“I got a tater in my sack,” Hillbilly said, and wished now he’d nabbed one of those fish in the doorway of the boxcar.

He came into the camp and took out the potato. The men around the fire stood up as he neared, just in case he might not be what he seemed.

“I put in some cooked beans a woman gave me,” one of the hobos said. He was a little man with an old black fedora and clothes that had been patched so much the original clothing was no longer visible. He had been sitting on an old black jacket rolled up on the ground.

“I didn’t have nothing to add but my best wishes,” said a fat colored man wearing overalls. He was squatting by the fire.

“I had the can,” the other man said. He looked pretty dressed up for a hobo. “I cleaned it in the creek there. It’s a pretty fresh can, so it doesn’t have rust in it.”

Hillbilly gave the patched clothes man the potato and the man pulled out a pocketknife and went to cutting it up, skin and all, into the can of boiling water and beans.

“It’d taste pretty good we had some wild onions,” said the colored man. “But I don’t know we could find any in the dark.”

“I got a little salt and pepper on me, too,” Hillbilly said, and he removed the little bag he had tied to his belt and opened it again. He took out the little boxes of salt and pepper. “Give it a pinch of these here.”

When the stew was cooked up, Hillbilly took his cup from the bag and the patched clothes man poured him up some. Then Patches poured some into a tin can the black man had, a metal plate the other man had, and he himself drank out of the cook can.