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Updated: October 14, 2025
When we had run about thirty miles, and every thing was going well, Colonel Williams concluded to walk back, on the top of the box-cars, to a passenger car which was attached to the rear of the train and occupied by the officers. This somewhat hazardous move he commenced just as we struck a stretch of trestlework which carried the road over a gorge some fifty feet deep.
Grabbing my kit, I slung myself aboard and reached a station by nightfall, where I got off and waited for the through train, which finally came along. The fellows on board with whom I had become acquainted on the way down, told me the hospital orderly was searching for me high and low. After another wearisome day aboard those unspeakable box-cars, I reached the base.
On a newly-made siding parallel to the main-line tracks, and in the center of a rolling vista of yellow-brown prairie, stood a trampish-looking train of weather-beaten passenger coaches and box-cars. In the sides of the latter small windows had been cut, and from the roofs projected chimneys.
The fugitives, thus finding themselves closely pursued, uncoupled two of the box-cars from the engine, to impede the progress of the pursuers. Fuller hastily coupled them to the front of his engine, and pushed them ahead of him, to the first turn-out or siding, where they were left, thus preventing the collision the adventurers intended.
Afterward he declared that the suspense which followed while the long box-cars rolled by was horrible, for nothing could be seen, and the two men shivered with the uncertainty as to what might be happening beneath the grinding wheels. When the last car passed both leapt down upon the track, and a man joined them holding a lantern aloft.
And on nearly every siding were standing long trains of box-cars, bedded with straw and filled with these same wiry, brown-faced little men in their rat-gray uniforms, being hurried to the fighting in the north. It reminded me of those long cattle-trains one sees in the Middle West, bound for the Chicago slaughter-houses. Rome in war-time is about as cheerful as Coney Island in midwinter.
"Here's a bunch of farmers with guns!" yelled the man from the flat-car. Olsen halted his force near one of the detached lines of box-cars, which he probably meant to take advantage of in case of a fight. "Hey, you I.W.W.'s!" he shouted, with all his might. There was a moment's silence. "There's no I.W.W.'s here," replied the authoritative voice.
Within the car was an American of fifty, thin and drawn, with huddled shoulders, who had been beaten by rebel forces in Zacatecas and robbed of his worldly wealth of $13,000 hidden in vain in his socks. Numbers of United States box-cars jolted across the country end to end with Mexican; the "B. & O." behind the "Norte de Mejico," the "N. Y. C.," followed by the "Central Mejicano."
Still, whatever my own conviction, it was my business to bring him before his accuser. After a time he recovered sufficiently to ask permission to change his clothes, and disappeared in one of the resident box-cars. The boy was already being fed in another. Had my prisoners been of almost any one of the other seventy-one nationalities I should not have thought of letting them out of my sight.
Besides the first-class and second-class coaches, most trains carry box-cars, very much like cattle-cars and without seats of any kind, for third-class passengers. And I don't recall having seen one yet that wasn't chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group of Americans would be in new automobiles.
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