“What!” exclaimed Mr. Minturn, “has that fellow had the audacity to come here for another job?  He has been discharged from his section this very week.”

“Then you know him, Minturn?  Come to think of it, he told me so.  How stupid I am to-day!  What is his name?”

“That he couldn’t have told you himself, if you had asked him, general.  He is a sort of waif of the switch-yard.  Jack Ingleside—­you knew Jack—­he was engineer on the old Greyhound, afterwards took to drink and went to the bad—­well, as I started to say, Jack found this boy in the caboose one morning as he was starting from Wood’s Hollow.  He wasn’t more than three years old, and how he got there is yet a mystery.  Jack took a fancy to him and gave him a home while he lived.  I think the young scamp still lives with the widow at Runaway Tavern.”

“He seems like a more than commonly smart boy.”

“Oh, he can appear well enough when he is a mind to.  But Mr. Gammon had to turn him off of his section for downright disobedience of orders.  Why, only yesterday he and a man named Baxter jumped on to the hand-car in the very teeth of the northern-bound mail, and came very near wrecking the train, to say nothing of ending their own worthless lives.”

“Oh, well, if you know the boy, of course you are more competent to judge of him than I. But I must confess he impressed me very favorably.  What news from Draco?”

So the august officials of the great Pen Yan gave no employment to the poor boy who had come so far for a situation, whether he deserved a better fate or not.

Meanwhile, the boy, unconscious that his fate had already been decided upon, hastened to the Fairfax Station, to take the homeward-bound train, which would be due in a few minutes.

The Pen Yan railway system forms upon the map of that part of the country a stupendous letter Y. The Fairfax Fork running north-northwest makes one branch of the arm meeting at the Big Y, as the junction is called—­the line of the upper arm, where the two tracks unite in one to reach across a mountainous, often sparsely-settled, country for over three hundred miles.  At the time we write it was a single-track road from the Big Y to its terminus.

The boy had to wait but a little while for the accommodation, which was on time, and stepping aboard, he was soon homeward bound.  He was absorbed in meditations when he was roused from his rather unpleasant reverie by the voice of the conductor, who had taken a seat near by him to chat a few minutes with a friend.

“It is a strange coincidence, Sam, and it puts me in mind of an adventure I had several years ago, and which came near punching my through ticket.”

“An adventure, Henry?  Give us the story.”

“As soon as we have passed Greenburn.  I shall have plenty of leisure then.”

Without dreaming how soon he should recall it with startling vividness, our hero, with a boy’s interest, listened to the conductor’s story: