“To hell with Womber!”

“Well, then, I’m going to thank him.”

“I’m grateful enough....  I might write him a letter thanking him ... but I’m not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood.”

So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ... to China and the East, finally, he said ...  I never knew his real name ... neither of us gave his right name to the town’s officials....

As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily, thinking I was drunk.

* * * * *

I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown package out of my inside pocket—­the brown paper on which I had inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal, and prostitute life I had heard during my three months’ sojourn behind bars.

I looked them over again.  With all their smut and filth, they were yet full of naive folk-touches and approximations to real balladry.  I was as tender of the manuscript as a woman would be with her baby.

* * * * *

The sky grew overcast.  A rain storm blew up.  A heavy wind mixed with driving wet ... chilly ...  I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the comparative comfort of my cell again....

The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along.  I made a run for it in the rapidly gathering dusk.  I grabbed the bar on one side and made a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one foot—­luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen underneath—­and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.

Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the bumpers did I realise that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.

Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train.  My one idea to regain the MSS.  I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and over.  I groped up and down.  And tears rained from my eyes when I understood those rhymes were lost forever....

It was midnight before I caught another freight.  I climbed wearily into an empty box car while the freight was standing still.  I was seen.  A brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the freight to be under way.

“Come on out with you!  Hit the grit!” commanded the “shack” grimly.

I rose.  I came to the door.  I hated him in my heart, but quite simply and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking him to let me ride, in the name of God.

He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.

* * * * *

All night long I rode ... bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump, bumpity-bump!  All night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of imprisonment.