The lights of the long coaches were just moving out of the station at the Landing. The two girls came about in a graceful curve and struck out for home at a pace that even the train could not equal. The rails followed the shore of the pond on the narrow strip of lowland at the foot of the bluffs. They could see the lights shining through the car windows all the way.
The fireman threw open the door of his firebox to feed the furnace and a great glare of light, and a shower of sparks, spouted from the smokestack. The rumble of the wheels from across the ice seemed louder than usual.
“Come on, Bess!” gasped Nan, quite excited. “We can do better than this! Why, that old train will beat us!”
For they were falling behind. The train hooted its defiance as it swept down toward Woody Point. The girls shot in toward the shore, where the shadow of the high bluff lay heavily upon the ice.
They heard the boys' voices somewhere below them, but Bess and Nan could not see them yet. They knew that the boys had divided into sides and were playing old-fashioned hockey, “shinny-on-your-own-side” as it was locally called. Above the rumbling of the train they heard the crack of the shinny-stick against the wooden block, and the “z-z-z-zip!” of the missile as it scaled over the ice.
“Those boys will get into the ice-hole if they don't look out,” Nan had just said to her chum, when suddenly a wild yell arose from the hockey players.
The train was slowing down at the signal tower, and finally stopped there. A freight had got in on the main track which had to be cleared before the passenger train could go into Tillbury station. The coaches stood right along the edge of the frozen pond.
But it was nothing in connection with the evening train that caused such a commotion among the skaters near the stamp factory. There was a crash of breaking ice and a scrambling of skaters away from the spot. The boys' yells communicated panic to other people ashore.
“He's in! He's in!” Nan and Bess heard the boys yelling. Then a man's voice took up the cry: “He'll be drowned! Help! Help!”
“That's old Peter Newkirk,” gasped Nan, squeezing Bess' gloved hands tightly. “He's night watchman at the stamp works, and he has only one arm. He can't help that boy.”