n?

Nobody came near the car. Even the porter had disappeared. The wait
seemed endless, and the persistent snoring of the whiskered gentleman
rasped the nerves like the scrape of a file.

"Well, how long are we going to stick here now?" began one of the
drummers. "Wonder if they hurt the engine with their dynamite?"

"Oh, I know they will come through the car and rob us," wailed the
school-teachers.

The lady with the little children went back to bed, and Annixter,
assured that the trouble was over, did likewise. But nobody slept. From
berth to berth came the sound of suppressed voices talking it all over,
formulating conjectures. Certain points seemed to be settled upon, no
one knew how, as indisputable. The highwaymen had been four in number
and had stopped the train by pulling the bell cord. A brakeman had
attempted to interfere and had been shot. The robbers had been on the
train all the way from San Francisco. The drummer named Max remembered
to have seen four "suspicious-looking characters" in the smoking-car
at Lathrop, and had intended to speak to the conductor about them. This
drummer had been in a hold-up before, and told the story of it over and
over again.

At last, after what seemed to have been an hour's delay, and when the
dawn had already begun to show in the east, the locomotive backed on to
the train again with a reverberating jar that ran from car to car. At
the jolting, the school-teachers screamed in chorus, and the whiskered
gentleman stopped snoring and thrust his head from his curtains,
blinking at the Pintsch lights. It appeared that he was an Englishman.

"I say," he asked of the drummer named Max, "I say, my friend, what
place is this?"

The others roared with derision.

"We were HELD UP, sir, that's what we were. We were held up and you
slept through it all. You missed the show of your life."

The gentleman fixed the group with a prolonged gaze. He said never a
word, but little by little he was convinced that the drummers told the
truth. All at once he grew wrathful, his face purpling. He withdrew his
head angrily, buttoning his curtains together in a fury. The cause of
his rage was inexplicable, but they could hear him resettling himself
upon his pillows with exasperated movements of his head and shoulders.
In a few moments the deep bass and shrill treble of his snoring once
more sounded through the car.

At last the train got under way again, with useless warning blasts of
the