The man stared. “Really, you are quite mistaken,” he drawled; “that train leaves from Platform 2. You had better hurry, you know; you haven’t much time.”
John waited for nothing more, but ran to tell the rest, and they all started for the other end of the station. Up the steep steps again ran Mrs. Pitt, with the four young people following. Along the bridge they flew till they reached Platform 2, and then they almost fell down the steps in their hurry, for the train was already there.
When they were fairly seated in a third-class carriage, John, still out of breath, exclaimed:—
“Whew! My! I never ran faster in my life, did you, Philip? How the girls kept up, I don’t know! You’re a first-class sprinter all right, Mrs. Pitt! We’d like you on our football team, at home! My, but I’m hot!”
He paused for breath, and then went on excitedly:
“There was a close call for you! We’d have lost it if I hadn’t spoken to that guard, just in fun! There we were calmly waiting, and all of a sudden, we took that wild dash across the bridge! It was great! I hope somebody caught a photograph of us! I’d like to see one! How stupid of the guard to make that mistake! They never seem to know very much, anyway. If I ever am a guard, I shall be different; I shall know things!”
They all had a good laugh over the adventure, and Mrs. Pitt assured John that when he was a guard, they would all promise to use his station.
“Don’t these trains seem different from ours, Betty?” the future guard asked of his sister. “It seems so queer to me why they want to take a perfectly good, long car, and chop it up from side to side, into little narrow rooms, like this! What’s the use of having so many doors?—one on each side of every ‘compartment’! And then, they put handles only on the outside, so you have to let down the window and lean away out to open it for yourself, if the guard doesn’t happen to do it for you! We Americans couldn’t waste so much time!”
Just then, Betty, who could contain herself no longer, burst out laughing.
“Why, what in the world’s the matter?” cried Barbara.