the steep way instead of crawling through, as Eugene was
doing. Later she had found out that Eugene really preferred that to the
more daring climb. Jerry involuntarily gripped the car seat with a
subconscious longing to get out and drive over the whole thing. Across
the aisle, the smile on the fat man's face was coming outside as he
watched the stranger passenger.

They were deep in now--a valley-like thing that was hotter than any
other inch of the whole way they had come. On either side tall slabs of
timber, planted upright, closed in the right of way. They were barely
moving through this narrow lane. The engine was gasping for breath, and
the cars dragged themselves after it by inches. Then all came to a dead
stop.

"Everybody turn out and help," somebody in uniformed authority called
through the car door, and all the men passengers stirred to action.

"_The_ dickens!" the short fat man exclaimed to everybody. "Stuck in a
sand-drift in that danged blowout. That's what comes of letting this
wind go all day. I told 'em up at the junction to stop it, but they
wouldn't listen to me. Now we've got to soar out of here and shovel for
our lives."

When he laughed everybody else had to laugh, too, and it was a really
good-natured company of men that piled down from the train to help the
cause of railway transportation.

The fat man had been last to leave the car.

"Let me close all these windows," he urged, strutting from seat to seat.
"It'll be hot with 'em shut, but you'll be buried in sand in here if we
leave 'em open, and we men don't want to dig you and the engine all out
in one day. We mightn't find all the children, you know, and leave some
of 'em in here covered up. He, he! Haw!" He struggled with the last
windows until they were sealed down, then turned away to lend his aid in
a good cause.

The tow-headed woman and her little perpetual-motion baby, who had been
sleeping wearily for a few miles, roused at the jolly man's loud laugh.

"It's the blowout," the mother said, as Jerry looked at her for the
first time. "Them timbers is driv in to keep out all that sand. See how
it's heaped up ag'in' 'em on the outside. On awfully windy days it blows
over and fills the tracks and stops the train, and then the men all get
out and help to shovel it off. Gee whiz! but it's hot in here! We'd be
just smothered in sand if we left the windows open, though. There!
There!"

The last to the big baby, stirring uneasily, who