The Sioux Attack on the Pacific Railroad Train and Passepartout’s Rescue is a turning point in which a railway journey becomes a battle for survival, and Phileas Fogg’s exacting pursuit of his wager gives way to a dangerous rescue. The attack leaves Passepartout among the missing, forcing Fogg to choose between his schedule and the servant whose resourcefulness has repeatedly sustained the expedition.

A duel interrupted by an attack

The danger begins as the train is stopped at a red signal: the bridge at Medicine Bow is reported too shaky to bear its weight. Once the journey continues, another confrontation takes shape aboard the train. Phileas Fogg and Colonel Stamp Proctor are to settle their dispute in a carriage, each armed with two revolvers, while their seconds wait outside for the locomotive’s whistle. The duel is poised to begin when cries and gunshots erupt elsewhere along the train, making their private contest suddenly irrelevant.

Fogg and Proctor leave the carriage and rush toward the commotion. The train is under attack by Sioux raiders, who have boarded it while it is moving. A hundred attackers climb onto the steps with the practiced ease of riders mounting a horse at full gallop; armed passengers answer their gunfire with revolver shots as the fighting spreads through the cars. The assault is not merely an attack on the passengers: the raiders have also seized the locomotive. A chief tries to stop it but opens the steam valve instead of closing it, sending the engine forward at terrifying speed and making the danger harder to contain.

The counterattack and the train’s separation

The attack spreads through the cars as the Sioux raiders force open doors and fight passengers at close quarters. Aouda defends herself with a revolver, firing through broken windows whenever an attacker appears. After ten minutes, the conductor is shot while fighting beside Phileas Fogg; with Fort Kearney only two miles away, he warns that the passengers will be lost unless the train is stopped before it passes the garrison.

Passepartout volunteers before Fogg can act. Using the acrobatic skills he had once learned, he slips beneath a car and works his way forward under the train, gripping chains and using brakes and the edges of the sashes as he moves from carriage to carriage. Suspended by one hand between the baggage car and the tender, he loosens the safety chains. The train’s traction prevents him from unscrewing the connecting bar, but a violent jolt knocks it free: the cars are detached, and the locomotive rushes ahead while the train coasts on its own momentum. The brakes finally bring the cars to a stop less than a hundred feet from Fort Kearney station. Soldiers hurry out from the fort, and the Sioux raiders flee before the train has fully stopped.

The missing passenger and Fogg’s decision

When the passengers gathered on the station platform, the immediate danger had passed, but the cost of stopping the attack was plain: the wheels were stained with blood, and several passengers were missing. Among them was Passepartout, whose dangerous work beneath the cars had saved the train. The Sioux raiders were already disappearing south along the Republican River, turning the rescue into a pursuit rather than a search at the station.

Phileas Fogg stood motionless, arms folded, facing a choice that put the wager against the life of his servant. Aouda said nothing, but he understood her look. He resolved to find Passepartout, alive or dead. When others questioned whether he could or should go after the Sioux raiders, Fogg answered that no one there had the right to teach him his duty, then said he would go alone. The reply makes the decision more than a sudden interruption to his itinerary: Fogg treats the rescue as an obligation that does not depend on its usefulness to his journey.

Fogg did not, in the end, set out unaided. He joined a sergeant and a small squad, first entrusting Aouda with his carpet bag. Before leaving, he offered the soldiers five thousand dollars if they saved the prisoners. Aouda waited alone in the station, moved by his calm courage and generosity: he had already risked his fortune on the rescue and was now putting his life at risk without hesitation. The carpet bag and the promised money mark what he leaves behind and what he places at stake, while his departure gives practical form to the duty he has just asserted.

The rescue party met the Sioux raiders ten miles south of Fort Kearney. Before Fogg and the soldiers arrived, Passepartout and the other captives had begun fighting their captors; Passepartout felled three of them with his fists. Fogg and the squad then hastened to their relief, and the group returned to the fort in good order, with Fogg at its head and Passepartout just behind him. The missing servant is thus not simply recovered by his master: his own resistance helps hold the danger at bay until the rescue arrives.

The reward and its aftermath

Fogg distributed the five thousand dollars he had promised the soldiers, converting his offer into a fulfilled obligation rather than a gesture made in the urgency of departure. Passepartout, safe again, privately acknowledged the cost his rescue had imposed on his master. The remark gives the ordeal a wry coda, but it also measures the distance Fogg has traveled from the punctual traveler who seemed to subordinate everything to his wager: when his servant disappeared, he had placed both fortune and life at risk to bring him back.

Fix watched Fogg in silence, his thoughts too difficult to read. Aouda, by contrast, answered the rescue with a simple physical gesture, taking her protector’s hand and pressing it in hers, too moved to speak. The episode closes not only with the captives’ return but with these distinct responses: Passepartout’s rueful humor, Fix’s unreadable regard, and Aouda’s wordless gratitude. The train is stopped, the immediate danger is over, and Fogg’s conduct has made personal responsibility visible in action, even at the expense of the journey’s schedule.