Chapter 6

The officer who took me to Plainfield was considerate, though he kept me handcuffed either to him or to the car seat during the journey. He allowed me to smoke, and cheered me up by telling me that if I behaved myself at the school I could be paroled to some nice family within a year. I don't think I really believed him, but on the principle of wishful thinking I derived some comfort from his assurances. I later learned that he had told the truth.

On arriving at Plainfield we were met at the station by the school bus, driven by a black boy about sixteen years of age. dressed in blue jeans. He was arrogant in his manner and made me give him the package of cigarettes I carried, not even letting me keep one to smoke on the drive of a mile or so to the school. However, as soon as we started, the officer --who was seated in back with me still handcuffed to him--lit a cigarette and, after taking a puff or two, gave it to me.

Arriving at the school, we all went into the Superintendent's office where the handcuffs were removed. Commitment papers were given to a frail little woman who, I later learned, was the superintendent's wife, and I was formally booked. The driver laid my pack of cigarettes on the desk and went out. The woman emptied the cigarette container, which to my surprise contained only two cigarettes; it had been nearly full when I had given it up. I wanted to mention this, but decided not to. After answering a lot of questions I was given a printed list of the rules and regulations governing the conduct of inmates and was told to keep and study them. I was told that I had sixteen demerit points against my name, and that I could reduce them by two each month if I behaved myself. This, it appeared, would make me eligible for parole at the end of eight months. I resolved then and there to become a model prisoner.

While I was being instructed, an enormous hulk of a man entered the office and sat down in an oversized chair, where he fanned himself and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He was the fattest man I had ever seen outside of a museum or sideshow. He was the school superintendent, and his name was Charlton. He must have weighed at least four hundred pounds, and reminded me of one of the enormous hogs I had once seen at Libby's packing house in Chicago. He did not seem to notice me, and presently I was led away by two jean-clad boys. They took me to a bathroom where I was required to wash and scrub myself thoroughly before being allowed to don an ill-fitting suit of blue jeans with muslin-lined long pants, in which I felt very uncomfortable. My hair had been clipped close, and my head rubbed with a liberal quantity of what appeared to be blue ointment, a mercurial product much used at the time for delousing and for the treatment of syphillis.

When I was cleaned to the satisfaction of my older companions, I was given a pair of cotton socks and brogue shoes. I was then taken to another building, where about thirty boys, ranging in age from about seven to eighteen, were seated at desks in a schoolroom. A middle-aged, pleasant-featured man, with greying hair cut pompadour-style, was talking to the class and diagramming scenes of the Holy Land on the blackboard. I had come in upon a Sunday school lesson. We sat down, and when the class was over the teacher came up to me, shook my hand, and led me into his living room. When we were seated he introduced himself as "Brother" Drake and told me I would henceforth be a member of his "family". He told me that his family was number nine and that my individual number was in the twenty-one hundreds; and he impressed upon me the necessity of yielding obedience to him at all times. After he had made a note of my name and age I was allowed to go into the yard and play with the other boys.

The school buildings, as I remember, were laid out in the form of a square, with the ofice building on the center line of the square; the other buildings were distributed on the north and south sides, partially enclosing a large drillfield and playground. The Chapel was at the extreme end of the northern side, the bakery and dining room were nearby, and the west side was open. The buildings were all of brick and, with the exception of the office building, the second floors served as dormitories and the windows were heavily screened. There was a large spring near the laundry, and a large pool containing numerous trout and other fish, so tame that they would take food from a person's hand.

