Jake could barely read, but he possessed a restless curiosity, and the men who came through could tell him how it was in Washington or Texas or Pennsylvania. The tales they had to tell were disturbing. Many of the men who came through had ridden the rails, as Jake once had, but hopping a freight was getting more difficult. With millions of hoboes as young as twelve or thirteen riding freight cars all over America, the railroad bulls had been turned loose. The hoboes who were caught were lucky. They were handed brief sentences for vagrancy in the city jail. If they were less fortunate, they could be sentenced to six months or more on a chain gang for the “crime” of wandering the country, looking for work. In some places, tramps were savagely beaten or murdered. Even so, white hoboes didn’t face the horrors that greeted blacks on the road in places like Oklahoma, where in some towns if a black man so much as stepped down off a boxcar, he would simply disappear. There were also tens of thousands of women and young girls riding the rails, some with babies in their arms. They would run to hop a train, toss a child up into a moving freight car, hope that someone would be there to catch the baby, then try to swing up themselves. There was no way of knowing how often they failed.

When men stopped at the farm to work, whether for a day or a month, they ate at the kitchen table with Jake and Emaline. Now and then, Jake would have to let a man know that he wasn’t welcome unless he climbed into the stock tank and cleaned up before he came indoors, but they would never allow a hired hand eat in the barn while they ate in the house. It was a small thing they could do for a few unfortunates in this mobile army of the poor, but it was better than nothing.

Emaline sent news from their small Nebraska farm all over the country, writing a steady stream of weekly letters to all her aunts, Tavie in Jackson Hole, Ruby on Sheep Creek, Marguerite in Valentine, Kate in Bellingham. They were all literate, intelligent women. Their lively letters kept her up-to-date on the world outside the Nebraska panhandle. She also wrote two or three letters a week to Bobby and Ben.

In February, Ben wrote a short note to say that Ida Mae Paint had died of heart failure in the State Hospital in Evanston and would be buried in Sheridan. Emaline had mixed feelings when she heard the news. She tried to be charitable to everyone, but Ida Mae had made life very difficult for Velma and her children. Someone else might want to mourn the woman. Emaline never would.