes. “I heard he had a girl up here at this school. The rascal!”

Professor Krenner had just reached the spot from the top of the hill. From below had hurried the crews of bobsleds number two and three. Linda Riggs, who led one of the crews, heard the angry fat man speaking so unfavorably of Nan Sherwood’s father. She sidled over to his side of the track to catch all that he said.

Nan, amazed and hurt by the fat man’s words and manner, would have withdrawn silently, had it not been for the last phrase the man used in reference to her father. Nan was very loyal, and to hear him called “rascal” was more than she could tamely hear.

“I do not know what you mean, sir,” she said earnestly. “But if you really know my father, you know that what you say of him is wrong. He is not a rascal.”

“I say he is!” ejaculated the man with the grouch.

Here Professor Krenner interfered, and he spoke quite sharply.

“You’ve said enough, Bulson. Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know,” grumbled the fat man.

“He can’t tell till he’s seen his lawyer,” whispered Laura Polk, beginning to giggle.

“Are any of you girls hurt?” queried the professor, his red and white cap awry.

“I don’t think so, Professor,” Bess replied. “Only Nan’s feelings. That man ought to be ashamed of himself for speaking so of Mr. Sherwood.”

“Oh, I know what I’m talking about!” cried the fat man, blusteringly.

“Then you can tell it all to me, Ravell Bulson,” bruskly interposed the professor again. “Come along to my cabin and I’ll fix you up. Mrs. Gleason has arrived at the top of the hill and she will take charge of you young ladies. I am glad none of you is hurt.”

The overturned crew hauled their bobsled out of the drift. Linda Riggs went on with her friends, dragging the Gay Girl.

“I’d like to hear what that fat man has to say about Sherwood’s father,” the ill-natured girl murmured to Cora Courtney, her room-mate. “I wager he isn’t any better than he ought to be.”

“You don’t know,” said Cora.

“I’d like to find out. You know, I never have liked that Nan Sherwood. She is a common little thing. And I don’t believe they came honestly by that money they brought from Scotland.”

“Oh, Linda!” gasped Cora.

“Well, I don’t!” declared the stubborn girl. “There is a mystery about the Sherwoods being rich, at all. I know they were as poor as church mice in Tillbury until Nan came here to school. I found that out from a girl who used to live there.”

“Not Bess Harley?”

“No, indeed! Bess wouldn’t tell anything bad about Nan. I believe she is afraid of Nan. But this girl I mean wrote me all about the Sherwoods.”

“Nan is dreadfully close-mouthed,” agreed Cora, who was a weak girl and quite under Linda’s influence.

“Well! Those Sherwoods were never anything in Tillbury. How Bess Harley came to take up with Nan, the goodness only knows. Her father worked in one of the mills that shut down last New Year. He was out of work a long time and then came this fortune in Scotland they claim was left Mrs. Sherwood by an old uncle, or great uncle. I guess it’s nothing much to brag about.”

“Bess said once it might be fifty thousand dollars,” said Cora, speaking the sum unctuously. Cora was poor herself and she loved money.

“Oh, maybe!” exclaimed Linda Riggs, tossing her head. “But I guess nobody knows the rights of it. Maybe it isn’t so much. You know that there were other heirs who turned up when Nan’s father and mother got over to Scotland, and one while Nan thought she would have to leave school because there wasn’t money enough to pay her tuition fees.”

“Yes, I know all about that,” admitted Cora, hurriedly. She had a vivid remembrance of the unfinished letter from Nan to her mother, which she had found and shown to Linda. Cora was not proud of that act. Nan had never been anything but kind to her and secretly Cora did not believe this ill-natured history of Nan Sherwood that Linda repeated.

Those of my readers who have read the first volume of this series, entitled “Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, Or, The Old Lumberman’s Secret,” will realize just how much truth and how much fiction entered into the story of Nan’s affairs related by the ill-natured Linda Riggs.

When Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood started for Scotland to make sure of the wonderful legacy willed to Nan’s mother by the Laird of Emberon’s steward, Nan was sent up into the Peninsula of Michigan to stay with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Kate Sherwood at a lumber camp. Her adventures there during the spring and summer were quite exciting. But the most exciting thing that had happened to Nan Sherwood was the decision on her parents’ part that she should go with her chum, Bess Harley, to Lakeview Hall, a beautifully situated and popular school for girls on the shore of Lake Huron.

In “Nan Sherwood at Lakeview Hall, Or, The Mystery of the Haunted Boathouse,” the second volume of the series, were narrated the incidents of Nan’s first term at boarding school. She and Bess made many friends and had some rivals, as was natural, for they were very human girls, in whom no angelic quality was over-developed.

In Linda Riggs, daughter of the rich and influential railroad president, Nan had an especially vindictive enemy. Nan had noticed Linda’s eagerness to hear all the ill-natured fat man had to say about Mr. Sherwood.