There were eleven or twelve "families", each consisting of some thirty to forty members. The following morning I was assigned to the job of peeling potatoes and onions, and preparing other vegetables for cooking and for the table. A Brother Wade had charge of this force, and when we had prepared enough for the day we were put to hoeing corn, killing potato bugs and similar farm duties. Our hours were short, as there were many more inmates than needed to do all of the necessary work. Except for about three hours a day, when we were required to attend school, we played games such as leapfrog and one-old-cat, or read Horatio Alger stories obtained at the library in the office building. We were fed three times a day except on Sundays, when we received a late breakfast after attending Sunday School, and after attending Chapel in the afternoon we were given a cup of milk, two doughnuts and a large piece of gingerbread. The weekday meals consisted principally of oatmeal mush and milk for breakfast, boiled meat, vegetables and bread with margarine for dinner, and "slumgullion" for supper; this being a thick flour gravy into which had been stirred pieces of boiled beef, mutton and sowbelly, along with potatoes, onions, and carrots. On Fridays we had boiled navy beans, creamed salt codfish and, rarely, fresh fish of some kind. The officers' dining room adjoined that of the inmates; they received better fare, of course, but probably no more nourishing or wholesome.

A few days later I received my only flogging at the school, and had another demerit added to my sixteen. Another boy and I were peeling onions; we each had a bushel basket full to peel, and when we were about half through I left to go to the latrine. When I returned I noticed that my basket was fuller than when I left it, and I accused my companion of having dumped some onions from his basket into mine. He denied it, and I punched him in the nose. Brother Wade happened to come by just then, and when I explained the matter to him he told me that I should have complained to him and not started a fight. He made me take off my jacket and lock my fingers over my head, after which he proceeded to give me six lashes with a long piece of round leather belting, such as was used on old-fashioned sewing machines. The belting was doubled in the center, leaving the ends free to cut into my flesh; they left long welts, the ends of which bled freely. As a matter of poetic justice, I suppose, the other boy was ordered to finish peeling my basket of onions as well as his, and I was sent to the infirmary to have my wounds dressed. When I returned, he sent me to my family with a note of explanation to Brother Drake.

I later learned that six lashes was the minimum punishment for first offences. I witnessed several boys receive twenty lashes, and in one case, thirty. This was a big negro boy who had escaped but had been caught and returned to the school. His shirt was removed and his hands fastened to a rope suspended from the ceiling. Brother Drake administered the punishment with a single round leather strap fully half an inch thick. He stood about three feet from the boy, swinging the strap with all his strength. and at each stroke the end of the lash would tear skin and flesh. The strokes were not hurried, but deliberate, with a pause of about ten seconds between strokes. The boy flinched, but did not cry ont. At about the twenty-fifth stroke he fainted, but the punishment continued until the full thirty strokes had been given. Then Brother Drake, helped by a couple of the older boys, lowered the boy to the ground, where he lay for about half an hour before he recovered consciousness. This flogging was given in the classroom in the presence of the entire family, some of whom were no more than eight years old; their faces were streaming with tears before the end. From that day I hated Brother Drake, but was careful not to let him know it. .

Among the older boys who were only mildly insubordinate, six lashes was the rule, coupled with compulsory long hours of labor in the laundry. Here, washing of all clothing, bedding, etc. was done by hand in low-set tubs equipped with old-fashioned wooden washboards. It was a back-breaking job, and thirty days of it usually sufficed to make the victim seek relief by promises of future good behavior. Younger boys were frequently punished by requiring them to stand on one spot with arms crossed and knees unbent for an hour each day for periods ranging from one to thirty days.

On the whole, however, the boys were well treated and had many privileges. From March until October, school studies were suspended and the boys were encouraged to participate in such normal outdoor activities ss baseball, crack- the-whip, tug of war, foot races, et cetera. The very youngest played tag and similar games. In the winter, snowballing and football--played with a large round inflated rubber ball--predominated, with acrobatics and gymnastics indoors.

We were required to attend Sunday school on Sunday mornings, and Chapel in the afternoon, where preachers of various denominations alternated in trying to save our wicked souls from "Hell and Damnation", the usual topic of their sermons.

The farm lands of the school lay to the east and south of the buildings, and so far as I know were unfenced except for low split-rail affairs one could jump over. When our day's work was over, I and a friend named Alonzo L. used to roam through the pear and apple orchards into the woods beyond where we gathered beechnuts, chinquapins, black walnuts, butternuts, hazelnuts, acorns, and other treasures. There were maple trees which the larger boys were required to tap to provide sap for boiling down into syrup and sugar for the officer's table.

