Sometimes Ralph picked up as high as fifty cents a day, the average was about half that amount, but it was welcome pocket money. Occasionally, too, some odd job for waiting passengers or railroad employes would come up. It gave Ralph spending money with which to enjoy his vacation, and, besides, he liked the work.
Especially work around the railroad. What live boy in Stanley Junction did not--but then Ralph, as the express agent often said, "took to railroading like a duck to water."
It was a natural heritage. Ralph's father had been a first-class, all-around railroad man, and his son felt a justifiable pride in boasting that he was one of the pioneers who had made the railroad at Stanley Junction a possibility.
"Home, a quick bite or two, and then for the baseball game," said Ralph briskly, as he ran his eye across the network of rails, and beyond them to the waving tree tops and the village green. Preparing to make a run for it, Ralph suddenly halted.
A grimed repair man, tapping the wheels of the coaches, just then jerked back his hammer with a vivid:
"Hi, you!"
Ralph discerned that the man was not addressing him, for his eyes were staringly fixed under the trucks.
"Let me out!" sounded a muffled voice.
Ralph was interested, as there struggled from the cindered roadbed an erratic form. It was that of a boy about his own age. He judged this from the dress and figure, although one was tattered, and the other strained, crippled and bent. The face was a criss-cross streak of dust, oil and cinders.
"A stowaway!" yelled the repair man, excitedly waving his hammer. "Schmitt! Schmitt! this way!"