But a shack had seen me from the caboose, and at the next stop a few miles farther on, Rock Springs, the shack stuck his head into my box and said:  “Hit the grit, you son of a toad!  Hit the grit!” Also he grabbed me by the heels and dragged me out.  I hit the grit all right, and the orange special and the Swede rolled on without me.

Snow was beginning to fall.  A cold night was coming on.  After dark I hunted around in the railroad yards until I found an empty refrigerator car.  In I climbed—­not into the ice-boxes, but into the car itself.  I swung the heavy doors shut, and their edges, covered with strips of rubber, sealed the car air-tight.  The walls were thick.  There was no way for the outside cold to get in.  But the inside was just as cold as the outside.  How to raise the temperature was the problem.  But trust a “profesh” for that.  Out of my pockets I dug up three or four newspapers.  These I burned, one at a time, on the floor of the car.  The smoke rose to the top.  Not a bit of the heat could escape, and, comfortable and warm, I passed a beautiful night.  I didn’t wake up once.

In the morning it was still snowing.  While throwing my feet for breakfast, I missed an east-bound freight.  Later in the day I nailed two other freights and was ditched from both of them.  All afternoon no east-bound trains went by.  The snow was falling thicker than ever, but at twilight I rode out on the first blind of the overland.  As I swung aboard the blind from one side, somebody swung aboard from the other.  It was the boy who had run away from Oregon.

Now the first blind of a fast train in a driving snow-storm is no summer picnic.  The wind goes right through one, strikes the front of the car, and comes back again.  At the first stop, darkness having come on, I went forward and interviewed the fireman.  I offered to “shove” coal to the end of his run, which was Rawlins, and my offer was accepted.  My work was out on the tender, in the snow, breaking the lumps of coal with a sledge and shovelling it forward to him in the cab.  But as I did not have to work all the time, I could come into the cab and warm up now and again.

“Say,” I said to the fireman, at my first breathing spell, “there’s a little kid back there on the first blind.  He’s pretty cold.”

The cabs on the Union Pacific engines are quite spacious, and we fitted the kid into a warm nook in front of the high seat of the fireman, where the kid promptly fell asleep.  We arrived at Rawlins at midnight.  The snow was thicker than ever.  Here the engine was to go into the round-house, being replaced by a fresh engine.  As the train came to a stop, I dropped off the engine steps plump into the arms of a large man in a large overcoat.  He began asking me questions, and I promptly demanded who he was.  Just as promptly he informed me that he was the sheriff.  I drew in my horns and listened and answered.