On one of these excursions, Alonzo found a tomato-like plant bearing a yellowish fruit, resembling a medium-sized tomato in size and shape. He was overjoyed, and told me they were "May apples". The flesh was also similar to that of a tomato, and on eating one I was delighted. I have eaten fruits from all parts of the world, yet never since have I tasted anything so delicious. I have often wondered why some Indiana Luther Burbank had not propagated them for market purposes. It may be that the plants were poor bearers, or the fruit unshippable. If so, these faults could probably be corrected by one of our many horticultural experiment stations; though it is possible that living plants can no longer be found, for they were quite rare then.

Alonzo, who was about fourteen, was an "honor" boy, i.e. having only a month or two to serve before being paroled. As such, he had many privileges, one of which was to go to Plainfield for the mail. On such trips he usually rode bareback on one of the big farm horses, and when he returned he always brought back with him a plentiful supply of forbidden cigarettes. Where he got the money to pay for them, and where he was able to buy them in a small village, he wouldn't tell. Evidently there were bootleggers then, as now. His duties, shared with another boy called Nick, consisted of feeding, bedding, and currying the horses, of which there were about a dozen; consequently, he had much free time to spend as he pleased. We used to hide out in the woods, smoking and exchanging confidences. I fear I exerted a bad influence on him, for he told me that when he was released he was going to get himself a jocker and become a tramp. When finally he was paroled, I fell heir to his stable duties, although not all of his privileges.

One morning, about two months after I became an inmate of the School, a monitor boy found me and handed Brother Wade an order to have me report to the main building at once. The monitor escorted me to the office, and I was trembling in my shoes, for to be summoned to appear before "Fatty" Charlton almost invariably presaged punishment for an infraction of the rules too serious to be handled by the lesser authorities. I couldn't imagine what I had done, apart from smoking, that warranted such a procedure, and as I entered the office my fear was so great that I could hardly walk. "Fatty" was seated as usual in his big oversized chair, and Mrs. Charlton was at her desk. She came forward, smiled at me, and told me I had visitors. I was naturally astonished, and thought immediately of Curly. As she led me toward the Visitors' Room I wondered how he had managed to hoodwink her. I had told Curly my real name and had given him the address of my parents, whom he had promised he would notify in case I was killed or badly injured. I had not written to my parents since I ran away from home, and had no intention of doing so while I was at the school.

Sure enough, when I entered the room, there stood Curly, all decked out in a new suit of clothes and holding a "Dicer", or Derby hat, in his hands. I could hardly refrain from crying "Curly!" as I sprang to embrace him, and as I did so, to my astonishment I saw my mother and father seated side by side on a sofa a few feet away. I burst into tears and ran to my mother, where I fell to my knees and, with my head in her lap, I sobbed my heart out.

Mother and father cried a lot, and tried to comfort me. When we all had regained our composure, Curly told me that after he had been released from jail he learned of my sentence to the reform school and for a time was undecided what to do about it. He said his first idea was to help me escape, as he had learned somehow that the school was without guards. He had abandoned that idea when he learned that I would probably be released within a year and that he would be liable to a long term of imprisonment if he were caught. He finally decided to try and secure my release with the aid of my parents and looked them up in Chicago, where he told them the whole story, omitting such details of our life together as would embarrass or grieve them. They had then come on to Plainfield to see me, with the aid of a letter given to my father by the governor of Illinois and addressed to the governor of Indiana, to see if they couldn't effect my pardon. However, it didn't work out. Perhaps the governors did not belong to the same party or church; politics and religion were taken seriously in those days. Or, possibly my father did not really try to get me pardoned; he may have thought that a few more months of discipline would be good for me. . .who knows?

