“Have a little brandy?”
“Think I’ll break up if I don’t.”
I gave him some brandy. From the other end of the car comes the guard.
“Think we’ll get round her all right now?” he asks.
“Oh, yes,” says the conductor shaking his snowy clothes.
The guard goes out. He, too, carries a weight of snow on his coat.
Says the officer (whom I have just saved from “breaking up”), “I am the conductor; but if anything went wrong they’d blame me, not him; am sent on to this train,—a special job.”
“What were you doing out there so long?”
“Digging the points out of the snow, to push these cars on to another track, and get round ahead of the train that’s broke down.”