"The weather was warm and I slept in a cow shack when I found one, and in the bushes when they got scarce. Finally I reached the railroad. I had never tried stealing a ride, sleeping on the trucks, hiding in freight cars, and being put off time and again until the next town was reached--I had never tried it because it had never been necessary, and then I hated that sort of thing. But I had no objection to asking for a lift, telling the agent or conductor the whole story, and I did it regularly at every station I passed on foot, only to get the customary oath or jeering laugh. After I had walked about sixty miles I came upon a water station known as Merton, with a goods train standing by. This time I asked for a ride on the tender. The engineer met my request with a vacant stare--never taking his pipe from his mouth. The fireman was a different sort of man. He not only listened to my story, but handed me part of the contents of his dinner pail wrapped up in a newspaper--which I was glad to get, and told him so. Before the train had gone fifty yards she was side-tracked for orders--which gave me another chance to get at the fireman. 'I may lose my job if I do,' he said, 'but I've been up against it myself; come around a little later; it'll be dark soon and something may turn up.'
"Something did turn up. While the engineer was oiling under his engine I got a wink from the fireman, climbed on the tender, crept beneath a tarpaulin, and rooted down in the coal. There, tired out, I fell asleep. I was awakened by the whistle of the locomotive, and then came the slow wheeze of the cylinder head, and we were off. Sleeping on a hard plank under a car going thirty miles an hour is a spring mattress to lying in a pile of coal with lumps as big as your head grinding into your back. Now and then the fireman--not my particular friend, but a man who had replaced him as I discovered when we whizzed past the light of a station--would ram his shovel within reach of my ribs--just missing me. But I didn't mind--every mile meant that much nearer home and less tramping in the heat and dust to get there. If I could manage to keep hidden until we reached Sydney I should gain one hundred--maybe two hundred--miles before morning.