The yard bulls had kicked him pretty hard. He had to try, though. He pulled himself erect. It was like a gantry standing up. He was six feet five inches tall—a hobo had measured him once, just to get the exact figure of it—and when he stood up he swayed like a tree. The small of his back hurt terribly and he put his hand back there. “Kidneys,” Deacon said knowingly. “Yard bulls go for the kidneys. They always do. You’ll be pissing blood for a day or two, Bone.”

Bone thought he was probably right.

They moved on down the tracks. In daylight he was able to see that this was a tiny agricultural depot, locked in by oceans of lettuce and, far off, arbored grapes. The sun had burned off the mist and the day was hot and getting hotter. The heat came up off the cracked dry bed of the railroad right-of-way like a growing thing. He saw the jungle in the distance now as Deacon had said, a small concatenation of box huts and hovels where a river cut through the broad flat valley and a stand of dusty dogwoods had grown up.

Bone had never been here before, though he had been many places like it. He knew he was not smart, but something in him, some instinct, prevented him from riding the same way twice. He wondered sometimes what he would do if he ran out of railroads, but that had never happened; maybe, he thought, it was impossible; maybe there were always more railroads, always more places like this. There certainly seemed no end to it.

He wondered, too, what it was he was looking for, what it was that pulled him with such a dire if dimly sensed imperative. It was more than habit or hunger. It was something he did not share with these other men. Something for which he had not been able to discover a name.

“I saw a man once,” Deacon was saying, his thin-soled shoes slapping against the packed earth, “take a drink of muscatel and walk out the door of a moving boxcar. I swear it, I saw him do that.