Father, always thin, was much thinner than when I ran away. His breathing was labored, which I attributed to his chronic asthma and the aneurism that I had been told he had. He was affectionate and asked me to condone the last flogging he had given me, telling me that he had subsequently learned that Marion - damn him! - had lied about the knife. I sat on his lap and forgave him and, with his arms about me, I cried some more when he slipped into my hand a brand-new copper-handled knife. That act of contrition endeared him to me more than anything he had ever done before.

Curly had gone into the office after telling me of the part he had played in our reunion, and after a while we all followed. Mrs. Charlton was very kind and told me I could show my visitors about the place. She invited mother, father and Curly to have lunch at the officers' mess; but when Curly asked if they couldn't eat at my family's table, she smilingly consented. So when the quarter-to-twelve assembly bell rang I took all three to my family house, where I introduced them to Brother Drake, and from there we all marched to the dining room. After dinner I asked for, and was given, relief from duty for the rest of the day. I showed them all over the grounds, and then led them past the stables into the orchard. Curly, I could tell, was dying for a smoke and when we were deep in the orchard he lit a cigarette. He did not offer one to me, nor did I ask for one. Father lit a cigar, while mother and I sat beneath a tree and she told me much that had transpired since I left home. She said that father's poor health had obliged him to give up his practice, and that they were selling our house with the intention of moving to Kansas or Colorado, where they hoped the climate would relieve his asthma.

About five o'clock, after repeated rests by father, we returned to the office and after more weeping we said farewell, but not until Curly had given me a name and address in Detroit where I was to write him whenever I could. Mother, at Curly's suggestion, had introduced himself to Mrs. Charlton as her brother and my uncle.

I don't know what cock-and-bull story my parents told Mrs. Charlton about how they came to locate me at Plainfield; something Curly had cooked up, no doubt. But after they had gone I couldn't have told which of the three I missed the most. I wrote home once a week, and less often to Curly. Mother wrote often, enclosing an occasional letter from father. I received but few letters from Curly, all containing good advice concerning my behavior but telling me nothing of his wanderings. All the mail, both incoming and outgoing, was censored at the office, so he had to be careful. I do know that from that time until mother's death in 1913, I never let more than ten days pass without writing to her if it were possible to do so.

Two or three weeks after my folks had left, my father wrote to tell me that he had been unable to secure my release. He begged me to be a good boy until I could be paroled to him.

Shortly after Alonzo had been paroled and I had taken over his job, I met with an accident that might have blinded me for life. I was helping an older boy repair some brickwork at the stables, and in moving a small keg of dry cement I let it drop instead of setting it down carefully. The jolt to the keg caused some of the powder to fly into my eyes, and in a moment I was in agony. I was taken to the Infirmary, where a physician removed the by-then caked pieces of cement and bandaged my eyes. The pain was quite severe for several days, and the doctor kept me sedated with an opiate. "Mitts" (heavy leather gloves with slots through which a leather strap could be threaded to secure the hands immovably across the chest) were placed on my hands to prevent me from scratching the bandages from my eyes. Incidentally, these mitts were also used in all the dormitories to prevent masturbation by those known to practice it.

I remained in a darkened room for a month or more before the bandages were finally removed, Two weeks later I was allowed to go outdoors, wearing fully shielded dark green glasses. It was near Thanksgiving, and I certainly had much to be thankful for; there was no impairment of vision, and disfigurement.

During the winter I attended school classes and made splendid progress, especially in arithmetic, in which I advanced to algebra and plane geometry. The three R's were stressed and my former bugaboos, grammar and history, were lightly passed over. For the first time in my life I liked school, and couldn't get enough of it. The ordinary "advanced" school geography proved to be inadequate, and Brother Drake let me use his exceptionally fine and complete Atlas of the World, containing detailed descriptions of the most fascinating places and people imaginable, together with brief histories of their governments and rulers.

