Phileas Fogg was now twenty hours behind his strict schedule. Passepartout was completely desperate. He blamed himself entirely for the delay. He felt that he had ruined his master's chances of winning the great bet.
At this moment, Detective Fix walked up to Mr. Fogg and looked him straight in the eye.
"Seriously, sir, are you in a great hurry?" Fix asked.
"Quite seriously," Fogg replied calmly.
"If the Indians had not attacked us, you would have reached New York with eleven hours to spare," Fix explained. "You are now twenty hours behind. That means you only need to make up nine hours. Do you want to try to catch up?"
"How? On foot?" Mr. Fogg asked.
"No. On a sled with sails," Fix answered.
Fix was still secretly determined to get Fogg back to England so he could finally arrest him. He pointed to an American man named Mudge, who was standing outside the military fort. Mr. Fogg walked over to speak with him and examined his strange vehicle.
It was a wide wooden sled built to slide over the ice and snow. However, instead of being pulled by horses, it had a tall mast and two huge sails, exactly like a boat. At the back, there was a wooden blade to help steer it. During the winter months, when the trains were blocked, these sail-sleds carried passengers across the flat plains at incredible speeds.
Mr. Fogg immediately paid Mudge a generous amount of money to take them to the next major train station in Omaha. Fogg offered to leave Aouda and Passepartout behind at the warm fort so they could travel to Europe later in comfort. But Aouda absolutely refused to separate from him, and Passepartout would never leave his master alone with the detective.
At eight o'clock in the morning, the travelers climbed onto the sled and wrapped themselves in thick blankets. Mudge raised the huge sails. The strong winter wind caught the heavy cloth, and the sled shot forward. It glided over the hard, frozen surface of the snow at forty miles an hour.
The ride was terrifying and uncomfortable. The travelers sat close together, shivering uncontrollably in the extreme cold. The freezing wind was so aggressive that they could not even speak to each other. The thick ropes holding the sails hummed loudly in the wind like the strings of a giant violin.
The flat, empty landscape looked like a vast white ocean. There were no trees, no houses, and no hills. The only sign of life came from a pack of ferocious prairie wolves. The hungry, wild animals ran behind the sled, howling loudly at the passengers. Passepartout sat at the back with his revolver in his hand, ready to shoot. But the wind was strong, and the sled easily outran the dangerous beasts, leaving them far behind in the snow.
Passepartout felt a sudden urge to thank Fix for finding the sled, but he kept his feelings to himself. Meanwhile, he could not stop thinking about Mr. Fogg's incredible bravery. His master had risked his life and his fortune to save him from the Indians. Passepartout promised himself that he would never forget it.
By one o'clock in the afternoon, the sled began to slow down. Mudge lowered the sails, and the sled coasted into a town covered in snow. They had made it to Omaha.
Mr. Fogg generously rewarded Mudge, and the group hurried directly into the railway station. They barely had time to buy their tickets before jumping onto a train heading east. For the next two days, they traveled continuously. They crossed the state of Iowa, passed over the mighty Mississippi River in the dark, and reached Chicago on the afternoon of December 10th.
They still had nine hundred miles to go. In Chicago, they immediately had to transfer to another fast train. This powerful locomotive rushed across the eastern states like a flash of lightning. The driver seemed to know that Mr. Fogg had no time to lose.
Finally, on the evening of December 11th, the train stopped at their final destination in New York City. Mr. Fogg checked his watch. It was a quarter past eleven at night. They immediately rushed out to the docks to catch the large steamship sailing for Liverpool.
But when they reached the dark harbor, the pier was completely empty. The ship to England had left exactly forty-five minutes earlier.