Perhaps an hour later the train came to a stop, and he heard some one walking by the track. He hid in a corner, ashamed of being there. Some one stopped before the car, and the door was rolled shut. Then the footsteps went on. There came clankings and jarrings, as of cars being shifted, and then these ceased and silence fell.
Samuel waited for perhaps an hour. Then, becoming restless, he got up and tried the door. It was fast.
The boy was startled and rather dazed. He sat down to think it out. “I suppose I'm locked in till we reach New York,” he reflected. But then, why didn't they go?
“Perhaps we're on a siding, waiting for the passenger train to pass,” was his next thought; and he realized regretfully that he would have been on that train. But then, as hour after hour passed, and they did not go on, a terrible possibility dawned upon him. He was left behind--on a siding.
Two or three trains went by, and each time he waited anxiously. But they did not stop. Silence came again, and he sat in the darkness and waited and wondered and feared.
He had no means of telling the time; and doubtless an hour seemed an age in such a plight. He would get up and pace back and forth, like a caged animal; and then he would lie down by the door, straining his ears for a sound--thinking that some one might pass, unnoticed through the thick wall of the car.
By and by he became hungry and he ate the scanty meal he had in his bundle. Then he became thirsty--and he had no water.
The realization of this made his heart thump. It was no joking matter to be shut in, at one could not tell what lonely place, to suffer from thirst. He sprang up and began to pound and kick upon the door in a frenzy.
But he soon tired of that and crouched on the floor again listening and shivering, half with fear and half with cold. It was becoming chillier, so he judged it must be night; up here in the mountains there was still frost at night.
There came another train, a freight, he knew by the heavy pounding and the time it took to pass. He kicked on the door and shouted, but he soon realized that it was of no use to shout in that uproar.
The craving for water was becoming an obsession. He tried not to think about it, but that only made him think about it the more; he would think about not thinking about it and about not thinking about that--and all the time he was growing thirstier. He wondered how long one could live without water; and as the torment grew worse he began to wonder if he was dying. He was hungry, too, and he wondered which was worse, of which one would die the sooner. He had heard that dying men remembered all their past, and so he began to remember his--with extraordinary vividness, and with bursts of strange and entirely new emotions. He remembered particularly all the evil things that he had ever done; including the theft of a ride, for which he was paying the penalty. And meantime, with another part of his mind, he was plotting and seeking. He must not die here like a rat in a hole. There must be some way.