thinking I was drunk.

* * * * *

I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown
package out of my inside pocket--the brown paper on which I had
inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal,
and prostitute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind
bars.

I looked them over again. With all their smut and filth, they were yet
full of naive folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as
tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby.

* * * * *

The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up. A heavy wind mixed with
driving wet ... chilly ... I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was
soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the
comparative comfort of my cell again....

The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along. I made a run for
it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made
a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one
foot--luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen
underneath--and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.

Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the bumpers did I realise
that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.

Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train. My one idea to
regain the MSS. I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and
over. I groped up and down. And tears rained from my eyes when I
understood those rhymes were lost forever....

It was midnight before I caught another freight. I climbed wearily into
an empty box car while the freight was standing still. I was seen. A
brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I
was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the
freight to be under way.

"Come on out with you! Hit the grit!" commanded the "shack" grimly.

I rose. I came to the door. I hated him in my heart, but quite simply
and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking
him to let me ride, in the name of God.

He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.

* * * * *

All night long I rode ... bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump! All
night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would
achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of impri