There was an awful, punching jolt, a frenzied shriek of steam, a splashing, hissing roar–that, surely, could not be the steel Thunder Bird’s challenge, unless it had suddenly become a wading goose–and, lo! she was hurled straight out of her dream across a Pullman aisle, fast flooding, right into the girl with whom she had once vainly measured eyelashes,–between whom and herself had existed that thin bridge of ice but one little minute before.
Alas! poor human ice that couldn’t stand a moment under the blows of Nature’s ice-hammer.
Both pairs of girlish lashes were stark with terror now.
“Una! Una! Una! Ac-ci-dent! Tr-rain accident! Gone through–through into–the–lake!” moaned Pemrose, half stunned, yet conscious, as she was ten seconds before, that they had been crossing frozen water.
Water! A pale pond, now plainly seen through awful, swirling, wave-blocked window-gaps! Yet across its wan and shattering crust there shone a trail of fire, red fire, heart fire–vivid at that moment as the Thunder Bird’s pink tail feathers switching through the space of horror–and somewhere in that stretched consciousness which is beyond thinking, Toandoah’s daughter knew that it was the Camp Fire training in presence of mind.
“Una! M-mer-rcy! Una! Water’s r-rushing in-n–in so fast–through windows–doors ahead–m-may dr-rown right here, ’less we can f-fight it–get out,” was her struggling cry as, paddling desperately like a little dog, she found herself topping the flood, that lashing, interned lake-water, now blotting out window-frames on one side of the car–groping with icy fingers for the painted ceiling of the Pullman–then undulatingly sinking below them on the other.
For it was a case just half-a-minute before, while Pem was still sanguinely loosing the Thunder Bird, of small pony-wheels on the big express engine striking a frog in the rails, an icy groove, and skidding,–then recklessly plunging down four feet, those runaway ponies, from the low bridge which they were crossing on to the ice, dragging the engine, the cab and the two front cars with them.
And now–now–to the inventor’s daughter, the girl-mechanic, who had plugged so hard at her high school physics that she might understand her father’s work, came a thought that was worse, worse even than the hiss of the imprisoned flood, tossing her like a cork: the engine might explode–the sneezing, sobbing engine, with the steam condensing in its boilers–wreck the car she was in–she and Una!
No! She did not think of herself alone. All the frail girlish ice was a gimcrack now.
But the terrors of the swamped car, that snuffling threat of steam ahead–a deep bass uz-z-z!–momentarily made a gimcrack of other things too–of everything but the desperate instinct to get out–free, somehow.