My tastes in reading changed at the same time. Brother Drake had a small but select library of books on such subjects as ancient history, mythology, and foreign adventures. He loaned them to me freely, and I usually kept one of them at the stables to read in the substantial amount of free time I had between chores. In fact, when it was not too cold, I often sat on one of the grain boxes after my evening chores were done, and read for half an hour or more after the supper bell had rung. It was one of my privileges to be late for supper, as was the case with the other boys whose duties required them to be absent at that time. We usually ate an hour later than the rest, and often got extra tidbits like cake, pie and cookies left over from the officers' table. I think these months were the most contented ones of my life.

The winter passed quickly, and it did not seem to be as cold as the ones I had spent in Chicago. At Christmas time, each family had a Christmas tree and we gathered around it on Christmas Eve to sing hymns and carols. There was no hanging up of stockings, as we all wore long pants and socks. The following morning we gathered around the tree again, where each boy found a small box bearing his name and number, and containing an orange, an apple, a few nuts, and lots of candy. Several boys, known to be good players on the harmonica, received one as a gift from Brother Drake. In addition, a few of the boys received boxes from home, containing mostly warm clothing such as underwear, scarves, mittens, gloves, and earmuffs. My parents sent me a box which contained, in addition to the usual goodies, a heavy woolen scarf and, what delighted me most, a pair of long gauntleted fur gloves. For dinner and supper that day we had roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and mince pie, with all the other trimmings. The feast was talked about for weeks thereafter.

Life went on without much of special interest, and when spring came I was elegible for parole. My parents had moved to Abilene, Kansas, from where they sent me a complete outfit of new clothing (short pants again!) together with the necessary legal papers to secure my release, and money for transportation. When the happy day came, I was taken to Plainfield by Mr. Charlton, my first personal contact with him, and he bought me my ticket. While seeing me aboard the train, he admonished me to be a good boy.

The trip was uneventful except for the thrill I got out of crossing the Mississippi, and my parents met me at the station at Abilene. We hugged each other and cried a bit before mother drove us in their buggy to a small, rented frame cottage on the north side of town. There I was greeted by my brother George, three years my junior. He was glad to see me, and that evening regaled me with stories he had heard of Indians, buffaloes and coyotes. We planned fishing trips to nearby Mud Creek and more distant Smoky Hill River. George was the good boy of the family and fulfilled the saying that "the good die young"; typhoid fever claimed him in Denver about two years later.

Father was a wraith of his former self, but had lost none of his optimism. At the time, he was associated with a Mr. George Rohrer, editor of the Abilene Gazette, and a Mr. Burton, who later became a member of the U. S. Senate.

The three engaged in a cattle-feeding venture which failed miserably, and in which father lost several thousand dollars, virtually all he had. During the year or more that they dithered around the stock pens and feeding yard I assisted as much as I could. In the spring of 1887 father went to Denver, taking George with him, and I got a job as chore boy on a nearby farm. The owners, the Shepherds, were very kind to me and treated me as one of the family. Meanwhile, mother secured a position as nurse or companion in the Burton household while father, in Denver, tried to interest mining men in an ore concentration process. In September, when mother left to join father, I too packed my few belongings, shipped them to the folks, and jumped a westbound freight.

I stopped over at Salina and Ellis, where I started begging again; and when I arrived in Denver I gave my mother a little more than twenty dollars, ten of which had been my last months' wages at the Shepherds. It was thankfully received; how thankfully, I did not realize until after her death, many years later. I found among her effects a letter from my father, dated September 2, 1887, in which he wrote, in part, "...if you can . . .dear. send me $2- do." What pathos and humiliation lie behind frustrated old age!

I was a husky kid for my age, and within a week had secured a job as "offbearer" to a moulder in a brickyard. The bricks were formed from soft clay into a wooden mold holding three bricks lengthwise. Five thousand bricks was a day's work for a moulder, for which he was paid $7.50. He paid $2.50 to his offbearer, whose duties consisted in washing and sanding the molds, running 25 yards or more with the filled ones, dumping them, and running back with the empty mold, which had to be washed and sanded and placed beside the moulder before the next one could be carried away. It was a backbreaking job of five or six hours of continuous dogtrotting, but I soon got used to it. The job lasted only about two months before cold weather put a stop to the work. The money I earned, however, was a boon to my parents, who by now were financially down and out.

