“Hold on there a minute! Don’t you think you’re being unnecessarily rough with that boy?”

“Naw, I don’t. And if I am, it ain’t none of your business that I can see.”

“Perhaps I mean to make it so.”

“Aw run along and play, kid. Don’t bother me.”

The brakeman glared angrily at the tall, well-built lad who had accosted him. In so doing, he for an instant ceased belaboring a dust-covered, cowering lad in pitifully ragged clothing whom, a moment before, he had been cuffing about the head without mercy.

[6]

“Take that, you young tramp!” he had hurled out savagely, as each blow fell on the quivering form.

The boy receiving this unmerciful punishment had been discovered riding the blind-baggage on the long, dust-covered train of Canadian Pacific coaches that had just come to a stop.

Of course the boy had been summarily ejected, and the brakeman was now engaged in what he would have termed “dusting the young rascal’s jacket.”

It was a pitiful sight, though, to see the slender, emaciated lad, whose rags hardly covered his thin body, and who could not have been much above sixteen, cowering under the punishment of the burly trainman. The brakeman was not of necessity a brute. But in his eyes the lad was “a miserable tramp,” and only getting his just dues. To more humane eyes, though, the scene appeared in a different light.

Some of the passengers, gazing from the windows,[7] had ventured to cry, “Shame,” but that was all that had come of it till Ralph Stetson, who had been standing with a group of his friends at the other end of the platform of the Pine Pass station, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, happened to see what was going forward. Without a word he had hastened from them and come to the rescue. Ralph was a boy whose blood always was on fire at the sight of cruelty and oppression, and it appeared to him that the brakeman was being unnecessarily rough. Besides, there was something in the big, appealing eyes of the sufferer, and his ragged, ill-clad form, that aroused all his sympathies. So it came about that he had tried to check the punishment with the words quoted at the beginning of this chapter.

Now he stood facing the brakeman who appeared quite willing for a minute to drop the lad he was maltreating and turn on the newcomer. Perhaps, though, there was something in Ralph’s eye that held him back. Old “King-pin” Stetson’s[8] son looked thoroughly business-like in his broad-brimmed woolen hat, corduroy jacket and trousers, stout hunting boots and flannel shirt, with a handkerchief loosely knotted about the neck. Evidently he had come prepared to rough it in the wild country in the midst of which the train had come to a halt.

His life and experiences in the strenuous country along the Mexican border had toughened Ralph’s muscles and bronzed his features, and he looked well equipped physically to carry out the confidence expressed in his cool, clear eyes.

“Who are you, anyhow?” the brakeman hurled at him, growing more aggressive as he saw some of his mates running toward him from the head of the long train where the two big Mogul locomotives were thundering impatiently.

“Never mind that for now. drop that boy and I’ll pay his fare to wherever he wants to go.”

“Well, you are a softy! Pay a tramp’s fare? Let me tell you, mister——”

[9]

“Say, going to hold this train all day?” demanded the conductor bustling up. “What’s all this?”

“This kid got on the train in the night some place. Bin ridin’ the blind baggage. I was giving him ‘what for’ when this other kid butts in,” explained the brakeman.

“I said I was willing to pay this boy’s fare rather than see him abused,” struck in Ralph, flushing slightly.

“Well, that’s fair and square,” said the conductor, “so long as he pays his fare, that’s all I care. But I ain’t goin’ to hold my train. Where d’ye want to go, boy?”

“This is Pine Pass, ain’t it?” demanded the ride stealer, whom the brakeman had now released.

“This is the Pass,—yes. Come, hurry up.”

“Then I’ve come all the fur I’m goin’.”

As if to signify that his interest was over, the conductor waved his hand to the engineers peering[10] from their cabs ahead. The brakemen scampered for their cars. The locomotives puffed and snorted and the long train began to move. As the conductor swung on he called back sarcastically:

“Sorry we couldn’t wait while you fixed it up. Wish you joy of your bargain.”

