A locomotive was pulling
it, giving the children a strange ride.

CHAPTER XIII

NUTTY, THE TRAMP

Bunny and Sue were so surprised when they found that they were being
hauled away in the closed and dark freight car that for a time after
their first startled cries they said nothing. They remained standing
hand in hand in the middle of the dark, empty space, swaying to and fro
as the train bumped over the uneven rails.

"Oh, Bunny!" gasped Sue in a little whisper, "where do you s'pose we're
going?"

"I don't know," he answered. "But it's somewhere. We're having a ride,
anyhow."

This was true enough. They were moving along quite swiftly now, but not
nearly so smoothly or so comfortably as when they had ridden in the
parlor car or the sleeping car.

"Will mother and daddy come?" asked Sue, her voice a bit shaky because
she was half crying.

"I--I don't guess they will," her brother answered. "Daddy is uptown,
seeing a man, and mother was on the station bench when we crawled in
this car to get the cat."

"Oh!" exclaimed Sue, and then she tried to peer through the gloom to see
Bunny. At first, after the door had slid shut, she could only dimly see
where her brother stood, even though she had hold of his hand. But now,
as her eyes became used to the darkness, she could make out that Bunny
was standing close beside her.

What had happened was this. The children had climbed into an empty
freight car that was standing on a siding, as the extra tracks around a
railroad station are called. The freight had been taken from the car
some days before, and, being empty, it was needed to be loaded again.

A switch engine, which was "picking up empties," as the railroad men
call it, had backed down the track and had been fastened to several cars
in addition to the one containing Bunny Brown and his sister Sue. The
railroad men, of course, did not know that the children were in the car.
And they knew nothing about the pussy cat. They supposed the freight car
was empty.

The freight engine, in backing down the track to be coupled, or
fastened, to the cars, had banged into them rather hard. This hard bang
had slid shut the sliding door, making Bunny, Sue, and the cat
prisoners.

"Oh!" suddenly exclaimed Sue after a period of silence.

"What's the matter?" asked Bunny, for, having hold of his sister's hand,
he could feel her jump.

"Something rubbed up against my legs," she answered.

"It's the cat!" exclaimed Bu