When he saw Gordon and his party he stopped tying his shoes and laughed.
“Well, partner, you look like a patriarch who’s lost his way. Ain’t none of your family got shoes?”
He looked at Gordon’s bleeding feet and at Kate and Ruth shivering behind him in the rain.
Gordon smiled and shook his head.
The fat man hastily pulled off his own shoes, snatched off those of the younger man beside him and offered them to the ladies.
“They won’t be what you might call a stylish fit, madam,” he said gallantly to Ruth, “but they’ll beat broken glass for comfort.”
Paying no attention to their protests, he made them sit down on the sample-cases and put them on.
Turning to Gordon and his companion, he called cheerfully:
“Come, men, that Pullman’s full of blankets; we must get them out for the women and children before it’s too late. It’s too dark to find our umbrellas. I believe that fool conductor’s got mine anyhow and gone home with it. I haven’t seen him anywhere.”
In a few minutes, he had blankets for all the passengers who had lost their clothes. By daybreak he had found the conductor, counted his tickets, and discovered that out of fifty passengers on the train twenty had been wounded, none fatally, and that thirty had escaped without a scratch. The train had dropped most of its passengers during the day and had only an average of ten people to a coach, and they were seated and sleeping near the centres of each car. By what seemed a miracle, none were killed.