Embarrassed, I made my way through the waiting passengers to where he’d pointed and then set down my suitcase. The map showed a whole tier of northern states, and I was just getting my bearings when the depot door opened and several fellows about my age came in. They were clean and slicked up, and each carried a grip of some kind. A couple had cardboard suitcases like mine.

Two or three of them nodded at me, and I nodded back but kept my attention on the map. I needed to get it figured before I got chased out. Looks like I go due north. Fort Peck must be about a hundred miles.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I whirled around, grabbing up my bag, expecting to see the ticket agent. “I’m on my way,” I said, before I saw it was one of the fellows who’d just come in.

He consulted a piece of paper. “Are you Bowman Bradley?” he asked. His nose was pinching in like he was trying to avoid smelling me.

“No,” I answered. I’d never had anybody look at me like he was, and it made me hurry out from that place fast as I could go.

I was a hundred yards away when he came chasing after me, hollering that he wanted his suitcase.

“I don’t have it!” I yelled back, but when I glanced down I saw I didn’t have my own. The one I was carrying had wider stripes, and the handle was the wrong color.

“I’m sorry,” I said, giving it over. “I must have picked up the wrong one.”

“There’s no other one inside,” he said. “You were stealing mine.”

“No!” I said.

But he was correct that my own suitcase wasn’t anywhere in the depot. “Look,” I told him, “I did have one. Someone else must have taken it.”

“Sure,” he said, “the one full of clean clothes. You think I’m stupid enough to believe that?”

“I wouldn’t have come back to get it if—”

“You’re just lucky I’ve got a schedule to keep to,” he said, as a train pulled in. “Otherwise I’d file charges.”

The waiting room had cleared before it really hit me that I’d just lost everything I wasn’t wearing.

The agent said, “Guess you better go on now, son.”

At a barbershop that offered use of a bathtub, I spent twenty of the fifty cents that was all the money I had left in my pocket.

Then, cleaner anyway, if not clean, I hit the road and put out my thumb. I slept in a hay shed and reached the construction town of Fort Peck, on the Missouri River, the next day. I asked around till I finally got directed to a personnel office in a building busy with guys hurrying in and out.