The rain began coming down in torrents, and in the darkness, unable to see our hands in front of our faces, like a pair of blind men we fumbled about for shelter.  Our instinct served us, for in no time we stumbled upon a saloon—­not a saloon that was open and doing business, not merely a saloon that was closed for the night, and not even a saloon with a permanent address, but a saloon propped up on big timbers, with rollers underneath, that was being moved from somewhere to somewhere.  The doors were locked.  A squall of wind and rain drove down upon us.  We did not hesitate.  Smash went the door, and in we went.

I have made some tough camps in my time, “carried the banner” in infernal metropolises, bedded in pools of water, slept in the snow under two blankets when the spirit thermometer registered seventy-four degrees below zero (which is a mere trifle of one hundred and six degrees of frost); but I want to say right here that never did I make a tougher camp, pass a more miserable night, than that night I passed with the Swede in the itinerant saloon at Council Bluffs.  In the first place, the building, perched up as it was in the air, had exposed a multitude of openings in the floor through which the wind whistled.  In the second place, the bar was empty; there was no bottled fire-water with which we could warm ourselves and forget our misery.  We had no blankets, and in our wet clothes, wet to the skin, we tried to sleep.  I rolled under the bar, and the Swede rolled under the table.  The holes and crevices in the floor made it impossible, and at the end of half an hour I crawled up on top the bar.  A little later the Swede crawled up on top his table.

And there we shivered and prayed for daylight.  I know, for one, that I shivered until I could shiver no more, till the shivering muscles exhausted themselves and merely ached horribly.  The Swede moaned and groaned, and every little while, through chattering teeth, he muttered, “Never again; never again.”  He muttered this phrase repeatedly, ceaselessly, a thousand times; and when he dozed, he went on muttering it in his sleep.

At the first gray of dawn we left our house of pain, and outside, found ourselves in a mist, dense and chill.  We stumbled on till we came to the railroad track.  I was going back to Omaha to throw my feet for breakfast; my companion was going on to Chicago.  The moment for parting had come.  Our palsied hands went out to each other.  We were both shivering.  When we tried to speak, our teeth chattered us back into silence.  We stood alone, shut off from the world; all that we could see was a short length of railroad track, both ends of which were lost in the driving mist.  We stared dumbly at each other, our clasped hands shaking sympathetically.  The Swede’s face was blue with the cold, and I know mine must have been.

“Never again what?” I managed to articulate.

Speech strove for utterance in the Swede’s throat; then faint and distant, in a thin whisper from the very bottom of his frozen soul, came the words:—­