They'll watch the coast and they'll watch the Eastern trains, but they won't think of Mexico." The sense of pursuit which had harassed him during the last week of his stay at the Big Dipper mine had worn off, and he believed himself to be very cunning.
"I'm pretty far ahead now, I guess," he said.

At Reno he boarded a south-bound freight on the line of the Carson and Colorado railroad, paying for a passage in the caboose.

"Freights don' run on schedule time," he muttered, "and a conductor on a passenger train makes it his business to study faces.

I'll stay with this train as far as it goes." The freight worked slowly southward, through western Nevada, the country becoming hourly more and more desolate and abandoned.

After leaving Walker Lake the sage-brush country began, and the freight rolled heavily over tracks that threw off visible layers of heat.