“You’d better beat it on out of the South as quick as you can,” an old tramp had warned me, “they’re hell on a bum down here, and harder yet on a Yankee ... no, they haven’t forgot that yet—­not by a damn sight!”

I was soon to wish that I had listened to the old tramp’s wisdom.

* * * * *

In the chill grey dip of an early spring dawn I dropped off a freight in the yards of the town of Granton.

I drew my threadbare coat closer as I made my way up the track, on the look-out for some place to go into and warm myself.  Usually, in chilly weather, each railroad station throughout the country has a stove a-glow in the waiting room ...  I found the railroad station, and the stove, red-hot, was there ... it was good to be near a fire.  In the South it can be at times heavily cold.  There is a moisture and a rawness in the weather, there, that hurts.

I was not alone.  Two negro tramps followed me; like myself, seeking warmth and shelter.  Then came a white tramp.

We stood around the stove, which shone red in the early half-light of dawn.  We shivered and rubbed our hands.  Then we fell into tramps’ gossip about the country we were in.

The two negroes soon left to catch a freight for Austin.  My fellow tramp and I stretched ourselves along the benches.  He yawned with a loud noise like an animal.  “I’m worn-out,” he said, “I’ve been riding the bumpers all night.”  I noticed immediately that he did not speak tramp argot.

“And I tried to sleep on the bare boards of a box car.”

We had disposed ourselves comfortably to sleep for the few hours till wide day, in the station, when the station master came.  He poked the fire brighter, shook it down, then turned to us.  “Boys,” not unkindly, “sorry, but you can’t sleep here ... it’s the rules.”

We shuffled to our feet.

“Do you mind if we stand about the stove till the sun’s high enough to take the chill off things?”

“No.”

But, standing, we fell to talking ... comparing notes....

“I’ve been through here once before,” remarked my companion, whom I never knew otherwise than as “Bud.”

“There’s a cotton seed mill up the tracks a way toward town, and we can sleep there, if you want ... to-day’s Sunday, and no one will be around, working, to disturb us.  In the South it’s all right for a tramp to sleep among cotton seed, provided he doesn’t smoke there.”

“Come on, then, let’s find a place.  I can hardly hold my head up.”

We slumped along the track.  A cinder cut into my foot through the broken sole of one shoe.  It made me wince and limp.

Soon we came to the cotton seed house and looked it over from the outside.  It was a four-square building, each side having a door.  All the doors but one were locked.  That one, when pushed against, tottered over.  We climbed in over the heavy sacks, seemingly full of cement, with which the unlocked door had been propped to.  It also was unhinged.