– Go away! Go away! – Baba Yaga shouted. – I didn’t call you! Get back to your swamp!!
– We won’t leave! – the locomotives blew, circling around the hut. – You are hiding something from us! Open the doors!!! – they demanded and even pushed the house with their sides a couple of times. At the same time, Baba Yaga staggered, but still held on, although it seemed that she was about to fly down.
– Take it! Take it!! – she shouted, fearing that now not only would the hut be smashed to pieces, but she herself would, inadvertently, be rolled into the mud behind the hut.
– Open up! – trumpeted the locomotives, stained with mud and covered with swamp mud.
The door to the hut opened by itself and, without thinking for a long time, Chu-Chukhin jumped out. He immediately rushed into the general whirlwind and, having made a couple more circles, together with everyone else, through the forest, he drove around… No, not towards the swamps. To the depot!!!
***
– Wow, we gave it to the old woman!!! – the locomotives laughed. They were having a lot of fun, but Maslenka was not having fun at all. He washed each locomotive with a hose, removing swamp dirt, cleared away the stuck mud, and lubricated and cleaned all the mechanisms that had certainly picked up dirt in the thicket of the forest and local swamps.
– Next time you rush to save someone, – muttered Maslenka the cat, clearly addressing Chu-chukhin. – At least let the others know. And now everyone has fun, and the poor mechanic has to work tirelessly until the morning, or even the next evening.
– Okay, next time for sure! – Chu-Chukhin answered him. He was very pleased with how everything was resolved, and the disguised performance of the steam locomotives from the depot, pretending to be local inhabitants who had just got out of the swamp, amused him no less than the participants in the action themselves.
– Yes, if you please, – Maslyonka the cat watered Chu-Chukhin with a hose under Kolobchuk’s disapproving sighs. – Otherwise, first the Ghost Engine comes and looks for Chu-Chukhin, and then he flies in with bulging eyes and says that he was deceived and now something bad will happen to Chu-Chukhin. – he kept muttering.
004. How the engines met Alenka
Alena’s grandparents lived in a railway house. That house stood somewhere on the route between Poltava and Kiev, exactly not far from the Enchanted Forest, the Marsh Swamps, the Swamp of Old Steam Locomotives and an abandoned depot. They were separated from this mysterious place by an old railway bridge and a wide river, through which local residents were afraid to cross, fearing those places and their inhabitants.
The house stood right next to the railway tracks, but in order to get to it from Poltava, and it was from there, from Poltava, that Alenka was traveling to visit her grandparents, she had to get off at one of the nameless stops, called “stop number so-and-so,” walk through the field for five kilometers and only after that get off at the desired railway track. And then, along this canvas, we walked for some more time and already there stood the house of my grandparents.
The train that carried Alenka that day traveled according to the schedule and its route. Alenka wondered why the train didn’t turn right next to the dense forest in order to pass not only past her grandparents’ house, but also take a significant shortcut. The fact is that the road she always took was quite a detour.
Surprised by this circumstance once again, Alenka decided to get off just one stop earlier. She took a map with her and judging by it, she only had to walk a couple of kilometers along the railway tracks through the forest, turn left, then cross the very bridge on which Kolobchuk ran away from them at one time, and then to the house of her grandmother and Grandfather is just a stone’s throw away. So, it seemed to her that she would have been with her grandparents much earlier, and it was much more pleasant to walk in the forest shade during the summer heat than to break through the field grasses, which that year grew taller than a man. At least taller than Alenka.
Having made this decision, Alenka jumped off the train at the stop and looked around. She didn’t notice anyone and confidently walked along the already fairly rusty railway line running into the forest. That branch branched off from the main highway and few people traveled along it, except perhaps those strange little trains that had recently settled in the forest, and even then it was unlikely.
Grandfather, who had worked on the railroad for many years, strictly forbade Alenka from even approaching the engines, much less communicating. He was sure that something was not clean here, because, in his opinion, locomotives themselves could not live. Grandfather was upset by the unauthorized rolling of steam locomotives, which violated the strict schedule of movement of rolling stock, to which grandfather was already accustomed. And in general, what fell outside the norms of the railway communication system, he saw as a gross violation of all possible norms and rules.
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