e night had turned cold, and heavy
wind-squalls, accompanied by rain, were chilling and wetting us. Many
police were guarding us and herding us to the camp. The Swede and I
watched our chance and made a successful get-away.

The rain began coming down in torrents, and in the darkness, unable to
see our hands in front of our faces, like a pair of blind men we
fumbled about for shelter. Our instinct served us, for in no time we
stumbled upon a saloon--not a saloon that was open and doing business,
not merely a saloon that was closed for the night, and not even a
saloon with a permanent address, but a saloon propped up on big
timbers, with rollers underneath, that was being moved from somewhere
to somewhere. The doors were locked. A squall of wind and rain drove
down upon us. We did not hesitate. Smash went the door, and in we
went.

I have made some tough camps in my time, "carried the banner" in
infernal metropolises, bedded in pools of water, slept in the snow
under two blankets when the spirit thermometer registered seventy-four
degrees below zero (which is a mere trifle of one hundred and six
degrees of frost); but I want to say right here that never did I make
a tougher camp, pass a more miserable night, than that night I passed
with the Swede in the itinerant saloon at Council Bluffs. In the first
place, the building, perched up as it was in the air, had exposed a
multitude of openings in the floor through which the wind whistled. In
the second place, the bar was empty; there was no bottled fire-water
with which we could warm ourselves and forget our misery. We had no
blankets, and in our wet clothes, wet to the skin, we tried to sleep.
I rolled under the bar, and the Swede rolled under the table. The
holes and crevices in the floor made it impossible, and at the end of
half an hour I crawled up on top the bar. A little later the Swede
crawled up on top his table.

And there we shivered and prayed for daylight. I know, for one, that I
shivered until I could shiver no more, till the shivering muscles
exhausted themselves and merely ached horribly. The Swede moaned and
groaned, and every little while, through chattering teeth, he
muttered, "Never again; never again." He muttered this phrase
repeatedly, ceaselessly, a thousand times; and when he dozed, he went
on muttering it in his sleep.

At the first gray of dawn we left our house of pain, and outside,
found ourselves in a mist, dense and chill. We stumbled on