We’d have made a precious pair, I am sure, if we’d ever got together; but get together we couldn’t.  I kept ahead of him clear across Manitoba, but he led the way across Alberta, and early one bitter gray morning, at the end of a division just east of Kicking Horse Pass, I learned that he had been seen the night before between Kicking Horse Pass and Rogers’ Pass.  It was rather curious the way the information came to me.  I had been riding all night in a “side-door Pullman” (box-car), and nearly dead with cold had crawled out at the division to beg for food.  A freezing fog was drifting past, and I “hit” some firemen I found in the round-house.  They fixed me up with the leavings from their lunch-pails, and in addition I got out of them nearly a quart of heavenly “Java” (coffee).  I heated the latter, and, as I sat down to eat, a freight pulled in from the west.  I saw a side-door open and a road-kid climb out.  Through the drifting fog he limped over to me.  He was stiff with cold, his lips blue.  I shared my Java and grub with him, learned about Skysail Jack, and then learned about him.  Behold, he was from my own town, Oakland, California, and he was a member of the celebrated Boo Gang—­a gang with which I had affiliated at rare intervals.  We talked fast and bolted the grub in the half-hour that followed.  Then my freight pulled out, and I was on it, bound west on the trail of Skysail Jack.

I was delayed between the passes, went two days without food, and walked eleven miles on the third day before I got any, and yet I succeeded in passing Skysail Jack along the Fraser River in British Columbia.  I was riding “passengers” then and making time; but he must have been riding passengers, too, and with more luck or skill than I, for he got into Mission ahead of me.

Now Mission was a junction, forty miles east of Vancouver.  From the junction one could proceed south through Washington and Oregon over the Northern Pacific.  I wondered which way Skysail Jack would go, for I thought I was ahead of him.  As for myself I was still bound west to Vancouver.  I proceeded to the water-tank to leave that information, and there, freshly carved, with that day’s date upon it, was Skysail Jack’s monica.  I hurried on into Vancouver.  But he was gone.  He had taken ship immediately and was still flying west on his world-adventure.  Truly, Skysail Jack, you were a tramp-royal, and your mate was the “wind that tramps the world.”  I take off my hat to you.  You were “blowed-in-the-glass” all right.  A week later I, too, got my ship, and on board the steamship Umatilla, in the forecastle, was working my way down the coast to San Francisco.  Skysail Jack and Sailor Jack—­gee! if we’d ever got together.

Water-tanks are tramp directories.  Not all in idle wantonness do tramps carve their monicas, dates, and courses.  Often and often have I met hoboes earnestly inquiring if I had seen anywhere such and such a “stiff” or his monica.  And more than once I have been able to give the monica of recent date, the water-tank, and the direction in which he was then bound.  And promptly the hobo to whom I gave the information lit out after his pal.  I have met hoboes who, in trying to catch a pal, had pursued clear across the continent and back again, and were still going.