In Linda Riggs, daughter of the rich and influential railroad president, Nan had an especially vindictive enemy.  Nan had noticed Linda’s eagerness to hear all the ill-natured fat man had to say about Mr. Sherwood.

“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 the Sky-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.”

CHAPTER III

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?”