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Updated: May 22, 2025
He saw no change since his last visit to this big, alms-giving, long-suffering city of the South, the cold weather paradise of the tramps. The levee where his freight-car stood was pimpled with dark bulks of merchandise. The breeze reeked with the well-remembered, sickening smell of the old tarpaulins that covered bales and barrels.
One day I rode one hundred miles in an automobile and spoke in five different towns. Another day I had to make a journey in a freight-car. It was, with a few exceptions, the roughest traveling I had yet known, and it took me six hours to reach my destination.
"What is it?" asked Cynthia, thankful for any awakening symptom of interest in her difficult friend. "Why, this," repeated Joyce with great gravity. "'If it takes an elephant ten minutes to put on a white vest, how many pancakes will it take to shingle a freight-car?" Cynthia's indignation was rapidly waxing hotter but she made one more tremendous effort to control it.
By its glow he recognized his father's huge frame, back to him, and the burly Neuman on the other side, and Glidden, whose dark face was working as he talked. These three were sitting, evidently on a flat pile of ties, and the other two men stood behind. Kurt could not make out the meaning of the low voices. Pressing closer to the freight-car, he cautiously and noiselessly advanced.
I was working for a blamed hard boss, and it doesn't matter why I quit without getting my wages out of him, but he wasn't feeling good when I lit out behind a freight-car. By bad luck, there was a trooper handy when a train-hand found me at a lonely side-track. Well, that policeman didn't know what to do with me.
A glance showed him the coast was clear. Running across the tracks, he joined Lane, who was waiting for him behind the freight-car with impatience. In silence they mounted their horses. For a short distance McKee led the way upon the railroad-track, in order to leave no hoof-prints, and then struck across the desert toward the hills in the south. "Why did you shoot?" gasped Lane.
The houses had in common the form of a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter or longer, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of stovepipe softly smoking from its roof.
The man who stood in the middle of the freight-car, looking down in wonder at the fugitives, was a tall vagabond of the most picturesque type. No ragamuffin was ever so tattered and torn as this rakish individual.
Captain Eri, alone of the trio, got any amusement out of the situation. He pretended to see in Captain Jerry an impatient bridegroom and administered comfort in large doses by suggesting that, in all probability, there had been so many replies that it had been found necessary to charter a freight-car to bring them down. "Cheer up, Jerry!" he said.
For what possible reason it slowed up on approaching the freight-car nobody ever knew; but the fact remains that it did, just as Jericho Bob laid his wicked black paw on the turkey's tail.
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