At Ames’ Monument, at the summit of the Rockies,—­I forget the altitude,—­the shack came forward for the last time.

“Say, Bo,” he said, “you see that freight side-tracked over there to let us go by?”

I saw.  It was on the next track, six feet away.  A few feet more in that storm and I could not have seen it.

“Well, the ‘after-push’ of Kelly’s Army is in one of them cars.  They’ve got two feet of straw under them, and there’s so many of them that they keep the car warm.”

His advice was good, and I followed it, prepared, however, if it was a “con game” the shack had given me, to take the blind as the overland pulled out.  But it was straight goods.  I found the car—­a big refrigerator car with the leeward door wide open for ventilation.  Up I climbed and in.  I stepped on a man’s leg, next on some other man’s arm.  The light was dim, and all I could make out was arms and legs and bodies inextricably confused.  Never was there such a tangle of humanity.  They were all lying in the straw, and over, and under, and around one another.  Eighty-four husky hoboes take up a lot of room when they are stretched out.  The men I stepped on were resentful.  Their bodies heaved under me like the waves of the sea, and imparted an involuntary forward movement to me.  I could not find any straw to step upon, so I stepped upon more men.  The resentment increased, so did my forward movement.  I lost my footing and sat down with sharp abruptness.  Unfortunately, it was on a man’s head.  The next moment he had risen on his hands and knees in wrath, and I was flying through the air.  What goes up must come down, and I came down on another man’s head.

What happened after that is very vague in my memory.  It was like going through a threshing-machine.  I was bandied about from one end of the car to the other.  Those eighty-four hoboes winnowed me out till what little was left of me, by some miracle, found a bit of straw to rest upon.  I was initiated, and into a jolly crowd.  All the rest of that day we rode through the blizzard, and to while the time away it was decided that each man was to tell a story.  It was stipulated that each story must be a good one, and, furthermore, that it must be a story no one had ever heard before.  The penalty for failure was the threshing-machine.  Nobody failed.  And I want to say right here that never in my life have I sat at so marvellous a story-telling debauch.  Here were eighty-four men from all the world—­I made eighty-five; and each man told a masterpiece.  It had to be, for it was either masterpiece or threshing-machine.

Late in the afternoon we arrived in Cheyenne.  The blizzard was at its height, and though the last meal of all of us had been breakfast, no man cared to throw his feet for supper.  All night we rolled on through the storm, and next day found us down on the sweet plains of Nebraska and still rolling.  We were out of the storm and the mountains.  The blessed sun was shining over a smiling land, and we had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours.  We found out that the freight would arrive about noon at a town, if I remember right, that was called Grand Island.