Free Two in the Field by Darryl Brock Page B

can turn ’em out. Best single-action piece ever. Made in Hartford, right where we’re headed. Probably cheaper there, though thousands go out by catalogue.”
    So much for gun control.
    “Sorry you started out so rough, Sam,” he said. “Swinging aboard like that could’ve got you named ‘Stump’ or ‘Fingers.’ ” He stretched out on the bags with a pleasurable sigh. “I’m obliged to you for sticking up for me.”
    “Damn right,” I agreed, moving unsteadily across the car, trying to gauge the bounces and jolts. At the doorway I unbuttoned my fly.
    “They say when a feller takes his first piss from a train,” Slack commented, “the road starts workin’ him. Once it’s in his blood, he ain’t satisfied staying put.”
    I doubted it would apply to me. Yet I did feel a subtle elation. There I was, spraying the tracks outside St. Louis from a train I’d hopped after knocking a man cold. I’d lost all my possessions. I’d found a friend. I was journeying to find the woman I loved.
    It was springtime, 1875.
    Things could be a lot worse.

    Moving eastward during the next week, Slack and I put together new kits: blankets instead of cardboard. My crash course in tramping featured learning the proper way to approach swaying cars, gauging critical distance, and swinging on with reasonable safety. He taught me to avoid so-called flat wheels that shook every bone in your body, to squat while riding to lessen the jolts, and to wrap my face against swirling dust—residue from livestock hay being the worst.
    My favorite place to ride was on the platforms of baggage cars on passenger trains. These were called “blinds” because the doors behind them were blocked by baggage and couldn’t be opened. They were easily the most comfortable outside perches. Except, of course, when we were showered with cinders and sparks, blasted by sun and wind, or pelted with rocks by sadistic trainmen.
    I learned the tramps’ card games, a good deal of their slang, and paid close attention to their etiquette, especially after seeing two of them go at each other with knives over some point of honor I never quite got. I learned to leave camp chairs upsidedown to avoid bad luck; to do dishes if I joined a meal; to refer to a small frying pan as a “banjo;” to shave my whiskers with a glass shard for a razor.
    Under Slack’s tutelage I came to recognize tramps’ symbols on houses and fences and hitching rails: “good meal here,” or “handout if you act religious,” or “danger here.” I learned that hanging around churches early on Sundays was good for handouts, and more so for cigar and cigarette butts tossed aside as worshippers took their final pulls before going in—I didn’t smoke but they were valuable trade items. Slack also showed me the trick of placing a loaf of stale bread on a doorstep, then knocking and asking politely if he might have it. Often we went away with butter and jam and other delicacies.
    At night, besides cards, “tramp orations” were popular. Many of them told of fighting in the war and then forming an “army of labor” in the postwar railroad building boom. The men had lived in style while laying track across the nation, sleeping legally in comfortable boxcars, dining on antelope and buffalo steaks, pulling top wages for “three strokes to the spike, four rails to the minute.”
    Greed and corruption had ruined it all. The collapse of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company, which according to Slack had bankrolled the whole Civil War, sparked a global depression. The Panic of ’73 saw swarms of businesses go under and more than half the railroads default on their bonds. Three million men lost their jobs. Veterans who’d tramped at Gettysburg and Antietam now tramped the whole country, and instead of building railroads they swarmed over them.
    Which brought an inevitable backlash.
    “They’re crackin’ down everywhere,” one tramp complained. “It’s gettin’ tougher to buy