"I am afraid you know it was. Could you sleep at all?"
"Oh, yes; I slept very well—after that terrible shaking up we had just before bedtime. What was happening then?"
"Nothing much. We were about to try the old experiment of passing two trains on a single track."
"Mercy!" she exclaimed.
It was safely retrospective now, and Ford could smile at her belated shock.
"Were the others alarmed?" he asked.
"Mrs. Van Bruce and Aunt Hetty were. But Uncle Sidney fairly coruscated. He said that an engineer who would make such a stop as that ought to be discharged."
"Hector was willing to quit," laughed Ford. "He grumbled for a full hour afterward about the wrenching he had given the 1012. You see he might have taken about six feet more for the stop, if he'd only known it."
Miss Alicia said "Mercy!" again. "Were we as near as that to a collision?" she asked, in a hushed whisper.
"We were, indeed. The freight was supposed to be on a siding—broken down. The crew tinkered things up some way, and the train proceeded. Luckily, the freight engineer saw our electric headlight farther than we could see his oil lamp, and the track happened to be measurably straight."