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.
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