A freight train stood on the track in front of the boy, a quarter of a mile away. A mad impulse came to him as he ran, and he yielded to it. A boy with a grievance, or a boy with a sore toe, or a boy with fear at his back, cannot fashion his conduct after the beautiful principles laid down in Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Data of Ethics." So when Jimmy Sears came to the freight train that blocked his flight, he darted down the track until he was out of sight of any possible pursuers in the street. He clambered breathlessly into a coal car, and snuggled down into a corner inside a little strip of shade, and panted like a hunted rabbit. A sickening pain throbbed up from his toe. The train moved slowly at first, and Jimmy knew that he could not hide from the train men in a coal car. On a banter from Piggy Pennington and Bud Perkins Jimmy had ridden on the brake-beam while the switch engine was pulling freight cars about the railroad yards. He had a vague idea that midway of the train, between two box cars, would be a safe place. When the train began to increase its speed, Jimmy climbed up the side of a cattle car and ran along the roof. He had gone three car-lengths and was about to make his third jump, when he saw the angry face of his father, who appeared on the depot platform. Instinctively the boy darted to the other side of the car-roof. His jump fell short. The father saw his son's head go down, and for an awful minute Henry Sears heard the lumbering train rumble by. In the first second of that minute, the frantic man listened for a scream. He heard none. Then slowly he sank upon a baggage truck. He was helpless. A paralysis of horror was upon him. Car after car jolted along. At last the yellow caboose flashed by him. Half of the longest second Henry Sears ever knew passed before he dared turn his eyes toward the place on the track where his son went down. Then he looked, and saw only the cinder track and the shining rails. But an instant later he heard a familiar whoop, and, staring around, saw Jimmy sitting on a load of wheat that was standing between the railroad tracks. In this the boy had fallen after his sidewise jump had thrown him from the moving train. When Henry Sears saw his son, Jimmy was holding his foot, jiggling it vigorously and roaring, moved half by the hysteria of fright and half by the pain of a fresh laceration of his bruised toe. The boy's face was black with coal-dust and wheat chaff, and tears were striping his features grotesquely. The palsy of terror loosened its steel bands from the father's limbs, and he ran to the wheat-wagon. Jimmy Sears, for all he or his father know, may have floated to the ground from the wagon bed. But a moment later, in a frenzy wherein anger furnished only a sub-conscious motor, and joy pumped wildly at the expanding valves of his blissful heart, Henry Sears took his thirteen-year-old son across his knee, and spanked him in a delirium of ecstasy; spanked