Entering the train-shed, I avoided the platforms and hurried along between the passenger train and a string of freight cars standing on the next track. Two or three yard hands brushed by me without a glance, for there was practically no difference between my greasy machinist’s rig-out and their own. But as I stopped and began to peer under one of the _erstige_ coaches I saw, with the tail of my eye, a brakeman of the freight train pause in his clamber up the end of one of the cars and crane his head suspiciously in my direction. Scores of times before (though never with so much at stake) I had faced the same kind of emergency, and, without an instant’s hesitation and as though it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing, I started tapping one of the wheels with my big steel wrench. Heaven only knows if they test for cracked car wheels that way in Germany! I certainly have never seen them do it, at any rate. Anyhow, it served my purpose of making the brakeman think I was there on business, for he climbed on up on to his train and passed out of sight. Two seconds later I was snuggled up on the “bumpers” with my wrench and magneto in my lap. The brake-beams of a German _schlafwagen_ are not quite as roomy as those of an American Pullman, but they might be much worse. The train was a fairly fast one, making few stops, and I believe would have taken me right in to Berlin if I had remained aboard long enough. I was getting rather cramped and stiff after four or five hours, however, and not caring to run the risk of being seen riding by daylight, I dropped off as the train slowed down at a junction on the outskirts of what appeared, and turned out, to be a large manufacturing city. The magneto slipped out of my two-fingered hand as I jumped off, and brought up in the frog of a switch with a jolt that must have played hob with its delicate insides, but I wasn’t doing any worrying on that score. Here I was, safe and sound, a good hundred miles beyond any place they would ever think of looking for me. Moreover, I had money in my pocket, as well as the possible means of getting more. I couldn’t have wished for a better start. There are a number of reasons why it would not be best for me to go into detail at this time regarding the various ways in which I steered clear of trouble in getting beyond the German frontiers, not the least of them being that it might make it harder in the future for some other poor devil trying to do the same thing. I do not think, however, there would be one chance in a thousand for a British prisoner less “heeled for the game”--a man unable to speak the language and to steal rides on the “brake-beams” of the trains, I mean--than I was to win through from any great distance from the frontier. But however that may be, I am not going to make it harder for any one who may get the chance by telling just how I did it.