Bone had never shaved but didn’t have a beard: he guessed it wasn’t in him to grow one.

“Train’ll go on through,” Deacon said, nodding to himself. “The cop can’t get on and we can’t get off. It’s safe.”

“Is it?” Archie said. “Look there.”

Bone stared where Archie was pointing. It was the cop’s flashlight bobbing up and down, the cop chasing after them, still yelling, and now the train was slowing, too, was grinding to a stop. Deacon said, “Oh, shit.”

At the sound of the brakes all the tramps leaped off the flatcar at once. It made Bone think of a man burning lice off his clothes with a lit cigarette, the way they jumped. Then Bone jumped, too. He landed crouched in the cindery gravel beside the track. The scissorbill was very close and he was shouting, and now—Bone could see them emerging from the fog— the yard bulls were running to join him. Suety, hostile men in dingy gray overalls.

“Bone!” Deacon was yelling. “This way! Bone! Run, dammit!”

The tramps were all scattering down the grade of the railway, through a scummy slough of water and into the foggy lettuce fields and the night. Bone moved to follow. But the seizure came then and he was down on the cold ground shaking. It was like a shiver that consumed his whole body. His awareness narrowed down to something like a speck, a black dot in a red emptiness. He was only distantly conscious when the railway cop pulled him up by the armpits, when the yard bulls—after a moment of disgusted commentary on his misshapen body—began to punch and kick him.

The blows came down like hard rain. Bone stared incuriously at his assailants. He had distanced himself from the pain. Cheated of a reaction, they hit and kicked him harder. Then—made queasy, perhaps, by the excesses he had inspired in them— they drifted away one by one_; and the scissorbill, his cap askew now, muttered something Bone did not understand and pushed him with his foot down the stony grade and into the cold and stagnant water.