Betty was sniffing—­that may not be an elegant expression, but it is exactly what she did—­and looking all about on the floor.

“Something’s been spilled here,” she said.  “It’s a funny odor.  Seems to me I remember smelling it before.”

“That’s the poison,” groaned the woman over the back of the seat.  “Her ma knocked it out of the young one’s hand.  Too bad.  She’s a goner!”

This seemed to Betty very dreadful.  She darted an angry glance at the woman.  “A regular Mrs. Job’s comforter, she is!” thought Betty.

But all the time she was looking about the floor of the car for the bottle.  Finally she dropped to her knees and scrambled about among the boots of the passengers.  She came up like a diver, with an object held high in one hand.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“That is the bottle, Miss,” sobbed the mother.  “My poor little Nellie!  Isn’t there a doctor, anywhere?  They say milk is good for some kinds of poison, but I haven’t any milk for baby even.  That is what makes him cry so.  Poor little Nellie!”

Betty had been staring at the label on the bottle.  Now she smelled hard at the mouth of it She held the bottle before the woman’s eyes.

“Are you sure this is the bottle the child drank out of?” she demanded.

“Yes, Miss.  That is it.  Poor little Nellie!”

“Why! can’t you smell?” demanded Betty.  “And can’t you see?  There is no skull and cross-bones on this label.  And all that was in the bottle was sweet spirits of niter.  I’m sure that won’t do your Nellie any lasting harm.”

The mother was thunderstruck for a moment—­and speechless.  The gloomy woman looking over the back of the seat drawled: 

“Then it wasn’t poison at all?”

“No,” said Betty.  “And I should think among you, you should have found it out!”

She was quite scornful of the near-by passengers.  The mother let the struggling little girl slip out of her lap, fortunately feet first rather than head first, and grabbed up the screaming baby.

“Dear me!  You naughty little thing, Nellie!  You are always scaring me to death,” she said scoldingly.  “And if we don’t come to some place where I can buy milk pretty soon and get it warmed, this child will burst his lungs crying.”

Betty, however, considered that the baby was much too strong and vigorous to be in a starving state as yet.  She wondered how the poor women expected to get milk with the train stalled in the snow.  She had in her pocket some chocolate wafers and she pacified the two older children with these and then ran back to the sleeping car.

She was in season to head off a procession of excited Pullman passengers in all stages of undress starting for the day coach with everything in the line of antidote for poison that could be imagined and which they had discovered in their traveling bags.

“Baby’s better.  She wasn’t poisoned at all,” Betty told them.  “But those children are going to be awfully hungry before long if we have to stay here.  Do you know we’re snowbound, girls?”