“Snow comes,” said the train official to the station officials; and they agreed that snow was about to come.  And it came, rapidly, plenteously.  The train had not been more than an hour on its journey when the cotton-wool clouds commenced to dissolve in a blinding downpour of snowflakes.  The forest trees on either side of the line were speedily coated with a heavy white mantle, the telegraph wires became thick glistening ropes, the line itself was buried more and more completely under a carpeting of snow, through which the not very powerful engine ploughed its way with increasing difficulty.  The Vienna-Fiume line is scarcely the best equipped of the Austrian State railways, and Abbleway began to have serious fears for a breakdown.  The train had slowed down to a painful and precarious crawl and presently came to a halt at a spot where the drifting snow had accumulated in a formidable barrier.  The engine made a special effort and broke through the obstruction, but in the course of another twenty minutes it was again held up.  The process of breaking through was renewed, and the train doggedly resumed its way, encountering and surmounting fresh hindrances at frequent intervals.  After a standstill of unusually long duration in a particularly deep drift the compartment in which Abbleway was sitting gave a huge jerk and a lurch, and then seemed to remain stationary; it undoubtedly was not moving, and yet he could hear the puffing of the engine and the slow rumbling and jolting of wheels.  The puffing and rumbling grew fainter, as though it were dying away through the agency of intervening distance.  Abbleway suddenly gave vent to an exclamation of scandalised alarm, opened the window, and peered out into the snowstorm.  The flakes perched on his eyelashes and blurred his vision, but he saw enough to help him to realise what had happened.  The engine had made a mighty plunge through the drift and had gone merrily forward, lightened of the load of its rear carriage, whose coupling had snapped under the strain.  Abbleway was alone, or almost alone, with a derelict railway waggon, in the heart of some Styrian or Croatian forest.  In the third-class compartment next to his own he remembered to have seen a peasant woman, who had entered the train at a small wayside station.  “With the exception of that woman,” he exclaimed dramatically to himself, “the nearest living beings are probably a pack of wolves.”

Before making his way to the third-class compartment to acquaint his fellow-traveller with the extent of the disaster Abbleway hurriedly pondered the question of the woman’s nationality.  He had acquired a smattering of Slavonic tongues during his residence in Vienna, and felt competent to grapple with several racial possibilities.

“If she is Croat or Serb or Bosniak I shall be able to make her understand,” he promised himself.  “If she is Magyar, heaven help me!  We shall have to converse entirely by signs.”