But to return to the hoboes that pass in the night.  I remember one I met in California.  He was a Swede, but he had lived so long in the United States that one couldn’t guess his nationality.  He had to tell it on himself.  In fact, he had come to the United States when no more than a baby.  I ran into him first at the mountain town of Truckee.  “Which way, Bo?” was our greeting, and “Bound east” was the answer each of us gave.  Quite a bunch of “stiffs” tried to ride out the overland that night, and I lost the Swede in the shuffle.  Also, I lost the overland.

I arrived in Reno, Nevada, in a box-car that was promptly side-tracked.  It was a Sunday morning, and after I threw my feet for breakfast, I wandered over to the Piute camp to watch the Indians gambling.  And there stood the Swede, hugely interested.  Of course we got together.  He was the only acquaintance I had in that region, and I was his only acquaintance.  We rushed together like a couple of dissatisfied hermits, and together we spent the day, threw our feet for dinner, and late in the afternoon tried to “nail” the same freight.  But he was ditched, and I rode her out alone, to be ditched myself in the desert twenty miles beyond.

Of all desolate places, the one at which I was ditched was the limit.  It was called a flag-station, and it consisted of a shanty dumped inconsequentially into the sand and sagebrush.  A chill wind was blowing, night was coming on, and the solitary telegraph operator who lived in the shanty was afraid of me.  I knew that neither grub nor bed could I get out of him.  It was because of his manifest fear of me that I did not believe him when he told me that east-bound trains never stopped there.  Besides, hadn’t I been thrown off of an east-bound train right at that very spot not five minutes before?  He assured me that it had stopped under orders, and that a year might go by before another was stopped under orders.  He advised me that it was only a dozen or fifteen miles on to Wadsworth and that I’d better hike.  I elected to wait, however, and I had the pleasure of seeing two west-bound freights go by without stopping, and one east-bound freight.  I wondered if the Swede was on the latter.  It was up to me to hit the ties to Wadsworth, and hit them I did, much to the telegraph operator’s relief, for I neglected to burn his shanty and murder him.  Telegraph operators have much to be thankful for.  At the end of half a dozen miles, I had to get off the ties and let the east-bound overland go by.  She was going fast, but I caught sight of a dim form on the first “blind” that looked like the Swede.

That was the last I saw of him for weary days.  I hit the high places across those hundreds of miles of Nevada desert, riding the overlands at night, for speed, and in the day-time riding in box-cars and getting my sleep.  It was early in the year, and it was cold in those upland pastures.  Snow lay here and there on the level, all the mountains were shrouded in white, and at night the most miserable wind imaginable blew off from them.  It was not a land in which to linger.  And remember, gentle reader, the hobo goes through such a land, without shelter, without money, begging his way and sleeping at night without blankets.  This last is something that can be realized only by experience.