Up to this time no one had given Stacy Brown a thought, but as the party was leaving the sleeper something awakened him. Then Stacy heard someone say, “robbers!” The fat boy tumbled out into the aisle in his pajamas.
“Wha—what is it?” he demanded sleepily.
“The train is held up,” answered Grace.
“Oh! Wow!”
“Yes, and Tom, Hippy and Mr. Ford, with two other passengers, have just gone out by the rear door to see what they can do to help us out,” announced Miss Briggs. “You are a fine brave fellow to sleep through all this uproar.”
“They have gone to capture the bandit outfit and get their heads shot off for their pains,” jeered the voice of a male passenger from the forward end of the car.
“You’re a brave man, aren’t you?” chided Emma, directing her remark at Stacy.
The fat boy blinked sleepily, then all of a sudden he woke up to a fuller realization of the situation. Emma’s remark had passed unnoticed, but the taunt of the cowardly passenger had sent the blood pounding to Stacy’s temples. The boy snatched his revolver from his grip and buckled on the holster, starting for the rear door at a run.
“We can’t all be heroes,” he flung back at the passenger who had jeered at the Overlanders. “Some of us are born cowards with a stripe of yellow a yard wide through us. Go to sleep, children! I’ll bag the lot of ’em and fetch ’em back for you to look at.”
Stacy fell through the opening in the platform, the trap-door still being open. In the fall, he bumped all the way from the platform to the ground, where he fetched up heavily in a sitting posture.