By the middle of December I was in jail again, this time for a very good reason. I met a tramp called "Jiggers" (and the name should have been a warning to me, for in Trampdom it means "watch out!"). He told me he had some "peddlings" from a hardware store in Kansas City. I offered to help him peddle them, and he gave me a big .45 Colt revolver and half a dozen razors. I had sold several of the razors and was trying to sell the Colt to a bartender in a saloon, when a man came in and picked up the gun. He laid it down after examining it, and asked whom it belonged to. I told him that it was mine, and offered it for sale. He displayed a detective's badge pinned to his vest and pocketed the gun. After handcuffing me, he led me to the City Jail on the bank of Cherry Creek at Larimer Street, where I was grilled for several hours in an attempt to make me confess where I had gotten the gun and razors. I told the officers I had found them, and stuck to my story. However, they caught me in several lies, and the gun and razors were identified as loot from a burglarized local hardware store. So, by the end of January, 1888 I was on my way to the reformatory at Golden, near Denver.

While I was in the County jail awaiting trial on a charge of burglary, father died. Mother came to see me after the funeral, and I was glad to learn that he had known nothing of my shame. He had been to Central City, a mining town, and had died suddenly of a ruptured aneurism within a few hours of his return to Denver.

Mother, who was forty-seven (my father had been sixty-nine)- had obtained a position as nurse, and when I learned of it I did not worry so much about her. I met a couple of tramps in the County Jail who knew Curly, whom I had not heard from in over a year. One was called "Sickness", and the other, "Baldy Todd". I met both of them again some years later, Sickness in Portland, Ore., and Baldy in Memphis, Tenn. They both promised to get word to Curly of my plight. One of them did, either in person or by the tramp grapevine - "If you see so-and-so, tell him such-and-such" - for about three months later I got a letter from Curly addressed to me at the school. He was still my "affectionate uncle", and promised to take care of me when I was released.

I shall not go into much detail regarding my life at Golden. The school was operated on practically the same plan as at Plainfield, although there were fewer inmates and some of them were girls. A Mr. Sampson was superintendent, and my family master was a Mr. Sam Poe. He later became sheriff of the county in which Golden is located. He was a strict disciplinarian, but not unkind. There were only four families; mine was number 4. I worked on the farm, learned to tie brooms in the broom factory, and had several months in the shoe shop under a Mr. J. D. Slater, who was also the school's bandmaster and taught me to play the B-flat cornet. The older boys used to try to flirt with the girls, who were domiciled in the office building, but there was no opportunity for personal contact. I once managed to exchange love notes with a girl named Ada, after I became a trusty and had access to the office building. She was about seventeen then, and very pretty. I met her a couple of years later at the Central Theatre on Holliday Street in Denver. It was a low-class variety house where girls were employed to solicit drinks in the long row of curtained boxes that ran around the entire inner edge of the balcony. She told me that she was diseased. We had a drink and a cry together over her misfortune, and that was the last time I saw her.

I was paroled to my mother just before Christmas. Her position was as an institutional nurse, with no night work, and she had taken a small flat on Santa Fe Avenue in order to continue her chemical experiments. She was glad to see me and urged me to go to school again; but to her sorrow I refused, and about the middle of January 1889 I hit the road again, bound for San Francisco. I was nearly sixteen, a man in size, and could no longer work the tearful panning spiel but had to rely on straight mooching. I wanted to go to Australia, and by cheerful lying I managed to get a job as wiper aboard the S.S. Rio de Janeiro. We stopped at Honolulu outbound, and then on to Sydney and Melbourne.

