“Now, tenderfoot, don’t get fresh with me,” warned Pete sullenly.

“I haven’t an idea of that sort in the world, sir,” Tom assured him.  “Do you happen to know the hiding-place of the camp?”

“What do you want of the camp?” insisted Pete.

“Well, sir, since you’re so determined to protect the camp from questionable strangers,” Tom continued, “I don’t know that it will do any harm to inform you that we are two greenhorns—–­tenderfeet, I believe, is your more elegant word—–­who have been engaged to join the engineers’ crowd and break in at the business.”

“Cub engineers, eh, tenderfoot?”

“That’s the full size of our pretensions, sir,” Tom admitted.

“Rich men’s sons, coming out to learn the ways of the Rookies?” questioned Bad Pete, showing his first sign of interest in them.

“Not quite as bad as that,” Tom Reade urged.  “We’re wholly respectable, sir.  We have even had to work hard in order to raise money for our railway fare out to Colorado.”

Bad Pete’s look of interest in them faded.

“Huh!” he remarked.  “Then you’re no good either why.”

“That’s true, I’m afraid,” sighed Tom.  “However, can you tell us the way to the camp?”

From one pocket Bad Pete produced a cigarette paper and from another tobacco.  Slowly he rolled and lighted a cigarette, in the meantime seeming hardly aware of the existence of the tenderfeet.  At last, however, he turned to the Colorado boy and observed: 

“Pardner, I reckon you’d better drive on with these tenderfeet before I drop them over the cliff.  They spoil the view.  Ye know where Bandy’s Gulch is?”

“Sure,” nodded the Colorado boy.

“Ye’ll find the railroad outfit jest about a mile west o’ there, camped close to the main trail.”

“I’m sure obliged to you,” nodded the Colorado boy, stepping up to his seat and gathering in the reins.

“And so are we, sir,” added Tom politely.

“Hold your blizzard in until I ask ye to talk,” retorted Bad Pete haughtily.  “Drive on with your cheap baggage, pardner.”

“Cheap baggage, are we?” mused Tom, when the wagon had left Bad Pete some two hundred feet to the rear.  “My, but I feel properly humiliated!”

“How many men has Bad Pete killed?” inquired Harry in an awed voice.

“Don’t know as he ever killed any,” replied the Colorado boy, “but I’m not looking for trouble with any man that always carries a revolver at his belt and goes around looking for someone to give him an excuse to shoot.  The pistol might go off, even by accident.”

“Are there many like Mr. Peter Bad in these hills nowadays?” Tom inquired.

“You’ll find the foothills back near Denver or Pueblo,” replied the Colorado youth coldly “You’re up in the mountains now.”

“Well, are there many like Peter Bad in these mountains?” Tom amended.

“Not many,” admitted their driver.  “The old breed is passing.  You see, in these days, we have the railroad, public schools, newspapers, the telegraph, electric light, courts and the other things that go with civilization.”