Jules Verne · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Three travelers, Passepartout included, had vanished. Had they died in the fighting? Were they now prisoners of the Sioux? There was no way yet to know.
The wounded were fairly numerous, but it was found that none was hurt mortally. One of the most gravely struck was Colonel Proctor, who had fought bravely, and whom a bullet to the groin had brought down. He was carried to the station with other travelers whose condition called for immediate care.
Mrs. Aouda was safe. Phileas Fogg, who had not spared himself, had not a scratch. Fix was wounded in the arm, an injury of no importance. But Passepartout was missing, and tears flowed from the young woman's eyes.
Meanwhile all the travelers had left the train. The wheels of the cars were stained with blood. From the hubs and spokes hung shapeless scraps of flesh. As far as one could see, long red streaks marked the white plain. The last of the Indians were disappearing then to the south, toward the Republican River.
Mr. Fogg, arms folded, remained motionless. He had a grave decision to make. Mrs. Aouda, near him, looked at him without uttering a word... He understood that look. If his servant was a prisoner, was it not his duty to risk everything to snatch him from the Indians?...
"I'll find him again, dead or alive," he said simply to Mrs. Aouda.
"Ah! sir... Mr. Fogg!" cried the young woman, seizing the hands of her companion, which she covered with tears.
"Alive!" added Mr. Fogg, "if we don't lose a single minute!"
By this resolve, Phileas Fogg was sacrificing himself entirely. He had just pronounced his own ruin. A single day's delay made him miss the steamer at New York. His wager was irretrievably lost. But faced with this thought—"It's my duty!"—he had not hesitated.
The captain in command of Fort Kearney was there. His soldiers—about a hundred men—had put themselves on the defensive in case the Sioux should launch a direct attack on the station.
"Captain," Mr. Fogg said to him, "three travelers have vanished.
"Dead?" asked the captain.
"Dead or prisoners," replied Phileas Fogg. "There's an uncertainty there that must be cleared up. Is it your intention to pursue the Sioux?
"That's a serious matter, sir," said the captain. "These Indians may flee beyond the Arkansas! I cannot abandon the fort entrusted to me.
"Sir," Phileas Fogg went on, "it's a question of the lives of three men.
"No doubt... but can I gamble fifty lives to save three?
"I don't know whether you can, sir, but you must.
"Sir," replied the captain, "no one here has anything to teach me about what my duty is.
"So be it," said Phileas Fogg coldly. "I'll go alone!
"You, sir!" cried Fix, who had come up, "go alone in pursuit of the Indians!
"Would you have me let this poor wretch perish, then—the man to whom everything living here owes its life? I'm going.
"Well, no, you won't go alone!" cried the captain, moved despite himself. "No! You have a brave heart!... Thirty men of good will!" he added, turning toward his soldiers.
The whole company stepped forward in a body. The captain had only to choose among these brave fellows. Thirty soldiers were named, and an old sergeant put himself at their head.
"Thank you, captain!" said Mr. Fogg.
"Will you permit me to accompany you?" Fix asked the gentleman.
"You'll do as you please, sir," Phileas Fogg answered him. "But if you want to do me a service, you'll stay near Mrs. Aouda. In case any harm should come to me..."
A sudden pallor swept over the face of the police inspector. To part from the man he had followed step by step and with such persistence! To let him venture off like this into that desert! Fix looked attentively at the gentleman, and, whatever he might feel, despite his prejudices, in spite of the struggle raging inside him, he dropped his eyes before that calm, frank gaze.
"I'll stay," he said.
A few moments later, Mr. Fogg had gripped the young woman's hand; then, after handing her his precious traveling bag, he set off with the sergeant and his little troop.
But before leaving, he had said to the soldiers:
"My friends, there are a thousand pounds for you if we save the prisoners!"
It was then a few minutes past noon.
Mrs. Aouda had withdrawn into a room of the station, and there, alone, she waited, thinking of Phileas Fogg, of that simple and great generosity, of that quiet courage. Mr. Fogg had sacrificed his fortune, and now he was staking his life, all of it without hesitation, out of duty, without fine words. Phileas Fogg was a hero in her eyes.
Inspector Fix, for his part, did not think so, and he could not contain his agitation. He paced feverishly on the station platform. Subdued for a moment, he became himself again. With Fogg gone, he grasped the folly he had committed in letting him go. What! this man he had just followed around the world—he had consented to part from him! His nature was getting the upper hand again; he blamed himself, he accused himself, he treated himself as if he had been the head of the metropolitan police, dressing down an agent caught red-handed in an act of naïveté.
"I've been an idiot!" he thought. "The other one will have told him who I was! He's gone, he won't come back! Where am I to lay hold of him now? But how could I have let myself be so mesmerized—I, Fix, I, who have his arrest warrant in my pocket! Decidedly, I'm nothing but a fool!"
So reasoned the police inspector, while the hours slipped by so slowly for his liking. He was at a loss what to do. At times he had a mind to tell Mrs. Aouda everything. But he grasped how he would be received by the young woman. What course to take? He was tempted to set off across the long white plains, in pursuit of this Fogg! It did not seem impossible to him to find him again. The detachment's footprints were still imprinted on the snow!... But soon, under a fresh layer, every trace was wiped out.
Then discouragement took hold of Fix. He felt something like an insurmountable urge to give up the game. Now, precisely, this chance to leave the Kearney station and to pursue this journey, so rich in setbacks, was offered to him.
Indeed, toward two o'clock in the afternoon, while the snow was falling in thick flakes, long whistles were heard coming from the east. An enormous shadow, preceded by a tawny glow, was advancing slowly, considerably enlarged by the mists, which gave it a fantastic look.
