g Vi more cheerfully.
"If you could spend your dime, Laddie, for something to eat, I'd feel a
whole lot better, I guess."

"Oh, I know what it is, Vi!" exclaimed the boy suddenly. "It's a
riddle."

"There you go again with your old riddles," sniffed Vi. "We can't eat
riddles."

"This is a good one," declared her brother cheerfully. "I'm going to ask
you: What looks like a dog-house, but isn't a dog-house?"

"I don't know. A hen-house, Laddie?"

"Pooh! They don't build hen-houses right down beside railroad tracks,
and just where a road crosses the tracks."

"Don't they? What do they build there, then?"

"Why," cried Laddie, quite delighted at his discovery, "a flagman's
house. That is what that little house is, Vi. A flagman stays there to
stop people from crossing the tracks when the train is coming. There!
There's the flagman now. See him?"

Just as Laddie spoke so excitedly a man came out of the little house,
and he bore a flag in his hand. Unnoticed by the children, there had
begun behind them a rumbling sound, and the rails between which they
walked began to hum. There was a train coming from the east.

The flagman unrolled his flag, and then he looked both ways along the
road that crossed the railroad. Then he turned and saw the two little
folks coming toward him. At sight of them he became much more excited
than the children were.

"Look out-a da train!" he shouted. "Look out-a da train!"

"What does he say?" asked Vi curiously.

The flagman began to wave his arms and the flag, and ran toward the
twins. He was a man with a very dark face, and his hair was black and
curly. But what interested Laddie and Vi most about the flagman was that
he wore big gold rings in his ears.

"Look out-a da train!" shouted the flagman again.

"I never saw a man wearing earrings before," said Vi soberly. "And he
acts awfully funny, doesn't he?"

The little girl began to feel a bit afraid of the strange man. She
stopped walking ahead and pulled back on her brother's hand.

"I guess he doesn't mean any harm," said Laddie doubtfully.

But drawn away by Vi, he stepped with her off the ties into the path
between the east-and west-bound tracks. The flagman stopped running, but
still gestured to the children. And just then, quite startling in the
twins' ears, sounded the long drawn shriek of a locomotive whistle.

Laddie and Vi glanced behind them. Around the curve, out of the railroad
cut in which their adventure had