Twenty-One

            The next train we caught, we had asked a fellow when our train would come out of the yard going our way. He told us but forgot to tell us it would be the second one and we took the first one. We rode all the way back across Illinois almost to the Indiana state line and a lot farther south We just had to keep going and around the line into Evansville, Kentucky where we would get a train going west.

            Kentucky is were we seen tobacco sheds and fields the first time, and the fellow we stopped to get something to eat, took us out and showed us there wagons and how the tobacco was hung up to dry. He let us sleep that night in the barn where the horses were kept. They had a lot of horses back them days. There was no tractors yet.

            Anyways, we where there a couple of days, doing odd jobs for him and had three or four good meals. They wanted us to stay longer but we just had to go. They packed some sandwiches for us to take along.

            The southern tip of Illinois is narrow so ti was only about a day and a half 'til we were across into Missouri again. We were close to the southern state line so we went over it just to say we were in Arkansas.

            By now we weren't so afraid of missing our train like in the beginning. We acted like there wasn't gonna be another train. We went over the corner of Arkansas on to Kansas, we went to Kansas City, also Kansas City, Missouri. We liked the bigger cities as there was more working people and it was easy to get a lot more food.

            We went over the state line into Iowa but we wanted to see more cowboys so we headed over the corner of Nebraska, down south into Alabama. Sometimes we didn't know where we was or where we were going 'till we came to some bigger city. That's where we'd find these C.C. camps, run by the government, for people to stop and get something to eat and a change clothes or a pair of shoes. We could sleep over night too. They were for fellows out of work, traveling around looking for work, but I always liked the HoBo Jungles the best.

            We rode a lot of local freight trains. They stopped at all the small towns to pick up freight cars or let empty ones off, take them to where the through freights stopped. It was the only way we could get off at the small towns out in the country. We seen one ranch where they were breaking some horses but they wouldn't let us ride any. They told us we'd get killed but there was always some of the fellows asked us in to have something to eat. Sometimes it was just under a big tent. We slept one time in a bunkhouse. It was hot weather anyways and some would just sleep outside on the ground.

            There was most always a small brook or a big watering trough where the horses drank that everyone washed up where the water was running out. It was most always a well with some kind of pump and was plenty cold, but by now we were used to cold water. The HoBo Jungles was always near a brook and everyone washed up and washed their clothes, hung them up on tree limbs and just waited 'til they were dry.