We slept that night over the boilers in an electric-lighting plant.  How we discovered that “kipping” place I can’t remember.  We must have just headed for it, instinctively, as horses head for water or carrier-pigeons head for the home-cote.  But it was a night not pleasant to remember.  A dozen hoboes were ahead of us on top the boilers, and it was too hot for all of us.  To complete our misery, the engineer would not let us stand around down below.  He gave us our choice of the boilers or the outside snow.

“You said you wanted to sleep, and so, damn you, sleep,” said he to me, when, frantic and beaten out by the heat, I came down into the fire-room.

“Water,” I gasped, wiping the sweat from my eyes, “water.”

He pointed out of doors and assured me that down there somewhere in the blackness I’d find the river.  I started for the river, got lost in the dark, fell into two or three drifts, gave it up, and returned half-frozen to the top of the boilers.  When I had thawed out, I was thirstier than ever.  Around me the hoboes were moaning, groaning, sobbing, sighing, gasping, panting, rolling and tossing and floundering heavily in their torment.  We were so many lost souls toasting on a griddle in hell, and the engineer, Satan Incarnate, gave us the sole alternative of freezing in the outer cold.  The Swede sat up and anathematized passionately the wanderlust in man that sent him tramping and suffering hardships such as that.

“When I get back to Chicago,” he perorated, “I’m going to get a job and stick to it till hell freezes over.  Then I’ll go tramping again.”

And, such is the irony of fate, next day, when the wreck ahead was cleared, the Swede and I pulled out of Evanston in the ice-boxes of an “orange special,” a fast freight laden with fruit from sunny California.  Of course, the ice-boxes were empty on account of the cold weather, but that didn’t make them any warmer for us.  We entered them through hatchways in the top of the car; the boxes were constructed of galvanized iron, and in that biting weather were not pleasant to the touch.  We lay there, shivered and shook, and with chattering teeth held a council wherein we decided that we’d stay by the ice-boxes day and night till we got out of the inhospitable plateau region and down into the Mississippi Valley.

But we must eat, and we decided that at the next division we would throw our feet for grub and make a rush back to our ice-boxes.  We arrived in the town of Green River late in the afternoon, but too early for supper.  Before meal-time is the worst time for “battering” back-doors; but we put on our nerve, swung off the side-ladders as the freight pulled into the yards, and made a run for the houses.  We were quickly separated; but we had agreed to meet in the ice-boxes.  I had bad luck at first; but in the end, with a couple of “hand-outs” poked into my shirt, I chased for the train.  It was pulling out and going fast.  The particular refrigerator-car in which we were to meet had already gone by, and half a dozen cars down the train from it I swung on to the side-ladders, went up on top hurriedly, and dropped down into an ice-box.