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The Border Boys in the Canadian Rockies
The Border Boys in the Canadian Rockies
CHAPTER I
THE BOY FROM NOWHERE
“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.
“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, 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.