“Suppose we get stalled?” questioned Louise, inclined to be the most thoughtful of the party.

“Well, suppose we do?” returned Bob.  “I tell you we are all right for food, for the dining car——­”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Tommy put in.  “The porter let me into a secret.  The diner was dropped about thirty miles back.  Broken flange of one wheel and no time, of course, to put on a new wheel.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Betty.  “I begin to feel hungry already.”

“Of course, we’ll pick up another diner?” asked Libbie, though rather doubtfully.

“We’ll hope so!” Bobby cried.

“If we get through to Tonawanda, yes,” said Tommy Tucker.  “That’s what the porter told me.  But we don’t get there, if we are on schedule, until eight o’clock.”

“There!  I knew I was perishing of hunger,” exclaimed Betty.  “It’s half past four already,” she added, looking at her wrist watch.

“Three and a half hours to dinner time?” wailed Bobby.  “Oh!  That—­is—­tough!”

“That is, if we make the regular time,” Bob said thoughtfully.  “And right now, let me tell you, this train is just about crawling, and that’s all.  Humph!  The soup sure will get cold in that dining car at Tonawanda, if it waits there to be attached to our train.”

“Oh!  Oh!” cried Bobby.  “Don’t let’s think of it.  I had no idea that snow could be so troublesome.”

“Beautiful snow!” murmured Betty.  “Say, Libbie.  Recite that for us, will you?  You know:  the poetry about ‘Beautiful Snow.’  You or Timothy should remember it.”

“Pah!” exclaimed Bobby, grumblingly.  “I’ll give you the proper version: 

    “Beautiful snow!  If it chokes up this train,
     It certainly will give me a pain!”

“Goodness me, Bobby!” retorted her cousin, Libbie, “your versifying certainly gives me a pain.”

CHAPTER XI

STALLED, AND WITHOUT A DOCTOR

The rapidity with which the storm had increased and the drifts had filled the cuts through which the rails were laid was something that none of the party bound for Mountain Camp had experienced.  Unless Uncle Dick be excepted.  As Betty said, Mr. Richard Gordon had been almost everywhere and had endured the most surprising experiences.  That was something that helped to make him such a splendid guardian.

“Yes,” he agreed, when Betty dragged him down the car aisle to the two sections which he had wisely abandoned entirely to his young charges, “we had considerable snow up there in the part of Canada where I have been this fall.  Before I came down for the Christmas holidays there was about four feet of snow on the level in the woods and certain sections of the railroad up there had been entirely abandoned for the winter.  Horse sleds and dog sleighs do all the transportation until the spring thaw.”

“Oh, do you suppose,” cried Libbie, big-eyed, “that we may be snowbound at Mountain Camp so that we cannot get back until spring?”