“I do wish Linda had not heard that horrid man speak so of Papa Sherwood,” Nan said to Bess Harley, as they toiled up the hill again after the overturning of theSky-rocket.

“Oh, what do you care about Linda?” responded Bess.

“I care very much about what people say of my father,” Nan said. “And the minute I get home I’m going to find out what that Bulson meant.”

That adventurous afternoon on Pendragon Hill was the last chance the girls of Lakeview Hall had that term for bobsledding. School closed the next day and those pupils who lived farthest away, and who went home for the holidays, started that very evening by train from Freeling.

Nan and her chum, Bess Harley, were two who hurried away from the Hall. Tillbury was a night’s ride from Lakeview Hall, and the chums did not wish to lose any of their short stay at home.

It had already been planned and agreed to that Nan and Bess were to go to Chicago to visit in the Masons’ home during a part of this vacation, and the two friends, who knew very little of city life, were eager indeed for the new experience.

Walter and Grace had started for Chicago that morning, and when the two Tillbury girls saw how hard it was snowing when Charley, with his ’bus on runners, drove them to the station, they wished that they had asked the privilege of Dr. Beulah Prescott, the principal, of going early, too.

“This yere’s goin’ to be a humdinger of a storm,” prophesied Charley. “You gals’ll maybe get snowed up on the train.”

“Oh! What fun!” cried the thoughtless Bess.

“I hope not!” proclaimed Nan.

“I think it would be fun, Nan,” urged her chum.

“Humph! How about eating?” queried the red-haired girl, Laura Polk, who would be one of the party as far as the Junction.

“Oh, there’s a dining-car on this train,” said May Winslow, who was to speed away to the South to spend Christmas, where there was no ice or snow, and where the darkeys celebrate the holiday with fire-crackers, as Northern people do the Fourth of July.

“That’s all right about the dining-car,” said Nan. “All right for you girls who are going to Chicago. But our train from the Junction has no ‘eats’ attached and if we get snowed up— ”

“Ugh!” cried her chum. “Don’t suggest such a horrid possibility. I’m going right now to buy out the lunch counter and take it along with us.”

“And break your teeth on adamantine sandwiches, harder than Professor Krenner’s problems in algebra?” suggested May.

The red-haired girl began to laugh. “I thought Bess never would carry a shoe-box lunch again. ’Member that one you two girls from Tillbury brought to school with you, last September?”

“Will we ever forget it?” groaned Nan.

“I don’t care!” exclaimed Bess. “You can’t have a bite of what I buy, Laura Polk!” and she marched away to the lunch counter and spent most of her remaining pocket money on greasy pies, decrepit sandwiches, soggy “pound-cake” and crullers that might have been used with success as car-seat springs!

The train was late in arriving at Freeling. It rumbled into the station covered with snow, its pilot showing how it had ploughed through the drifts. The girls were separated at once, for Nan’s seat and her chum’s were in one car, while the girls bound Chicago-ward had a section in another.

Nan and Bess would be in their berths and asleep when their car should be switched to the southern line to be picked up by the other train at the Junction. So they bade their friends good-bye at once and, after a false start or two, the heavy train blundered into the night and the storm, and Freeling was left behind.

The train did not move rapidly. A few miles out of Freeling it became stalled for a while. But a huge snow-plow came to the rescue at this point and piloted the train clear into the Junction.

The sleeping-car porter wanted to make up the girls’ berths at the usual hour— nine o’clock. But Nan begged hard for more time and Bess treated him to a generous lunch from the supply she had bought at Freeling. Afterwards she admitted she was sorry she was so reckless with the commissary.

Just now, however, neither Bess nor Nan worried about supplies for what Laura Polk called “the inner girl.” Through the window they saw the drifts piling up along the right of way, wherever the lamps revealed them; country stations darkened and almost buried under the white mantle; and the steadily driving snow itself that slanted earthward— a curtain that shut out of sight all objects a few yards beyond the car windows.

“My! this is dreadful,” murmured Bess, when the train halted again for the drifts to be shoveled out of a cot. “When do you s’pose we’ll ever get home?”

“Not at eight o’clock in the morning,” Nan announced promptly. “That’s sure. I don’t know just how many miles it is— and I never could tell anything about one of these railroad time-tables.”

“Laura says she can read a menu card in a French restaurant more easily,” chuckled Bess. “I wonder how their train is getting on?”

“I’m so selfishly worried about our own train that I’m not thinking of them,” admitted Nan. “There! we’ve started again.”

But the train puffed on for only a short distance and then “snubbed” its nose into another snow-bank. The wheels of the locomotive clogged, the flues filled with snow, the wet fuel all but extinguished the fire. Before the engineer could back the heavy train, the snow swirled in behind it and built a drift over the platform of the rear coach. The train was completely stalled.