And yet no train coming from the east was expected as yet. The help called for by telegraph could not arrive so soon, and the Omaha-to-San Francisco train was not due to pass until the next day.—They were soon set straight.
This locomotive advancing at low steam, throwing out great whistle blasts, was the one that, after being detached from the train, had continued on its way at such a frightful speed, carrying off the unconscious fireman and engineer. It had run along the rails for several miles; then the fire had died down for want of fuel; the steam had eased off, and an hour later, gradually slowing its pace, the engine had at last stopped twenty miles beyond the Kearney station.
Neither the engineer nor the fireman had perished, and, after a rather prolonged faint, they had come to.
The engine was then at a standstill. When he saw himself in the desert, the locomotive alone, with no more cars behind it, the engineer understood what had happened. How the locomotive had been detached from the train, he could not guess, but there was no doubt in his mind that the train, stranded behind him, was in distress.
The engineer did not hesitate over what he had to do. To keep on toward Omaha was prudent; to go back toward the train, which the Indians were perhaps still plundering, was dangerous... No matter! Shovelfuls of coal and wood were engulfed in the firebox of his boiler, the fire revived, the pressure rose again, and, toward two o'clock in the afternoon, the engine was coming back toward the Kearney station. It was the one whistling in the mist.
It was a great satisfaction to the travelers when they saw the locomotive place itself at the head of the train. They were going to be able to continue this journey so unhappily interrupted.
At the engine's arrival, Mrs. Aouda had left the station, and, addressing the conductor:
"You're going to leave?" she asked him.
"This instant, madam.
"But those prisoners... our unfortunate companions...
"I can't interrupt the service," replied the conductor. "We're already three hours behind.
"And when will the other train coming from San Francisco pass through?
"Tomorrow evening, madam.
"Tomorrow evening! but that will be too late. We have to wait...
"It's impossible," replied the conductor. "If you want to leave, get aboard.
"I won't leave," replied the young woman. Fix had heard this conversation. A few moments earlier, when he had no means of transport at all, he had been resolved to leave Kearney, and now, with the train standing there, ready to dash off, when he had only to take his place again in the car, an irresistible force bound him to the ground. The station platform scorched his feet, and he could not tear himself away from it. The struggle began again in him. The fury of failure choked him. He wanted to fight on to the very end.
Meanwhile the travelers and some of the wounded—among others Colonel Proctor, whose condition was grave—had taken their places in the cars. The hummings of the overheated boiler could be heard, and the steam was escaping through the valves. The engineer whistled, the train got under way, and soon vanished, its white smoke merging with the swirling snow.
Inspector Fix had stayed behind.
A few hours went by. The weather was very bad, the cold very sharp. Fix, seated on a bench in the station, remained motionless. One might have thought he was sleeping. Mrs. Aouda, despite the squall, left at every moment the room that had been placed at her disposal. She would come to the end of the platform, trying to see through the snowstorm, wanting to pierce that mist that shrank the horizon around her, listening for whether some sound might make itself heard. But nothing. She would go back in, then, chilled through, only to return a few moments later, and always to no purpose.
Evening came. The little detachment was not back. Where was it at this moment? Had it been able to catch up with the Indians? Had there been a fight, or were these soldiers, lost in the mist, wandering at random? The captain of Fort Kearney was very anxious, though he wanted to let nothing of his anxiety show.
Night fell, the snow came down less heavily, but the intensity of the cold increased. The most intrepid gaze could not have looked without dread on that dark immensity. An absolute silence reigned over the plain. Neither the flight of a bird, nor the passing of a wild beast disturbed its infinite calm.
All through that night, Mrs. Aouda, her mind full of sinister forebodings, her heart filled with anguish, wandered along the edge of the prairie. Her imagination swept her off into the distance and conjured a thousand dangers. What she suffered during those long hours cannot be expressed.
Fix was still motionless in the same place, but he too was not sleeping. At a certain moment, a man had come up, had even spoken to him, but the agent had sent him away, after answering his words with a shake of the head.
The night passed thus. At dawn, the half-quenched disk of the sun rose over a mist-shrouded horizon. Still, the range of sight could extend to a distance of two miles. It was toward the south that Phileas Fogg and the detachment had headed... The south was utterly deserted. It was then seven o'clock in the morning.
The captain, deeply worried, could not decide what to do. Ought he send a second detachment to rescue the first? Ought he sacrifice fresh men with so little hope of saving those already given up at the start? But his hesitation did not last, and with a gesture, calling one of his lieutenants, he was giving him the order to push a reconnaissance to the south—when shots rang out. A signal, perhaps? The soldiers poured out of the fort, and a half mile off they spotted a little troop returning in good order.
Mr. Fogg was marching at the head, and near him Passepartout and the two other travelers, wrenched from the hands of the Sioux.
There had been a fight ten miles south of Kearney. A few moments before the detachment arrived, Passepartout and his two companions were already struggling against their guards, and the Frenchman had already floored three of them with his bare fists when his master and the troops rushed to the rescue.
All of them, rescuers and rescued, were greeted with cries of joy, and Phileas Fogg handed out to the soldiers the reward he had promised them, while Passepartout repeated to himself, not without some reason:
"Decidedly, I have to admit I cost my master dear!"
Fix, without saying a word, watched Mr. Fogg, and it would have been no easy thing to analyze the impressions that were at war within him just then. As for Mrs. Aouda, she had taken the gentleman's hand and was pressing it in her own, without being able to utter a word!
Meanwhile Passepartout, the moment he arrived, had looked for the train in the station. He believed he'd find it there, ready to dash off toward Omaha, and he hoped they might still make up the lost time.
"The train, the train!" he cried.
"Gone," replied Fix.
"And the next train, when will it pass?" asked Phileas Fogg.
"Not until this evening.
"Ah!" replied the impassive gentleman simply.