Everybody was cracking a joke at Marjorie's expense. Everybody felt a good-natured grudge against her for being such a mystery. The car was ringing with hilarity, when the porter came stumbling in and paused at the door, with eyes all white, hands waving frantically, and lips flapping like flannel, in a vain effort to speak.
The passengers stopped laughing at Marjorie, to laugh at the porter. Ashton sang out:
"What's the matter with you, Porter? Are you trying to crow?"
Everybody roared at this, till the porter finally managed to articulate:
"T-t-t-train rob-rob-robbers!"
Silence shut down as if the whole crowd had been smitten with paralysis. From somewhere outside and ahead came a pop-popping as of firecrackers. Everybody thought, "Revolvers!" The reports were mingled with barbaric yells that turned the marrow in every bone to snow.
These regions are full of historic terror. All along the Nevada route the conductor, the brakemen and old travelers had pointed out scene after scene where the Indians had slaked the thirst of the arid land with white man's blood. Ashton, who had traveled this way many times, had made himself fascinatingly horrifying the evening before and ruined several breakfasts that morning in the dining-car, by regaling the passengers with stories of pioneer ordeals, men and women massacred in burning wagons, or dragged away to fiendish cruelty and obscene torture, staked out supine on burning wastes with eyelids cut off, bound down within reach of rattlesnakes, subjected to every misery that human deviltry could devise.
Ashton had brought his fellow passengers to a state of ecstatic excitability, and, like many a recounter of burglar stories at night, had tuned his own nerves to high tension.
The violent stopping of the train, the heart-shaking yells and shots outside, found the passengers already apt to respond without delay to the appeals of fright. After the first hush of dread, came the reaction to panic.
Each passenger showed his own panic in his own way. Ashton whirled round and round, like a horse with the blind staggers, then bolted down the aisle, knocking aside men and women. He climbed on a seat, pulled down an upper berth, and, scrambling into it, tried to shut it on himself. Mrs. Whitcomb was so frightened that she assailed Ashton with fury and seizing his feet, dragged him back into the aisle, and beat him with her fists, demanding that he protect her and save her for Sammy's sake.