On the morning of the fourth day they struck a railroad for the first time since they left it.  It proved to be the St. Paul-Omaha main line of the Chicago and Northwestern System, and as luck would have it, while they were walking up a steep grade a stock train loaded with sheep passed them so slowly that they found it an easy matter to swing themselves onto it and they climbed through an open end-door into one of the stock cars, in which, hidden amongst the sheep, they managed to hobo unmolested through many division points where they bought provisions while the sheep were being fed and watered.  On the morning of the third day they landed, not at Chicago, as Kansas Shorty had until now made Jim believe, but at Denver, the beautiful capital city of Colorado.

While they walked about the streets of the city, Kansas Shorty met a friend whom he addressed as “Nevada Bill,” and who as soon as the former told him that Jim was “his road kid”, placed his hand under the boy’s chin and after sizing the lad up just as a butcher would a beef, he whispered:  “Well, well, Kansas Shorty, I see you have brought a fine ‘broncho’ to town with you.  I hope that you will be able to make a first-class road kid of him.”  To which coarse remarks Kansas Shorty laughingly replied:  “Never fret, Nevada Bill, I have trained many a road kid into good plingers.”  Nevada Bill then told him where a gang of plingers had their headquarters, and as Kansas Shorty seemed to be acquainted with most of them whose monickers Nevada Bill repeated to him, he decided to pay this gang a visit.

They wended their way through Denver’s lowest slums and finally arrived at the headquarters of this gang of professional tramp beggars, who always prefer cities in which to ply their trade, and only strike out to visit smaller places and the country at large—­and then only in separate pairs—­when too many of them drifted into the same city, so as to make combing the public for money an unprofitable business, or when the police made a general raid upon vagrants of their class.

This last reason was hardly to be feared, for as in this gang’s case, they invariably have their headquarters in the building above a slum saloon, whose proprietor would and could not be in business very long unless he knew how to protect his lodgers against police interference, as a gang’s quarters needed to be raided only one time, and ever after all plingers in the land would give this unsafe “dump,” as tramps call this class of hangout, a wide berth, as this raid sufficiently proved to them that this slum saloon was not properly “protected.”

Up the well-worn stairway they climbed and when they reached the second floor of the building Kansas Shorty knocked on a door, which was only opened to them after he had given an account of his identity, and when they entered the room, that by another open door was connected with an adjoining second one, Jim, to his complete surprise found himself in the company of eight grown, burly hoboes of the roughest imaginable type and almost a school class of road kids.