They were forced close up to the outlet, when there was a check.  More officials had been summoned; somebody had dropped a heavy box which obstructed the passage, and a group of passengers began a savage fight for its recovery.  George seized a man who was jostling the girl and thrust him backward; but the next moment he was struck by somebody, and he saw nothing of his companions when, after being violently driven to and fro, he reached the gate.  A woman with two screaming children clinging to her appeared beside him, and he held a man so that she might pass.  He was breathless, and almost exhausted, but he secured her a little room; and then the pressure suddenly slackened.  The crowd swept out like a flood from a broken dam, and in a few more moments George stood, gasping, on the platform amid a thinner stream of running people.  There was no sign of the Canadian or his daughter; the cars were besieged; and George waited until Edgar joined him, flushed and disheveled.

“I suppose I was lucky in getting through with only my jacket badly torn,” said the lad, “I wondered why the railroad people caged up their passengers behind iron bars, but now I know.”

George laughed.

“I don’t think this kind of thing is altogether usual.  Owing to the accident, they’ve no doubt had two trainloads to handle instead of one.  But the platform’s emptying; shall we look for a place?”

They managed to enter a car, though the stream of passengers, pouring in by the two vestibules, met within in dire confusion, choking up the passage with their baggage.  Order was, however, restored at last; and, with the tolling of the bell, and a jerk that flung those unprepared off their feet, the great express got off.

“Nobody left behind,” Edgar announced, after a glance through the window.  “I can’t imagine where they put them all; though I’ve never seen a train like this.  But what has become of our Canadian friends?”

George said he did not know, and Edgar resumed: 

“I’m rather taken with the girl—­strikes me as intelligent as well as fetching.  The man’s a grim old savage, but I’m inclined to think he’s prosperous; when a fellow says he can’t afford cigars I generally suspect him of being rich.  It’s a pity that stinginess is one of the roads to affluence.”

The car, glaringly lighted by huge lamps, was crowded and very hot, and after a while George went out on to the rear platform for a breath of air.  The train had now left the city, and glancing back as it swung around a curve, he wondered how one locomotive could haul the long row of heavy cars.  Then he looked out across the wide expanse of grass that stretched away in the moonlight to the dim blur of woods on the horizon.  Here and there clumps of willows dotted the waste, but it lay silent and empty, without sign of human life.  The air was pleasantly fresh after heavy rain; and the stillness of the vast prairie was soothing by contrast with the tumult from which they had recently escaped.