In the early evening I came down to the depot at Ogden.  The overland of the Union Pacific was pulling east, and I was bent on making connections.  Out in the tangle of tracks ahead of the engine I encountered a figure slouching through the gloom.  It was the Swede.  We shook hands like long-lost brothers, and discovered that our hands were gloved.  “Where’d ye glahm ’em?” I asked.  “Out of an engine-cab,” he answered; “and where did you?” “They belonged to a fireman,” said I; “he was careless.”

We caught the blind as the overland pulled out, and mighty cold we found it.  The way led up a narrow gorge between snow-covered mountains, and we shivered and shook and exchanged confidences about how we had covered the ground between Reno and Ogden.  I had closed my eyes for only an hour or so the previous night, and the blind was not comfortable enough to suit me for a snooze.  At a stop, I went forward to the engine.  We had on a “double-header” (two engines) to take us over the grade.

The pilot of the head engine, because it “punched the wind,” I knew would be too cold; so I selected the pilot of the second engine, which was sheltered by the first engine.  I stepped on the cowcatcher and found the pilot occupied.  In the darkness I felt out the form of a young boy.  He was sound asleep.  By squeezing, there was room for two on the pilot, and I made the boy budge over and crawled up beside him.  It was a “good” night; the “shacks” (brakemen) didn’t bother us, and in no time we were asleep.  Once in a while hot cinders or heavy jolts aroused me, when I snuggled closer to the boy and dozed off to the coughing of the engines and the screeching of the wheels.

The overland made Evanston, Wyoming, and went no farther.  A wreck ahead blocked the line.  The dead engineer had been brought in, and his body attested the peril of the way.  A tramp, also, had been killed, but his body had not been brought in.  I talked with the boy.  He was thirteen years old.  He had run away from his folks in some place in Oregon, and was heading east to his grandmother.  He had a tale of cruel treatment in the home he had left that rang true; besides, there was no need for him to lie to me, a nameless hobo on the track.

And that boy was going some, too.  He couldn’t cover the ground fast enough.  When the division superintendents decided to send the overland back over the way it had come, then up on a cross “jerk” to the Oregon Short Line, and back along that road to tap the Union Pacific the other side of the wreck, that boy climbed upon the pilot and said he was going to stay with it.  This was too much for the Swede and me.  It meant travelling the rest of that frigid night in order to gain no more than a dozen miles or so.  We said we’d wait till the wreck was cleared away, and in the meantime get a good sleep.