But it was a night not
pleasant to remember. A dozen hoboes were ahead of us on top the
boilers, and it was too hot for all of us. To complete our misery, the
engineer would not let us stand around down below. He gave us our
choice of the boilers or the outside snow.

"You said you wanted to sleep, and so, damn you, sleep," said he to
me, when, frantic and beaten out by the heat, I came down into the
fire-room.

"Water," I gasped, wiping the sweat from my eyes, "water."

He pointed out of doors and assured me that down there somewhere in
the blackness I'd find the river. I started for the river, got lost in
the dark, fell into two or three drifts, gave it up, and returned
half-frozen to the top of the boilers. When I had thawed out, I was
thirstier than ever. Around me the hoboes were moaning, groaning,
sobbing, sighing, gasping, panting, rolling and tossing and
floundering heavily in their torment. We were so many lost souls
toasting on a griddle in hell, and the engineer, Satan Incarnate, gave
us the sole alternative of freezing in the outer cold. The Swede sat
up and anathematized passionately the wanderlust in man that sent him
tramping and suffering hardships such as that.

"When I get back to Chicago," he perorated, "I'm going to get a job
and stick to it till hell freezes over. Then I'll go tramping again."

And, such is the irony of fate, next day, when the wreck ahead was
cleared, the Swede and I pulled out of Evanston in the ice-boxes of an
"orange special," a fast freight laden with fruit from sunny
California. Of course, the ice-boxes were empty on account of the cold
weather, but that didn't make them any warmer for us. We entered them
through hatchways in the top of the car; the boxes were constructed of
galvanized iron, and in that biting weather were not pleasant to the
touch. We lay there, shivered and shook, and with chattering teeth
held a council wherein we decided that we'd stay by the ice-boxes day
and night till we got out of the inhospitable plateau region and down
into the Mississippi Valley.

But we must eat, and we decided that at the next division we would
throw our feet for grub and make a rush back to our ice-boxes. We
arrived in the town of Green River late in the afternoon, but too
early for supper. Before meal-time is the worst time for "battering"
back-doors; but we put on our nerve, swung off the side-ladders as the
freight pulled into the yards, and made a run for the houses.