Twenty-Eight

            While we was in Bakersfield we headed out one day to collect different things to cook up and we forgot to say where we would meet and never did find each other again. I stayed around there for almost a week just looking for the fellow. I went westward but had no luck so I went on alone.

            I heard years later that he had stayed there and found a job and never did come back east. Years later I stopped in where he lived when we were in school but his folks weren't there anymore, different people had the house and no one knowed where they had went so that was the end of that boyhood friendship.

            Anyways, I was so close to Arizona that I went across the southeast corner of the stat just so I could say I was in it and headed back to the northern part of the state. The heat wasn't so bad but Idaho and Montana, the trains were finding their way over the Rocky Mountains and I had never seen so much hilly country and rock mountains. It was cooler weather all right. Some nights I was shivering and was thinking of the desert.

            There was plenty of cowboys but by now I had seen so many it didn't get me all excited like at first. There was quite a lot of nice big ranches and real big valleys after I did get over the mountains. I was alone now and missing my friend real bad. We had a lot of good days together in school and on the trip gone west. We were together all the days we skipped school. I used to go to his home quite often. I remember eating with him and his folks but there wasn't too much to do as he was alone at his age. His brother was a lot older and he didn't hang around with them much so we went our way. I don't remember much more about his home and we didn't stay there much.

            Anyways, I sure missed him now that things had ended so quick with us. The days was long and the trains seemed so slow now that I was used to them. I didn't make friends very easy and that made it bad. I was alone most of the time except when I got off to stop at the HoBo Jungles. The fellows there always called me over when they see me coming. They did that with everyone. They all was in the same boat, out of work and just traveling around looking for work and they seemed to want to be together.

            The only one during the day I was with very long was a girl dressed like a fellow and had a man's haircut. I was there three days before I found out she was coming back east too so we was together for a while, ten days, until she went in the other direction towards where she lived.   

            While we were together she would help find food and share things she got different. We slept the last two nights in the end of a reff car as she would not go to the HoBo Jungle. That was a train car like a box car for refrigeration or meat. It had a trap door on top at each end to fill with ice. It was four feet by eight feet across the end. When empty it was a good place to climb down in and sleep while riding at night. Her father was a coal miner in Kentucky and I didn't want to go down there at the time she left me.