THE TUNNEL
The baby was screaming, the little boy of four or five looked miserably
unhappy, and the worn and meager-looking mother was plainly frightened out
of her wits. She let the baby scream on the seat beside her while she held
the little girl in her lap.
That youngster seemed to be the least disturbed of any of the party. She
was a pretty child, and robust. She kicked vigorously against being held
almost upside down by her mother (as though by that means the dose of
poison could be coaxed out of the child) but she did not cry.
"The little dear!" cooed Betty, pushing through the ring of other
passengers. "What has happened to her?"
"She'll be dead in five minutes," croaked a sour visaged woman who bent
over the back of the seat to stare at the crying baby without making an
effort to relieve the mother in any way.
"What is the poison?" demanded Betty excitedly.
"It--it's----I don't know what the doctor called it," wailed the poor
mother. "I had it in my handbag with other drops. Nellie here is always
playing with bottles. She will drink out of bottles, much as I can do or
say."
Betty was sniffing--that may not be an elegant expression, but it is
exactly what she did--and looking all about on the floor.
"Something's been spilled here," she said. "It's a funny odor. Seems to me
I remember smelling it before."
"That's the poison," groaned the woman over the back of the seat. "Her ma
knocked it out of the young one's hand. Too bad. She's a goner!"
This seemed to Betty very dreadful. She darted an angry glance at the
woman. "A regular Mrs. Job's comforter, she is!" thought Betty.
But all the time she was looking about the floor of the car for the
bottle. Finally she dropped to her knees and scrambled about among the
boots of the passengers. She came up like a diver, with an object held
high in one hand.
"Is this it?" she asked.
"That is the bottle, Miss," sobbed the mother. "My poor little Nellie!
Isn't there a doctor, anywhere? They say milk is good for some kinds of
poison, but I haven't any milk for baby even. That is what makes him cry
so. Poor little Nellie!"
Betty had been staring at the label on the bottle. Now she smelled hard
at the mouth of it She held the bottle before the woman's eyes.
"Are you sure this is the bottle the child drank out of?" she demanded.
"Yes, Miss. That is it. Poor little Nellie!"
"Why! can't you smell?" demanded Betty. "And can't you see? There is no
skull and cross-bones on this label. And all that was in the bottle was
sweet spirits of niter. I'm sure that won't do your Nellie any lasting
harm."
The mother was thunderstruck for a moment--and speechless. The gloomy
woman looking over the back of the seat drawled:
"Then it wasn't poison at all?"
"No," said Betty. "And I should think among you, you should have found it
out!"
She was quite scornful of the near-by passengers. The mother let the
struggling little girl slip out of her lap, fortunately feet first rather
than head first, and grabbed up the screaming baby.
"Dear me! You naughty little thing, Nellie! You are always scaring me to
death," she said scoldingly. "And if we don't come to some place where I
can buy milk pretty soon and get it warmed, this child will burst his
lungs crying."
Betty, however, considered that the baby was much too strong and vigorous
to be in a starving state as yet. She wondered how the poor women expected
to get milk with the train stalled in the snow. She had in her pocket
some chocolate wafers and she pacified the two older children with these
and then ran back to the sleeping car.
She was in season to head off a procession of excited Pullman passengers
in all stages of undress starting for the day coach with everything in the
line of antidote for poison that could be imagined and which they had
discovered in their traveling bags.
"Baby's better. She wasn't poisoned at all," Betty told them. "But those
children are going to be awfully hungry before long if we have to stay
here. Do you know we're snowbound, girls?"
This last she confided to the three Littell girls.
"Won't they dig us out?" asked the practical Louise.
"What a lark!" exclaimed Bobby, clapping her hands.
"Just think! Buried in the snow! How wonderful!" murmured Libbie.
"Cheese!" exclaimed Tommy Tucker, overhearing this. "You'll think it's
wonderful. The brakeman told me that the drivers were clogged at six
o'clock and the wheels haven't turned since. We're completely buried in
snow and it's still snowing. Head engine's an oil-burner and there is
plenty of fuel; but there isn't a chance of our being dug out for days."
"How brutal you are," giggled Bobby, who could not be frightened by any
misadventure. "How shall we live?"
"After we eat up the bread and ham we will draw lots and eat up each
other," Bob observed soberly.
"But those little children can't eat each other," Betty declared with
conviction. "Come on Bobby. You're dressed. Let's see what we can do for
that poor mother and the babies."
The two girls had to confer with Uncle Dick first of all. He had charge of
the supplies. Betty knew there was some way of mixing condensed milk with
water and heating the mixture so that it would do very well at a
pinch--the pinch of hunger!--for a nursing child. Uncle Dick supplied the
canned milk and some other food for the older children, and Betty and
Bobby carried these into the day coach where the little family had spent
such an uncomfortable night and were likely to spend a very uncomfortable
day as well.
For there was no chance of escaping from their present predicament--all
the train crew said so--until plows and shovelers came to dig the train
out of the cut.
Of course the conductors and the rest of the crew knew just where they
were. Behind them about three miles was a small hamlet at which the train
had not been scheduled to stop, and had not stopped. Had the train pulled
down there the situation of the crew and passengers would have been much
better. They would not have been stalled in this drifted cut.
Cliffdale, to which Uncle Dick and his party were bound, was twenty miles
and more ahead. The roadbed was so blocked that it might be several days
before the way would be opened to Cliffdale.
"The roads will be opened by the farmers and teams will get through the
mountains before the railroad will be dug out," Mr. Gordon told the boys.
"If we could get back to that station in the rear we might find
conveyances that would take us on to Mountain Camp. If I had a pair of
snowshoes I certainly could make it over the hills myself in a short
time."
"You go ahead, Mr. Gordon," said Tommy Tucker, "and tell 'em we're
coming."
"I'll have to dig out of here and get the webs on my feet first," replied
Uncle Dick, laughing.
His speech put an idea in the head of the ingenious Tommy Tucker. While
the girls were attending to the children in the car ahead, the twins and
Bob and Timothy Derby went through the train to the very end. The
observation platform was banked with snow, and the snow was packed pretty
hard. But there were some tools at hand and the boys set to work with the
two porters and a brakeman to punch a hole through the snowbank to the
surface.
It was great sport, although the quartette from Salsette Academy enjoyed
it more than the men did. It was fun for the boys and work for the men,
and the latter would have given it up in despair if the younger diggers
had not been so eagerly interested in the task.
They sloped the tunnel so that it was several yards long before it reached
the surface. The snow underneath, they tramped hard; they battered their
way through by pressing a good deal of the snow into solid walls on either
side. When the roof at the end finally fell in on them, they found that it
was still snowing steadily and the wind was pouring great sheets of it
into the cut and heaping it yard upon yard over the roofs of the cars.
They could barely see the top of the smokestack of the pusher a few feet
away.
That locomotive had been abandoned by its crew when the train was stalled.
Keeping the boiler of the head engine hot was sufficient to supply the
cars with heat and hot water.
"Cricky!" cried Bob. "We've found the way out; but I guess even Uncle Dick
wouldn't care to start out in this storm, snowshoes or not. Fellows, we're
in a bad fix, just as sure as you live."
"All right," said Teddy Tucker. "Let's go back and get something to eat
before somebody else gets ahead of us. I suppose those girls have given
all the milk to those kids up front, and maybe the ham sandwiches too."
"Dear me!" sighed Timothy, "it is like being cast away on a desert island.
We are Robinson Crusoes."
"And haven't got even a goat!" chuckled Tommy Tucker.