“She’s gone away,” said she, wishing he, too, would go away.
“Indeed. Tell me where to find her. You’re small enough, but there should be somebody else in this section.”
“I guess you can’t find her. She’s sailing and sailing on a steamer to my papa, who’s sick and needs her more ’n I do.”
“Hello! this is odd!” said the conductor, and passed on. But not before he added the caution:
“You stay right exactly where you are, sissy, till I come back. I’ll find out your party and have you looked after.”
Josephine tried to obey to the very letter. She did not even lay aside the doll she had clasped to her breast, nor turn her head to look out of the window. The enchanting, fairy-like landscape might fly by and by her in its bewildering way; she dared gaze upon it no more.
After a while there were lights in the coach, and these made Josephine’s eyes blink faster and faster. They blinked so fast, in fact, that she never knew when they ceased doing so, or anything that went on about her, till she felt herself lifted in somebody’s arms, and raised her heavy lids, to see the shiny-blue man’s face close above her own, and to hear his voice saying:
“Poor little kid! Make her berth up with double blankets, Bob, and keep an eye on it through the night. My! Think of a baby like this making a three-thousand-mile journey alone. My own little ones—Pshaw! What made me remember them just now?”
Then Josephine felt a scratchy mustache upon her check, and a hard thing which might have been a brass button jam itself into her temple. Next she was put down into the softest little bed in the world, the wheels went to singing “Chug-chug-chug,” in the drowsiest sort of lullaby, and that was all she knew for a long time.
But something roused her, suddenly, and she stretched out her hand to clasp, yet failed to find, her own familiar bed-fellow. Missing this she sat up in her berth and shrieked aloud: