The Big Book of Christmas

by Anton Chekhov

  “I do wish Linda had not heard that horrid man speak so of Papa Sherwood,” Nan said to Bess Harley, as they toiled up the hill again after the overturning of theSky-rocket.

  “Oh, what do you care about Linda?” responded Bess.

  “I care very much about what people say of my father,” Nan said. “And the minute I get home I’m going to find out what that Bulson meant.”

  An Adventure On The Rail

  That adventurous afternoon on Pendragon Hill was the last chance the girls of Lakeview Hall had that term for bobsledding. School closed the next day and those pupils who lived farthest away, and who went home for the holidays, started that very evening by train from Freeling.

  Nan and her chum, Bess Harley, were two who hurried away from the Hall. Tillbury was a night’s ride from Lakeview Hall, and the chums did not wish to lose any of their short stay at home.

  It had already been planned and agreed to that Nan and Bess were to go to Chicago to visit in the Masons’ home during a part of this vacation, and the two friends, who knew very little of city life, were eager indeed for the new experience.

  Walter and Grace had started for Chicago that morning, and when the two Tillbury girls saw how hard it was snowing when Charley, with his ’bus on runners, drove them to the station, they wished that they had asked the privilege of Dr. Beulah Prescott, the principal, of going early, too.

  “This yere’s goin’ to be a humdinger of a storm,” prophesied Charley. “You gals’ll maybe get snowed up on the train.”

  “Oh! What fun!” cried the thoughtless Bess.

  “I hope not!” proclaimed Nan.

  “I think it would be fun, Nan,” urged her chum.

  “Humph! How about eating?” queried the red-haired girl, Laura Polk, who would be one of the party as far as the Junction.

  “Oh, there’s a dining-car on this train,” said May Winslow, who was to speed away to the South to spend Christmas, where there was no ice or snow, and where the darkeys celebrate the holiday with fire-crackers, as Northern people do the Fourth of July.

  “That’s all right about the dining-car,” said Nan. “All right for you girls who are going to Chicago. But our train from the Junction has no ‘eats’ attached and if we get snowed up— ”

  “Ugh!” cried her chum. “Don’t suggest such a horrid possibility. I’m going right now to buy out the lunch counter and take it along with us.”

  “And break your teeth on adamantine sandwiches, harder than Professor Krenner’s problems in algebra?” suggested May.

  The red-haired girl began to laugh. “I thought Bess never would carry a shoe-box lunch again. ’Member that one you two girls from Tillbury brought to school with you, last September?”

  “Will we ever forget it?” groaned Nan.

  “I don’t care!” exclaimed Bess. “You can’t have a bite of what I buy, Laura Polk!” and she marched away to the lunch counter and spent most of her remaining pocket money on greasy pies, decrepit sandwiches, soggy “pound-cake” and crullers that might have been used with success as car-seat springs!

  The train was late in arriving at Freeling. It rumbled into the station covered with snow, its pilot showing how it had ploughed through the drifts. The girls were separated at once, for Nan’s seat and her chum’s were in one car, while the girls bound Chicago-ward had a section in another.

  Nan and Bess would be in their berths and asleep when their car should be switched to the southern line to be picked up by the other train at the Junction. So they bade their friends good-bye at once and, after a false start or two, the heavy train blundered into the night and the storm, and Freeling was left behind.

  The train did not move rapidly. A few miles out of Freeling it became stalled for a while. But a huge snow-plow came to the rescue at this point and piloted the train clear into the Junction.

  The sleeping-car porter wanted to make up the girls’ berths at the usual hour— nine o’clock. But Nan begged hard for more time and Bess treated him to a generous lunch from the supply she had bought at Freeling. Afterwards she admitted she was sorry she was so reckless with the commissary.

  Just now, however, neither Bess nor Nan worried about supplies for what Laura Polk called “the inner girl.” Through the window they saw the drifts piling up along the right of way, wherever the lamps revealed them; country stations darkened and almost buried under the white mantle; and the steadily driving snow itself that slanted earthward— a curtain that shut out of sight all objects a few yards beyond the car windows.

  “My! this is dreadful,” murmured Bess, when the train halted again for the drifts to be shoveled out of a cot. “When do you s’pose we’ll ever get home?”

  “Not at eight o’clock in the morning,” Nan announced promptly. “That’s sure. I don’t know just how many miles it is— and I never could tell anything about one of these railroad time-tables.”

  “Laura says she can read a menu card in a French restaurant more easily,” chuckled Bess. “I wonder how their train is getting on?”

  “I’m so selfishly worried about our own train that I’m not thinking of them,” admitted Nan. “There! we’ve started again.”

  But the train puffed on for only a short distance and then “snubbed” its nose into another snow-bank. The wheels of the locomotive clogged, the flues filled with snow, the wet fuel all but extinguished the fire. Before the engineer could back the heavy train, the snow swirled in behind it and built a drift over the platform of the rear coach. The train was completely stalled.

  This happened after eleven o’clock and while they were between stations. It was a lonely and rugged country, and even farm-houses were far apart. The train was about midway between stations, the distance from one to the other being some twenty miles. The weight of the snow had already broken down long stretches of telegraph and telephone wires. No aid for the snow-bound train and passengers could be obtained.

  Before this, however, the porter had insisted upon making up the girls’ berths and, like most of the other passengers in the Pullman, Nan and Bess were asleep. While the passengers slept the snow continued to sift down, building the drifts higher and higher, and causing the train-crew increasing worriment of mind.

  The locomotive could no longer pierce the drifts. The train had been too heavy for her from the first. Fuel supply had been renewed at the Junction, as well as water; but the coal was now needed to keep up steam for the cars— and it would not last long for that purpose.

  If the storm continued until morning without change, it might be several days before the road could be opened from either end of the division. Food and fuel would be very hard to obtain in this waste of snow, and so far from human habitation.

  The two conductors and the engineer spent most of the night discussing ways and means. Meanwhile the snow continued to fall and the passengers, for the most part, rested in ignorance of the peril that threatened.

  Cast Away In The Snow

  It was Bess who came back from the ladies’ room on the Pullman and startled Nan Sherwood by shaking her by the shoulder as she lay in the upper berth, demanding:

  “Have you any idea what time it is, Nan? Say! have you?”

  “No-o— ouch!” yawned her chum. “Goodness! That was my elbow. There’s not much room on these shelves, is there?”

  “Do you hear me?” shrilled Bess. “What time do you suppose it is?”

  “Oh, dear me! Is that a conundrum?” asked Nan, with but faint interest.

  “Wake up!” and Bess pinched her. “I never knew you so stupid before. See my watch, Nan,” and she held the small gold time-piece she had owned since her last birthday, so that her chum could see its face.

  “A quarter to eight,” read Nan from the dial. “Well! that’s not so late. I know we’re allowed to remain in the car till eight. I’ll hurry. But, oh! isn’t it dark outside?”

  “Now, you’re showing a little common sense,” snapped Bess. “But do you see that my watch has stopped?”

 
“Oh! so it has,” agreed Nan. “But, then, honey, you’re always letting it run down.”

  “I know,” said Bess, impatiently. “And at first I thought it must have stopped last evening at a quarter to eight. When I woke up just now it was just as dark as it was yesterday morning at six. But I took a peep at the porter’s clock and what do you think?”

  “I’ll shave you for nothing and give you a drink,” laughed Nan, quoting the old catch-line.

  Bess was too excited to notice her chum’s fun. She said, dramatically:

  “The porter’s clock says half-past nine and half the berths are put up again at the other end of the car!”

  “Mercy!” gasped Nan, and swung her feet over the edge of the berth. “Oh!” she squealed the next moment.

  “What’s the matter now?” demanded her chum.

  “Oh! I feel like a poor soldier who’s having his legs cut off. My! isn’t the edge of this berth sharp?”

  “But what do you know about its being half-past nine?” demanded Bess.

  “And the train is standing still,” said Nan. “Do you suppose we can be at Tillbury?”

  “Goodness! we ought to be,” said Bess. “But it is so dark.”

  “And Papa Sherwood would be down in the yards looking for me before this time, I know.”

  “Well! what do you think it means?” demanded her chum. “And b-r-r-r! it’s cold. There isn’t half enough steam on in this car.”

  Nan was scrambling into her outer garments. “I’ll see about this in a minute, Bess,” she said, chuckling. “Maybe the sun’s forgotten to rise.”

  Bess had managed to draw aside the curtain of the big window. She uttered a muffled scream.

  “Oh, Nan! It’s sno-ow!”

  “What? Still snowing?” asked her chum.

  “No. It’s all banked up against the pane. I can’t see out at all.”

  “Goodness— gracious— me!” ejaculated Nan. “Do you suppose we’re snowed in?”

  That was just exactly what it meant. The porter, his eyes rolling, told them all about it. The train had stood just here, “in the middle of a snow-bank,” since midnight. It was still snowing. And the train was covered in completely with the soft and clinging mantle.

  At first the two chums bound for Tillbury were only excited and pleased by the novel situation. The porter arranged their seats for them and Bess proudly produced the box of lunch she had bought at Freeling, and of which they had eaten very little.

  “Tell me how smart I am, Nan Sherwood!” she cried. “Wish we had a cup of coffee apiece.”

  At that very moment the porter and conductor entered the car with a steaming can of the very comforting fluid Bess had just mentioned. The porter distributed waxed paper cups from the water cooler for each passenger’s use and the conductor judiciously poured the cups half full of coffee.

  “You two girls are very lucky,” he said, when he saw what was in the lunch-box. “Take care of your food supply. No knowing when we’ll get out of this drift.”

  “Why, mercy!” ejaculated Bess. “I don’t know that I care to live for long on stale sandwiches and pie, washed down by the most miserable coffee I ever tasted.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s better to live on this sort of food than to die on no food at all,” Nan said, laughing.

  It seemed to be all a joke at first. There were only a few people in the Pullman, and everybody was cheerful and inclined to take the matter pleasantly. Being snow-bound in a train was such a novel experience that no unhappy phase of the situation deeply impressed any of the passengers’ minds.

  Breakfast was meagre, it was true. The “candy butcher,” who sold popcorn and sandwiches as well, was bought out at an exorbitant price by two traveling men, who distributed what they had secured with liberal hand. Bess, more cautious than usual, hid the remains of her lunch and told Nan that it was “buried treasure.”

  “Castaways ought to find treasure buried on their island to make it really interesting,” she told her chum. “Think of poor Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday. Wouldn’t they have been just tickled to death to have found anything like this for their Sunday dinner, say?”

  “I don’t believe Friday would have cared much about railroad lunch apple pies,” said Nan. “One’s palate has to become accustomed to such delicacies.”

  “Now, don’t be critical, Nan Sherwood, or I sha’n’t give you any more pie,” cried Bess. “B-r-r-r! isn’t it cold in here?”

  “We really ought to speak to the janitor about it,” said Nan, demurely. “He isn’t giving us enough steam. I shall move into another apartment before next winter if they can’t heat this one any better.”

  They whiled away the morning in conversation and reading. They had to sit with their furs on. Nan looked like a little Esquimaux in hers, for her Uncle Henry Sherwood had bought them for her to wear in the Big Woods the winter before. Finally Bess declared she was too fidgety to sit still any longer.

  “I’ve just got to do something. Here’s the conductor again. Let’s stir him up about the heat.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said more thoughtful Nan. “He looks as though he had his own troubles.”

  “I don’t care! We can’t sit here and freeze to death. Say, Mr. Conductor, can’t we have any more heat? We’re really almost frozen.”

  “Can’t help it, little ladies,” responded the man, rather gruffly. “You’ll find it worse when the coal gives out entirely.”

  “Oh, mercy!” Bess exclaimed, when he had gone on. “What a bear!”

  But Nan looked suddenly disturbed. “Do you suppose that is possible?” she asked.

  “What’s possible?”

  “That the coal may give out?”

  “What if it does?” queried her chum, blankly.

  “Goodness me! How will they make steam if there’s no fuel for the fire?”

  “Oh!” gasped Bess, “I never thought of that. Goodness, Nan, we’ll be frozen to icicles!”

  “Not yet, I hope,” said Nan, getting up briskly. “Let’s see if we can’t stick our heads out of doors. I’m aching for a breath of fresh air.”

  They went forward and opened the vestibule door. The outside doors were locked and the snow was piled against the little windows, high up in the door panels.

  “I believe this snow is piled completely over the cars,” declared Nan.

  “Isn’t that funny?” said Bess. “How do you s’pose they’ll ever dig us out?”

  “I wonder if it has stopped snowing?”

  “I hope so!”

  “We can’t hear anything down here,” continued Nan. “But we naturally couldn’t, if the train is buried in the snow.”

  “Dear me, Nan!” said her chum, in a really worried tone. “What do you s’pose will happen to us?”

  “We— ell— ”

  “And our folks! They’ll be awfully worried. Why! we should have been at Tillbury by eight o’clock, and here it is noon!”

  “That is so,” Nan said, with more assurance. “But of course they know what has happened to the train. We’re in no real danger.”

  “We— ell, I s’pose not,” admitted Bess, slowly. “But it does seem funny.”

  Nan chuckled. “As long as we see anything funny in the situation, I guess we shall get along all right.”

  “Oh! you know what I mean,” her chum said. “I wonder where that door leads to?”

  “Into another car,” Nan said demurely.

  “Is that so, Miss Smartie?” cried Bess. “But what car?”

  She tried the door. It gave entrance to a baggage coach, dimly lit by a lantern swinging from the roof. Nobody was in the car and the girls walked hesitatingly forward.

  “Oh!” squealed Bess, suddenly. “Here’s my trunk.”

  “And here’s mine,” Nan said, and stopped to pat the side of the battered, brown box stenciled “N.S.” on its end. Nan had something very precious in that trunk, and to tell the truth she wished she had that precious possession out of the trunk right then.


  “It’s awfully cold in here, Bess,” she said slowly.

  “I guess they haven’t got the steam turned on in this flat, either,” returned Bess, laughing. “Nothing to freeze here but the trunks. Oh! oh! what’s that?”

  Her startled cry was caused by a sudden sound from a dark corner— a whimpering cry that might have been a baby’s.

  “The poor thing!” cried Nan, darting toward the sound. “They have forgotten it, I know.”

  “A baby in a baggage car?” gasped Bess. “Whoever heard the like?”

  Waifs And Strays

  “What a cruel, cruel thing!” Nan murmured.

  “I never supposed the railroad took babies as baggage,” said her chum wonderingly.

  At that Nan uttered a laugh that was half a sob. “Silly! reach down that lantern, please. Stand on the box. I’ll show you what sort of a baby it is.”

  Bess obeyed her injunction and brought the light. Nan was kneeling in the corner before a small crate of slats in which was a beautiful, brown-eyed, silky haired water spaniel— nothing but a puppy— that was licking her hands through his prison bars and wriggling his little body as best he could in the narrow quarters to show his affection and delight.

  “Well, I never!” cried Bess, falling on her knees before the dog’s carrier, and likewise worshipping. “Isn’t he the cunning, tootsie-wootsie sing? ’E ’ittle dear! Oh, Nan! isn’t he a love? How soft his tiny tongue is,” for the puppy was indiscriminate in his expressions of affection.

  “I believe the men must have forgotten him,” said Nan.

  “It’s a murderin’ shame, as cook would say,” Bess declared. “Let’s let him out.”

  “Oh, no! we mustn’t— not till we’ve asked leave.”

  “Well, who’ll we ask?” demanded Bess.

  “The baggage-man, of course,” said Nan, jumping up. “I believe he’s hungry, too.”

  “Who? the baggage-man?” giggled Bess.

  “The puppy, of course,” returned Nan.

  “We’ll feed him some of our pie,” suggested Bess.