“You are fortunate to have someone to do it for you. But there, it is only the old who are alone; the young can always find friends,” he said bitterly.
“Are you alone? I am so very sorry!”
There was so much sympathy in Bertha’s tone, that the old fellow looked at her in surprise.
“Why should you be so kind to an old man? Have you a father of your own?” he asked gruffly.
“No; my father is dead, and my mother too. But you said that you were alone, and because I also am alone I felt sorry for you,” replied Bertha simply.
He nodded, but did not say anything more for a long time, and she thought he was asleep, as most of the other passengers were. The slow hours dragged on, the blizzard raged outside, and presently darkness settled down; but the engine had not come back, and people began to wake up, telling each other in low tones of anxiety that it could not get back. Then the conductor came back, and they at once fell upon him with their questioning, but he could not tell them more than they knew already—the engine had gone ahead with the snow-plough to clear the track. It had not yet come back, probably could not get back, in which case they were stuck fast until such time as something came along to help them out of their fix.
Most of the passengers took the ill fortune quietly, since after all it was of no use to rail at what could not be helped. But there were a few, and Bertha’s old man was among them, who abused the railway company in no measured terms for not taking more care to keep their roads clear.
“I shall lose money heavily from the delay, and I can ill afford to add loss to loss in this fashion,” he said querulously, when he came back to sit with Bertha, after he had spent himself in his utterly useless complaints.
“Perhaps it will not be so bad as you fear. We may not be delayed very long after all,” she said, trying to speak courageously, although she was dreadfully depressed by the existing state of things, which was so much worse than anything that she had expected to encounter in her journey.
“It could not very well be much worse. The fact that I got on the wrong cars at all means a delay that will stand me in to lose two thousand dollars, while a few weeks ago I was robbed to the tune of about two hundred thousand dollars,” he said angrily, taking off his gloves and beating his poor wrinkled old hands together to warm them a little.