“This train’ll never get in on time,” said Ford to the conductor, a little later.  “How’ll I get to the city?”

“Well,” replied the railway man, who was not in the best of humors, “I don’t suppose the city could do without you overnight.  The junction with the main road is only two miles ahead, and if you’re a good walker you may catch a train there.”

Some of the other passengers, none of whom were very much hurt, had made the same discovery, and in a few minutes more there was a long, straggling procession of uncomfortable people marching by the side of the railway track, under the hot sun, The conductor was right, however, and nearly all of them managed to make the two miles to the junction in time.

Mr. Ford Foster was among the very first to arrive, and he was likely to reach home in very fair season in spite of the pig.

As for his danger, he had hardly thought of that, and he would not have missed so important an adventure for anything he could think of, just then.

It was to a great, pompous, stylish, crowded, “up-town boarding-house,” that Ford’s return was to take him.  There was no wonder at all that wise people should wish to get out of such a place in such hot weather.  Still, it was the sort of a home Ford Foster had been best acquainted with all his life, and it was partly owing to that that he had become so prematurely “knowing.”

He knew too much, in fact, and was only too well aware of it.  He had filled his head with an unlimited stock of boarding-house information, as well as with a firm persuasion that there was little more to be had,—­unless, indeed, it might be scraps of such outside, knowledge as he had now been picking up over on Long Island.

In one of the great “parlor chambers” of the boarding-house, at about eight o’clock that evening, a middle-aged gentleman and lady, with a fair, sweet-faced girl of about nineteen, were sitting near an open window, very much as if they were waiting for somebody.

Such a kindly, motherly lady!  She was one of those whom no one can help liking, after seeing her smile once, or hearing her speak.  Whatever may have been his faults or short-comings, Ford Foster could not have put in words what he thought about his mother.  And yet he had no difficulty in expressing his respect for his father, or his unbounded admiration for his pretty sister Annie.

“Oh, husband!” exclaimed Mrs. Foster, “are you sure none of them were injured?”

“So the telegraphic report said.  Not a bone broken of anybody but the pig that got in the way.”

“But how I wish he would come!” groaned Annie.  “Have you any idea, papa, how he can get home?”

“Not clearly,” said her father, “but you can trust Ford not to miss any opportunity.  He’s just the boy to look out for himself in an emergency.”

Ford Foster’s father took very strongly after the son in whose ability he expressed so much confidence.  He had just such a square, active, bustling sort of body, several sizes larger, with just such keen, penetrating, greenish-gray eyes.  Anybody would have picked him out, at a glance, for a lawyer, and a good one.