Nan Sherwoods Winter Holidays | Page 6

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