He might have said more, but at that instant from the trail ahead, came a series of shouts[54] and yells that made it appear as if a troop of rampant Indians was on the war-path. The sharp crack of a rifle sounded, followed by silence.
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 bioderma matricium , 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.&rdquo ;