emaining 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