Sitting up to rub his eyes and look at his watch, the fugitive made a
hasty calculation. If the train had been in motion all night, this early
morning stopping-place should be Indianapolis. Getting upon his feet, he
applied an investigative eye to the crack. The train, or at least his
portion of it, was side-tracked in a big yard with many others. Working
the pick-lock wire again, he unhasped the door and opened it. There was
no one in sight in this particular alley of the crowded yard, and he
dropped to the ground and slid the door back into place.
Making a note of the initials and number, so that he might find the car
again, he crawled under three or four standing trains and made his way
to a track-side lunch-counter. The thick ham sandwich and the cup of
muddy coffee eaten and drunk with the appetite of a starved vagrant set
up another mile-stone in the distances traversed. Was it, indeed, only
on the morning of yesterday that he had sent his toast back because,
forsooth, the maid at Mrs. Gilman's select boarding-house for single
gentlemen had scorched it a trifle? It seemed as incredible as a
fairytale.
Beyond the quenching of his hunger and the stuffing of his pockets with
two more of the sad sandwiches, he went back to his box car, knowing
that, in the nature of things, his flight was as yet only fairly begun.
His train, or some train in which his car was a unit, was just pulling
out, and he was barely in time to slide the door and scramble in. Once
inside, he made haste to close the opening before the train should
emerge from the shelter of its mate on the next track. But before he
could brace himself for the shove, a hand came down from the car roof, a
brakeman's coupling-stick was thrust into the riding-rail of the door,
and the closing operation was effectively blocked.
Smith stood back and waited for a head to follow the hand. It came
presently; the bare, tousled head of a young brakeman who had taken off
his cap and was lying on his stomach on the car roof to look under the
eaves into the interior. Smith made a quick spring and caught the
hanging head in the crook of his elbow. "You're gone," he remarked to
the inverted face crushed in the vise of forearm and biceps. "If you
turn loose, you'll break your back as you come over, and if you don't
turn loose, I can pull your head off."
"Leggo of me!" gasped the poor prisoner, drumming with his toes on the
roof. "Wha--whadda you want with my head? You can't do nothin' with it
when you get it!"
"I have got it," said Smith, showing his teeth. "By and by, when we get
safely out of town, I'm going to jump up and bite you."
The brakeman tried to cry out that he was slipping; that the fall would
kill him. Smith felt him coming and shifted his hold just in time to
make the fall an assisted somersault, landing the man clumsily, but
safely, inside of the car. The trigging stick had been lost in the
scuffle, and Smith's first care was to slide the door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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