The train slowed. He guessed they were approaching a railway yard, but a ground fog had risen up from the farm fields all around and had hidden the stars and the horizon. He sat up straighter at the thought of a railyard: in Bone’s mind a railyard was a bright nexus of danger. It was then, abruptly, that he saw the cop, the beam of his flashlight flicking out of the mist to touch on Bone and the other figures asleep on the flatcar, the man’s blue scissorbill cap cocked toward them avidly. The cop yelled something, but the train was still moving pretty fast^ Bone was alarmed but figured there would be time to get away.

He woke up the other men one by one. In the difficult journey through the mountains he had learned some of their names. Benny and Joe, Deacon and Archibald, Campbell and Crawford. Some were singles, some moved in pairs or in temporary alliances of threes. They were uniformly dirty and they wore sack pants and rope belts just like Bone did. Bone woke the other hoboes by jostling them with his big knobby hands. Some, waking and seeing his angular Halloween face above them, involuntarily flinched away_; but when he told them about the scissorbill they sat up frowning, furtively crouched.

Deacon Kenny and Bill Archibald came and squatted next to him. These two were a pair, and Deacon, a middle-aged man who said he was a meat-packer from Chicago, was the leader. Deacon was short and dense and tattooed and had an immense collection of snipes, unsmoked cigarette butts, which he hoarded and rationed as if they were a private treasure. Archibald, his buddy, was a lanky man who spoke in laconic, brief Southern drawls and carried Deacon’s frying pan for him and would hold up a fragment of mirror so that Deacon could shave his face with a sliver of broken glass each morning. Deacon was an obsessive shaver; Archibald had a wispy tramp’s beard that he would not cut off, though Deacon tugged on it and ragged him for it.