My intention had been to desert the ship at Sydney and tour the country, but I gave up that idea quickly when I found that railroads in Australia were few and far between, and that they went nowhere in particular. Australia, I learned too, had an answer to the tramp problem: hard labor. As that didn't appeal to me, I returned to San Francisco quite disillusioned.

I bummed around San Francisco for a couple of weeks, and then started for Denver. At Truckee I went to the Central Pacific R.R. water tank (now the Southern Pacific), where I met three tramps. I nodded to them, and immediately started carving my adopted monicker--Chi Curly-- on the tank's superstructure. I added B-E (bound east) and the date, now forgotten.

As it was the custom for a tramp meeting two or more unknown tramps to first introduce himself, I felt that I had complied with the convention most effectively. The three arose, and one of them introduced himself as "Sardines" and then introduced the others as Michael J. Gorman and Liverpool Tony. Gorman offered me a drink of "whiteline" (alcohol and water). I took a swig, handed the bottle back and, pulling a silver dollar from my pocket, suggested that one of the three go up town for the makings of a mulligan. Tony, a runt of a man with a large head and Bette-Davis-sized eyes, took the money and went toward town while the three of us sat down again. I asked if either of them knew Michigan Curly. Much to my surprise, Sardines said yes and added that Curly had been in Truckee the day before and had gone east. He showed me Curly's monicker carved on the other side of the tank, and I inwardly cried with joy. I concealed my excitement, and casually mentioned that Curly was my partner; but I was on tenterhooks the rest of the day, and could barely eat a small portion of the fine mulligan Gorman cooked for us. Tony offered me some change from the dollar I had given him, but I refused it.

When night came, I got Sardines and Gorman to spring open the side door of a loaded and sealed freight car containing sacked ore concentrates consigned to the Argo Smelter in Denver. When I had gotten inside the car, one of them passed me a couple of fishplates (flat steel plates, used to join rail ends) , a crowbar, (stolen, no doubt, from the section foreman's tool house), and a block of wood to be used as a fulcrum and wedge when springing myself out of the car at Ogden or Denver. They passed in some food and water, and sprung the door back onto its rails. They wished me good luck; and when the train pulled out about an hour later I was assured of being undisturbed for several days.

Two days later I reached Ogden and started on a hunt for Curly. He had not been seen at any of the tramp hangouts, and I concluded that he had not reached the city but had taken leisurely jumps from town to town, while I had come straight through. I haunted the freight yard day and night, and after four or five days had passed I decided to backtrack toward Reno. I swung onto the blind baggage of a slow-moving westbound passenger train as it went through the yards, but only got as far as the first stop when I was "ditched". It was night, and as I sat beside the water tank waiting for another train I checked my impatience and considered the matter in the light of probabilities. I reasoned that if Curly was really B.E. he would sooner or later reach Ogden and leave some evidence, so I caught a freight that stopped for water and returned to Ogden.

As I dropped off in the yards I saw several others do likewise. I called to them, but Curly was not among them. I talked with one of them; his monicker was "The Houligan". He was an Austrian, about twenty years old, and spoke broken English. He told me that he had seen Curly at Elko, Nevada the previous day. I paid for a couple rounds of drinks in an all-night saloon, we had breakfast together in a Chinese restaurant near the depot, and parted.

Two days later as I loitered about the yards, ducking switch engines and watchmen, I saw Curly about two hundred feet away coming toward me. I recognized his long, swinging gait and ran toward him. He didn't recognize me and tried to avoid me by ducking under a freight car, but when I yelled "Curly!" a couple times he rose and waited. I fell into a walk and when I got about fifty feet from him, he grinned and came toward me. I could scarcely get words of greeting out of my mouth as I embraced him, and tears streamed down my cheeks. We stopped short and looked each other over approvingly. He hadn't changed a bit. H wore the same cheerful smile I had learned to love, his voice had the same deferential quality, and the expression of his face and eyes bore the same benignity I had known in the past.

From "Journey to Nowhere"
Dale Makuridge, Dial Press, 1985
(A book about hoboes rather than tramps)