This happened after eleven o’clock and while they were between stations. It was a lonely and rugged country, and even farm-houses were far apart. The train was about midway between stations, the distance from one to the other being some twenty miles. The weight of the snow had already broken down long stretches of telegraph and telephone wires. No aid for the snow-bound train and passengers could be obtained.

Before this, however, the porter had insisted upon making up the girls’ berths and, like most of the other passengers in the Pullman, Nan and Bess were asleep. While the passengers slept the snow continued to sift down, building the drifts higher and higher, and causing the train-crew increasing worriment of mind.

The locomotive could no longer pierce the drifts. The train had been too heavy for her from the first. Fuel supply had been renewed at the Junction, as well as water; but the coal was now needed to keep up steam for the cars— and it would not last long for that purpose.

If the storm continued until morning without change, it might be several days before the road could be opened from either end of the division. Food and fuel would be very hard to obtain in this waste of snow, and so far from human habitation.

The two conductors and the engineer spent most of the night discussing ways and means. Meanwhile the snow continued to fall and the passengers, for the most part, rested in ignorance of the peril that threatened.

It was Bess who came back from the ladies’ room on the Pullman and startled Nan Sherwood by shaking her by the shoulder as she lay in the upper berth, demanding:

“Have you any idea what time it is, Nan? Say! have you?”

“No-o— ouch!” yawned her chum. “Goodness! That was my elbow. There’s not much room on these shelves, is there?”

“Do you hear me?” shrilled Bess. “What time do you suppose it is?”

“Oh, dear me! Is that a conundrum?” asked Nan, with but faint interest.

“Wake up!” and Bess pinched her. “I never knew you so stupid before. See my watch, Nan,” and she held the small gold time-piece she had owned since her last birthday, so that her chum could see its face.

“A quarter to eight,” read Nan from the dial. “Well! that’s not so late. I know we’re allowed to remain in the car till eight. I’ll hurry. But, oh! isn’t it dark outside?”

“Now, you’re showing a little common sense,” snapped Bess. “But do you see that my watch has stopped?”

“Oh! so it has,” agreed Nan. “But, then, honey, you’re always letting it run down.”

“I know,” said Bess, impatiently. “And at first I thought it must have stopped last evening at a quarter to eight. When I woke up just now it was just as dark as it was yesterday morning at six. But I took a peep at the porter’s clock and what do you think?”

“I’ll shave you for nothing and give you a drink,” laughed Nan, quoting the old catch-line.

Bess was too excited to notice her chum’s fun. She said, dramatically:

“The porter’s clock says half-past nine and half the berths are put up again at the other end of the car!”

“Mercy!” gasped Nan, and swung her feet over the edge of the berth. “Oh!” she squealed the next moment.

“What’s the matter now?” demanded her chum.

“Oh! I feel like a poor soldier who’s having his legs cut off. My! isn’t the edge of this berth sharp?”

“But what do you know about its being half-past nine?” demanded Bess.

“And the train is standing still,” said Nan. “Do you suppose we can be at Tillbury?”

“Goodness! we ought to be,” said Bess. “But it is so dark.”

“And Papa Sherwood would be down in the yards looking for me before this time, I know.”

“Well! what do you think it means?” demanded her chum. “And b-r-r-r! it’s cold. There isn’t half enough steam on in this car.”

Nan was scrambling into her outer garments. “I’ll see about this in a minute, Bess,” she said, chuckling. “Maybe the sun’s forgotten to rise.”

Bess had managed to draw aside the curtain of the big window. She uttered a muffled scream.

“Oh, Nan! It’s sno-ow!”

“What? Still snowing?” asked her chum.

“No. It’s all banked up against the pane. I can’t see out at all.”

“Goodness— gracious— me!” ejaculated Nan. “Do you suppose we’re snowed in?”

That was just exactly what it meant. The porter, his eyes rolling, told them all about it. The train had stood just here, “in the middle of a snow-bank,” since midnight. It was still snowing. And the train was covered in completely with the soft and clinging mantle.

At first the two chums bound for Tillbury were only excited and pleased by the novel situation. The porter arranged their seats for them and Bess proudly produced the box of lunch she had bought at Freeling, and of which they had eaten very little.

“Tell me how smart I am, Nan Sherwood!” she cried. “Wish we had a cup of coffee apiece.”

At that very moment the porter and conductor entered the car with a steaming can of the very comforting fluid Bess had just mentioned. The porter distributed waxed paper cups from the water cooler for each passenger’s use and the conductor judiciously poured the cups half full of coffee.

“You two girls are very lucky,” he said, when he saw what was in the lunch-box. “Take care of your food supply. No knowing when we’ll get out of this drift.”

