For a week that car was trundled southward, shifted, laid over, and manipulated after the manner of rolling stock, but Chicken stuck to it, leaving it only at necessary times to satisfy his hunger and thirst.  He knew it must go down to the cattle country, and San Antonio, in the heart of it, was his goal.  There the air was salubrious and mild; the people indulgent and long-suffering.  The bartenders there would not kick him.  If he should eat too long or too often at one place they would swear at him as if by rote and without heat.  They swore so drawlingly, and they rarely paused short of their full vocabulary, which was copious, so that Chicken had often gulped a good meal during the process of the vituperative prohibition.  The season there was always spring-like; the plazas were pleasant at night, with music and gaiety; except during the slight and infrequent cold snaps one could sleep comfortably out of doors in case the interiors should develop inhospitability.

At Texarkana his car was switched to the I. and G. N. Then still southward it trailed until, at length, it crawled across the Colorado bridge at Austin, and lined out, straight as an arrow, for the run to San Antonio.

When the freight halted at that town Chicken was fast asleep.  In ten minutes the train was off again for Laredo, the end of the road.  Those empty cattle cars were for distribution along the line at points from which the ranches shipped their stock.

When Chicken awoke his car was stationary.  Looking out between the slats he saw it was a bright, moonlit night.  Scrambling out, he saw his car with three others abandoned on a little siding in a wild and lonesome country.  A cattle pen and chute stood on one side of the track.  The railroad bisected a vast, dim ocean of prairie, in the midst of which Chicken, with his futile rolling stock, was as completely stranded as was Robinson with his land-locked boat.

A white post stood near the rails.  Going up to it, Chicken read the letters at the top, S. A. 90.  Laredo was nearly as far to the south.  He was almost a hundred miles from any town.  Coyotes began to yelp in the mysterious sea around him.  Chicken felt lonesome.  He had lived in Boston without an education, in Chicago without nerve, in Philadelphia without a sleeping place, in New York without a pull, and in Pittsburg sober, and yet he had never felt so lonely as now.

Suddenly through the intense silence, he heard the whicker of a horse.  The sound came from the side of the track toward the east, and Chicken began to explore timorously in that direction.  He stepped high along the mat of curly mesquit grass, for he was afraid of everything there might be in this wilderness—­snakes, rats, brigands, centipedes, mirages, cowboys, fandangoes, tarantulas, tamales—­he had read of them in the story papers.  Rounding a clump of prickly pear that reared high its fantastic and menacing array of rounded heads, he was struck to shivering terror by a snort and a thunderous plunge, as the horse, himself startled, bounded away some fifty yards, and then resumed his grazing.  But here was the one thing in the desert that Chicken did not fear.  He had been reared on a farm; he had handled horses, understood them, and could ride.