I FIRED HIM OUT
of that, but when I was collecting tickets for Mimico I found him sound asleep in a cushioned chair in a first-class coach. I kicked him this time, but when we got to the Queen’s wharf he jumped down from the top of one of the coaches and disappeared in the darkness. Oh, he was a thoroughbred, I tell you. When I was a freight conductor I used to have a lot of trouble with them. I soon was able to distinguish between the regular tramp and the poor fellow who was in a hole and trying to get home to his friends. That kind of a man I would give a lift to, but the others, you bet, I give them the grand bounce every time. I have caught them riding astride of the bumpers; I have caught them under the car swinging by the rods; I have caught them in the bonded cars, in the cattle cars, anywhere they could get, and always bounced them. They are a funny crowd.”
“Have you much trouble with gamblers and crooks on the cars?”
“Not much now, but we used to, though. The line from Detroit east is still infested with them. They are confidence men and three-card monte players chiefly. You know what three-card monte is, and how it is worked, don’t you? Well, one night a man rushed into the car where I was and told me he had been swindled at cards. I went out, and when I entered the coach where the deed had been done three men rose from their seats, darted to the other end of the train and jumped off. We were going at the rate of forty miles an hour through a rough country, and I was sure they would be killed, but I never heard of them after—they escaped by a miracle. On another division of the road, however, a gambler jumped off and paid the penalty of his crookedness by breaking his neck.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
MILLIE’S FIVE CENT PIECE.
While looking over his exchanges the other day The News editor clipped from the Switchellville Recorder a two-column article with five headings, the first of which was “Kidnapped,” in flaring letters. The article, dealing as it did with an erring woman, who had fled to the city, seemed to him to touch in some way or other the night side of city life, and in that connection interested him. It led off as follows: “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, but few are called upon to bear as much trouble as our wealthy but unfortunate fellow-townsman, Mr. Switchell. All will remember when he brought home to his handsome residence a beautiful wife. None will forget the advent of his little daughter. Everyone was sorry when he was prostrated with fever, and recovered only to find himself almost entirely deaf, or “very hard of hearing,” as the phrase goes; but the climax of sympathy was reached two months ago, when his young wife, after eight years of married life, grew tired of her deaf husband and eloped with Dr. Clarke, a man who has only been known to the people of this village one year, but who in that time has contrived to swindle almost every one of them. But a still greater blow has fallen upon him. His little daughter Millie, who had all her mother’s beauty combined with her father’s integrity, and a certain sweetness of her own, has disappeared. The neighboring country has been diligently searched, without result, and the conclusion is inevitable that the child has been kidnapped by her