“Why, mercy!” ejaculated Bess. “I don’t know that I care to live for long on stale sandwiches and pie, washed down by the most miserable coffee I ever tasted.”

“Well, I suppose it’s better to live on this sort of food than to die on no food at all,” Nan said, laughing.

It seemed to be all a joke at first. There were only a few people in the Pullman, and everybody was cheerful and inclined to take the matter pleasantly. Being snow-bound in a train was such a novel experience that no unhappy phase of the situation deeply impressed any of the passengers’ minds.

Breakfast was meagre, it was true. The “candy butcher,” who sold popcorn and sandwiches as well, was bought out at an exorbitant price by two traveling men, who distributed what they had secured with liberal hand. Bess, more cautious than usual, hid the remains of her lunch and told Nan that it was “buried treasure.”

“Castaways ought to find treasure buried on their island to make it really interesting,” she told her chum. “Think of poor Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday. Wouldn’t they have been just tickled to death to have found anything like this for their Sunday dinner, say?”

“I don’t believe Friday would have cared much about railroad lunch apple pies,” said Nan. “One’s palate has to become accustomed to such delicacies.”

“Now, don’t be critical, Nan Sherwood, or I sha’n’t give you any more pie,” cried Bess. “B-r-r-r! isn’t it cold in here?”

“We really ought to speak to the janitor about it,” said Nan, demurely. “He isn’t giving us enough steam. I shall move into another apartment before next winter if they can’t heat this one any better.”

They whiled away the morning in conversation and reading. They had to sit with their furs on. Nan looked like a little Esquimaux in hers, for her Uncle Henry Sherwood had bought them for her to wear in the Big Woods the winter before. Finally Bess declared she was too fidgety to sit still any longer.

“I’ve just got to do something. Here’s the conductor again. Let’s stir him up about the heat.”

“I wouldn’t,” said more thoughtful Nan. “He looks as though he had his own troubles.”

“I don’t care! We can’t sit here and freeze to death. Say, Mr. Conductor, can’t we have any more heat? We’re really almost frozen.”

“Can’t help it, little ladies,” responded the man, rather gruffly. “You’ll find it worse when the coal gives out entirely.”

“Oh, mercy!” Bess exclaimed, when he had gone on. “What a bear!”

But Nan looked suddenly disturbed. “Do you suppose that is possible?” she asked.

“What’s possible?”

“That the coal may give out?”

“What if it does?” queried her chum, blankly.

“Goodness me! How will they make steam if there’s no fuel for the fire?”

“Oh!” gasped Bess, “I never thought of that. Goodness, Nan, we’ll be frozen to icicles!”

“Not yet, I hope,” said Nan, getting up briskly. “Let’s see if we can’t stick our heads out of doors. I’m aching for a breath of fresh air.”

They went forward and opened the vestibule door. The outside doors were locked and the snow was piled against the little windows, high up in the door panels.

“I believe this snow is piled completely over the cars,” declared Nan.

“Isn’t that funny?” said Bess. “How do you s’pose they’ll ever dig us out?”

“I wonder if it has stopped snowing?”

“I hope so!”

“We can’t hear anything down here,” continued Nan. “But we naturally couldn’t, if the train is buried in the snow.”

“Dear me, Nan!” said her chum, in a really worried tone. “What do you s’pose will happen to us?”

“We— ell— ”

“And our folks! They’ll be awfully worried. Why! we should have been at Tillbury by eight o’clock, and here it is noon!”

“That is so,” Nan said, with more assurance. “But of course they know what has happened to the train. We’re in no real danger.”

“We— ell, I s’pose not,” admitted Bess, slowly. “But it does seem funny.”

Nan chuckled. “As long as we see anything funny in the situation, I guess we shall get along all right.”

“Oh! you know what I mean,” her chum said. “I wonder where that door leads to?”

“Into another car,” Nan said demurely.

“Is that so, Miss Smartie?” cried Bess. “But what car?”

She tried the door. It gave entrance to a baggage coach, dimly lit by a lantern swinging from the roof. Nobody was in the car and the girls walked hesitatingly forward.

“Oh!” squealed Bess, suddenly. “Here’s my trunk.”

“And here’s mine,” Nan said, and stopped to pat the side of the battered, brown box stenciled “N.S.” on its end. Nan had something very precious in that trunk, and to tell the truth she wished she had that precious possession out of the trunk right then.

“It’s awfully cold in here, Bess,” she said slowly.

“I guess they haven’t got the steam turned on in this flat, either,” returned Bess, laughing. “Nothing to freeze here but the trunks. Oh! oh! what’s that?”

Her startled cry was caused by a sudden sound from a dark corner— a whimpering cry that might have been a baby’s.

“The poor thing!” cried Nan, darting toward the sound. “They have forgotten it, I know.”

“A baby in a baggage car?” gasped Bess. “Whoever heard the like?”