In another instant the train was swinging around into a long cut between deep, rocky walls. In yet another instant it was gone, and Ralph Stetson, with a rather puzzled expression on his good-looking face, stood confronting the scarecrow-like object he had rescued from the brakeman. In the tenement-house district of any large city the pitiful figure might not have looked out of place.

But here, in the Canadian Rockies, with a boiling, leaping torrent racing under a slender trestle, great scraps of rocks and pine and balsam-clad mountains towering above, and in the distance the mighty peaks of the Selkirks looming against[11] the clean-swept blue, the spectacle that this waif of the big towns presented seemed almost ludicrous in its contrast. Ralph felt it so at least, for he smiled a little as he looked at the disreputable figure before him and asked:

“What are you doing at Pine Pass?”

The question was certainly a natural one. Besides the tiny station, no human habitation was in sight. Above it, threatening to crush it seemingly, towered a precipice of dark colored rock. Beyond this rose mighty pines, cliffs, waterfalls and, finally, climbing fields of snow. Everywhere peaks and summits loomed with a solitary eagle wheeling far above. In the air was the thunderous voice of the torrent as it tumbled along under the spidery trestle beyond the station, and the sweet, clean fragrance of the pines.

“What’m I doin’ at Pine Pass?” The ragged youth repeated the question. “I-I’m sorry, mister, but I can’t tell yer.” He paused, and a strange, wistful look came into his eyes as he[12] gazed at the distant peaks, “I thought some time I’d get up among them mountains; but there’s a heap more of ’em than I calculated on.”

“How did you get here? Where did you come from?” pursued Ralph.

“Frum Noo York.” And then, answering the unspoken question, he continued, “You kin call me Jimmie, and ef you want ter know how I got yere, I jes’ beat it.”

“Beat it, eh? Tramped it, you mean?”

“Yep. Stole rides when I could. Walked when I couldn’t. Bin two munts er more, I reckin. Steamboats, freights, blin’ baggage, anyting.”

“And what did you think you’d do when you got here?”

“Work till I got some coin togedder. But it don’t look much as if there was any jobs fer a kid aroun’ here, does it?”

“It does not. What can you do?”

“Anyting; that’s on the level.”

[13]

“Hum; you wait here a minute, Jimmie. I don’t quite understand what brought you here, and if you don’t want to tell me I won’t ask you. But you wait here a minute and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Say, you will? Kin you put me to woik? Say, you’re all right, you are, mister. I’ll bet you’d have put that braky away in a couple of punches, big as he wuz.”

And the boy gazed admiringly after Ralph’s athletic form as the latter hastened toward the group at the end of the platform. They were standing beside what appeared to be a small mountain of baggage and they had just noticed his absence.

“Well, what under the sun——?” began Harry Ware, whose full name, H. D. Ware, was, of course, shortened at Stone fell College to Hardware.

“Simpering serpents, Ralph,” broke in Percy Simmons, who, equally, of course, was known to[14] his boyish chums as Persimmons, “grinning gargoyles, we knew this was to be a collecting trip, but you appear to have started by acquiring a scarecrow!”

“Hold on a minute, boys,” cried Ralph, half laughingly, for Persimmons’ odd way of talking and explosive exclamations made everyone who knew him smile. “Hold on; listen to what happened.”

The eldest member of the group, a tall and angular, but withal good-natured and kindly looking man with a pair of shell-rimmed spectacles perched across his bony nose, now struck in.

“Yes, boys; let us hear what Ralph has been up to now. I declare, since our experience along the Border I’m prepared for anything.”

“Even what may befall us in the Canadian Rockies, eh, Professor Wintergreen?” asked Ralph. “Well, that lad yonder, if I’m not much[15] mistaken, is our future deputy cook, bottlewasher, and midshipmate.”

They all stared at him. Persimmons was the first to recover his voice.

“Giggling gophers,” he gasped, “as if Hardware hadn’t brought along enough patent dingbats without your adding a live one to the collection!”