“Sure it is!” said the motorman. “Let’s get off and fix ’em.”
Billy glanced out of the window. There, right before his eyes, he saw a great number of little people, clad in white uniforms, raking huge masses of what seemed to be white flowers on the upper side of a cloud. Through the dim half-light he watched them working away, with rakes and pitchforks, some of them piling the white flakes into great stacks, while others pulled long rows of them to the edge of the cloud and pushed them over the side.
Billy remembered that it was summer when he left home and he wondered how it happened that snow-making was going on; but following with his eyes the flakes that whirled downward he saw a long chain of mountains far below. He knew, of course, that snow fell on mountains, even in summer time, so he understood.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” the motorman was saying; “I’ll go out and back her sideways and we’ll run through ’em. That’ll knock ’em all off the cloud, and we won’t have no more snow.”
“Great idea,” said the conductor. “We’ll get ’em all at one lick.”
Billy looked anxiously at Nimbus, who overheard, but only chuckled. “Let ’em try it,” he said, “and see what happens.”
Nimbus joined Billy at the window, and the motorman and the conductor, seeing that the Fairy’s back was turned, got up very quietly and went out on the front platform.
The motorman put his lever on the controller and, looking around carefully to make sure that he was not observed, reversed the power.
The car trembled, stopped, then began to go backward with a sidelong motion that took it right into the snow cloud.
Instantly the air grew cold, and the wind howled around the trolley pole and rattled the windows.