pen and I
could see their infuriated faces in the shine of the lanterns. It was
all very simple to them. They had us cornered in the car, and they
were going to come in and man-handle us. They started. I didn't kick
anybody in the face. I jerked the opposite door open, and the gay-cat
and I went out. The train-crew took after us.

We went over--if I remember correctly--a stone fence. But I have no
doubts of recollection about where we found ourselves. In the darkness
I promptly fell over a grave-stone. The gay-cat sprawled over another.
And then we got the chase of our lives through that graveyard. The
ghosts must have thought we were going some. So did the train-crew,
for when we emerged from the graveyard and plunged across a road into
a dark wood, the shacks gave up the pursuit and went back to their
train. A little later that night the gay-cat and I found ourselves at
the well of a farmhouse. We were after a drink of water, but we
noticed a small rope that ran down one side of the well. We hauled it
up and found on the end of it a gallon-can of cream. And that is as
near as I got to the quarries of Rutland, Vermont.

When hoboes pass the word along, concerning a town, that "the bulls is
horstile," avoid that town, or, if you must, go through softly. There
are some towns that one must always go through softly. Such a town was
Cheyenne, on the Union Pacific. It had a national reputation for being
"horstile,"--and it was all due to the efforts of one Jeff Carr (if I
remember his name aright). Jeff Carr could size up the "front" of a
hobo on the instant. He never entered into discussion. In the one
moment he sized up the hobo, and in the next he struck out with both
fists, a club, or anything else he had handy. After he had man-handled
the hobo, he started him out of town with a promise of worse if he
ever saw him again. Jeff Carr knew the game. North, south, east, and
west to the uttermost confines of the United States (Canada and Mexico
included), the man-handled hoboes carried the word that Cheyenne was
"horstile." Fortunately, I never encountered Jeff Carr. I passed
through Cheyenne in a blizzard. There were eighty-four hoboes with me
at the time. The strength of numbers made us pretty nonchalant on
most things, but not on Jeff Carr. The connotation of "Jeff Carr"
stunned our imagination, numbed our virility, and the whole gang was
mortally scared of meeting him.

It rarely pays to stop and enter into explanation