“If you had helped dig that tunnel,” said Teddy Tucker confidently, “you’d know that the snow is packed so hard you wouldn’t sink in very deep in walking.”

“But of course, you girls can’t go,” Tommy said.  “We fellows will have to go for supplies.”

The girls did not much like this statement.  Betty and Bobby at least considered that they were quite as well able to endure the hardships of a tramp through the snow as the boys.

“I’d just like to see that tunnel, and see how hard it is snowing outside,” said Betty privately to her chum.

“Let’s go look,” exclaimed Bobby, equally curious.

Libbie and Timothy had their heads together over a book.  Louise and the boys were engaged socially with some of the other passengers in their coach.  So Betty and Bobby were able to slip away, with their coats and caps, without being observed.

There were two Pullman coaches and but one day coach besides the express and baggage and mail cars to the train.  The passengers in the day coach were confined to that or to the smoker’s end of the baggage car ahead.  The occupants of the Pullman coaches could roam through both as they pleased; and had the weather been fine it is certain that the young folks from Fairfields would have occupied the observation platform at the rear of the train a good part of the daytime.

They had been shut in by the storm the afternoon before, and now they were doubly shut in by the snow.  The doors of the vestibules between the cars could not be opened, for the snow was banked up on both sides to the roofs.  That tunnel the boys and train hands had made from the rear platform was the only means of egress for the passengers from the submerged train.

Betty and Bobby passed through the rear car and out upon the snow-banked platform.  They saw that several people must have thrust themselves through the tunnel since the boys had made it.  Probably these explorers had wished, like the two girls, to discover for themselves just what state the weather was in.

“Dear me!” gasped Bobby, “dare we poke through that hole?  What do you think, Betty?”

“The snow is hard packed, just as the boys say.  I guess we can risk it,” declared the more daring Betty.  “Anyway, I can go anywhere Bob Henderson can, my dear.  I will not take a back seat for any boy.”

“Hear!  Hear!” chuckled Bobby.  “Isn’t that what they cry at political meetings?  You have made a good speech, Bettykins.  Now go ahead and do it.”

“Go ahead and do what?”

“Lead the way through that chimney.  My!  I believe it has stopped snowing and the boys don’t know it.”

“Come on then and make sure,” Betty cried, and began to scramble up the sloping tunnel on hands and knees.

Both girls were warmly dressed, booted, and mittened.  A little snow would not hurt them—­not even a great deal of snow.  And that a great deal had fallen and blown into this railroad cut, Betty and Bobby soon realized when they had scrambled out through what the latter had called “the chimney.”