"He's our father!" exclaimed Nan and Bert together.
"Mr. Bobbsey your father! Well, I do declare!" cried the strange man, and he smiled at the children. They were beginning to like him very much. "Just think of that now!" he went on. "My railroad train gets in a wreck right near Lakeport, where I want to get off, and first I know I run into Mr. Bobbsey's children! Well, well! To think of that!"
"Here comes daddy now!" cried Flossie, pointing to a figure walking over the snow toward them.
"Oh, Daddy, I saw the train wreck!" yelled Freddie. "And I saw the firemans, I did, but they didn't have any engines, and I—I—I saw—" But Freddie was too much out of breath from running to meet his father to tell any more just then.
It was indeed Mr. Bobbsey who had come along just then. He had come home earlier than usual from the lumberyard office, and his wife had told him that the children had gone down the street with Sam to look at the railroad wreck.
"I'll go down and bring them back," said Mr. Bobbsey, "I heard about the wreck. It isn't as bad as at first they thought it was. No one was killed."
"I'm glad of that," replied his wife. "I told Sam to bring the children back if it was too bad."
So it had come about that Mr. Bobbsey reached the top of the cut, down in which the railroad wreck was, just as the strange man was asking the Bobbsey children about their father.
"Well, little fireman and little fat fairy," asked Mr. Bobbsey of
Flossie and Freddie, "did you see all there was to see?"
"I saw the engines all smashed together," answered Flossie.