Perhaps it was because he fell so hard that he bounced up so instantaneously. He fought himself free of the smothering folds of dusty tarpaulin and turned to flee headlong into the darkness. He took three flying steps and tripped over the guy rope of the next tent. As he fell with stunning violence into the protecting shadows he heard pursuit roll over the platform past Osay, thud on the earth, clatter on by him and die away in the distance to the accompaniment of cheers, whoops and the bloodthirsty threats of the despoiled countryman.
If one has never stolen a ride on a freight train the task presents difficulties and dangers. Still, it may be done, provided one is sufficiently [126] hard pressed to dare its risks and risk its discomforts. There is one especially disagreeable feature incident to the experience—sooner or later discovery is practically inevitable.
Discovery in this instance came just before the dawn, as the freight lumbered through the swampy bottoms of Obion Creek. A sleepy and therefore irritable brakeman found, huddled up on the floor of an empty furniture car, a dark heap, which, on being stirred with a heavy boot-toe, moved and moaned and gave forth various other faint signs of life. So, as the locomotive slowed down for the approach to the trestle, he hoisted the unresisting object and with callous unconcern shoved it out of the open car door on to the sloping bank of the built-up right of way—all this occurring at a point just beyond where a white marker post gleamed spectrally in the strengthening light of the young summer day, bearing on its planed face the symbol, S-3—meaning by that, three miles to Swango Junction.
At sunup, forty minutes later, a forlorn and shrunken figure, shirt-sleeved, hatless and carrying no baggage whatsoever, quit the crossties and, turning to the left from the railroad track some rods above the station, entered, with weary gait, a byway leading over the hill to the town beyond. There was a drooping in the shoulders and a dragging of the mud-incrusted legs, and the head, like Old Black Joe’s, was bending low.
[127]
The lone pedestrian entered the confines of Swango proper, seeking, even at that early hour, such backways as seemed most likely to be empty of human life. But as he lifted his leaden feet past the Philpotts place, which was the most outlying of local domiciles, luck would have it that Mr. Abram Philpotts should be up and stirring; in fact, Mr. Philpotts, being engaged in the milk and butter business, was out in his barn hitching a horse to a wagon. Chancing to pass a window of the barn he glanced out and saw a lolled head bobbing by above the top of his back fence.
“Hey there!” he called out. “Hey, Gash, what air you doin’ up so early in the mornin’?”
With a wan suggestion of the old familiar sprightliness the answer came back, comically evasive:
“That’s fur me to know and fur you to find out!”
Overcome, Mr. Philpotts fell up against his stable wall, feebly slapping himself on the legs with both hands.
“Same old Gashney!” he gurgled. “They can’t nobody ever git ahead of you, kin they boy?”