“Perhaps so,” answered Bill. It was evident that he had reasons of his own for not wishing to be absent from the festival.
Meantime, the train was plowing along. Now and then it came to a halt in a cut which the snow had filled, but a small party of shovelers that had come on board at Westfield usually succeeded, after a short delay, in clearing the track. Still the progress was very slow. A full hour and a half was consumed between Springfield and Russell, and it was almost seven o’clock when the train stopped at Chester.
The boys were pretty hungry by this time, and the prospect of spending the night in a snowbank was much less attractive, even to Phil, than it had been two hours before. At Chester, where there was a long halt, the passengers—of whom there were not many—nearly all got out and refreshed themselves. A couple of sandwiches, a piece of custard pie, a big, round doughnut, and a glass of good milk considerably increased Phil’s courage and greatly comforted Win, so that they returned to the car ready to encounter with equal mind the perils of the night.
The snow had ceased to fall, but the wind was still blowing. Two or three more shovelers came on board, and, thus reënforced, the train pushed on. But it was slow work; the grade was getting heavier and the drifts were deeper every mile. But Middlefield was passed and Becket was left behind, and at nine o’clock the train was slowly toiling up toward the summit at Washington, when, suddenly, it came to a halt, and a long blast was blown by the whistles of both engines. Shortly, a brakeman came through the train, and, taking one of the red lanterns from the rear of the last car, hurried down the track with it.
“Where is he going with that lantern?” asked Phil.
“He is going back a little way,” said Will. “The lantern is a signal to keep other trains from running into us. That means that we are to stay here for some time. I’ll go out and see what’s up.”
Presently he returned with a sober face, and looking very cold.
“Well, what is it?” they all asked.
“Oh, nothing; there’s a freight train in the cut just ahead of us, with two of its cars off the track, and the cut’s about half full of snow. If our Christmas goose isn’t cooked already, there’ll be plenty of time to have it cooked before we get out of this.”
“Is it that deep cut just below the Washington station?” asked Grace.