When Henry arrived at the railway yards, there was a large crowd of men milling about. Some carried signs demanding jobs, others shouted that they didn’t want to go on the dole.
Henry’s father had told him about the dole. It was money the government gave you when your family was starving. Henry knew it was a shameful thing, something to be avoided at all costs. His pa said a real man earned his living by honest hard work and didn’t take charity from anyone, which was why he’d left home to look for a job.
Past the tall fence, Henry saw the big yard. The trains were amazing! He watched the donkey engines push and pull boxcars and even full-sized locomotives around the crisscrossing tracks. There was a huge roundhouse with tracks running into it from different directions. As Henry stared in fascination, a large engine, belching steam like a lumbering dragon, rumbled into the building. The engine stopped on a wide pivoting platform, which began to turn. When it came to a halt, the locomotive chugged off in a different direction.
Tearing himself away, Henry moved into the crowd. He felt uneasy as he searched for his father. He couldn’t see him anywhere, and these men were very angry. They began to shout and to shove the train-yard gate. Someone threw a rock over the fence. Another man stepped in front of a big black car as it drove up. The car stopped, and within seconds the men were crowding around. The shouting became much louder as the mob rocked the car back and forth.
Two men standing in front of Henry backed away.
“Come on, let’s get out of here!” the taller of the two said. “We’ll go to the hobo jungle, where it’s safe.”
The other man laughed at this but followed his friend.
Henry was afraid a riot was going to break out. The tall man had said the hobo jungle was safe. Henry didn’t know what a hobo jungle was, but it had to be better than this shouting, pushing, shoving throng of furious men.
He squeezed through the mob and followed the two strangers.
They made their way through a maze of streets until they reached the outskirts of the city. The sun had gone down, and in the gloom Henry could smell wood smoke drifting on the breeze.
He stopped. In the trees ahead of him were dozens of small campfires, ramshackle sheds and flimsy lean-tos. Shadowy men in tattered coats tended pots hung over the fires or sat huddled together, muttering to one another. Their unshaven faces looked sinister in the flickering light.
Henry swallowed. If this was the hobo jungle, he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with it. It didn’t look safe at all, but going back was out of the question. He didn’t have anyplace to stay in the city. Had his father ended up here, with these dangerous-looking men?
Henry spotted an old canvas tarp lying on top of a pile of broken posts. If he were Tom Sawyer, or even Tom’s best friend, Huck Finn, he’d take that tarp and make a teepee to live in while he was lost in the wilderness.
Henry inched behind the woodpile and pulled out a couple of sturdy pieces, then dragged the tarp and the wood into the trees. Wrestling with the posts, he wedged them into the ground a few feet apart and hung the tarp across. It wasn’t like the teepees he’d seen in books, but it would do.
Crawling inside, Henry wrinkled his nose at the moldy smell. He rummaged in his book bag for the bread, meat and cheese he’d brought. Tearing off a small portion of each, he carefully wrapped up the rest and put it back in his bag. Since there was no telling how long it would be until he could get more food, he would have to ration the little he had left.
When Henry finished his meager meal, he plumped up the lumpy book bag to use as a pillow. He wished he’d brought a blanket with him. The temperature was dropping and the ground felt damp.
This was not how he’d imagined today would go, but at least wild animals wouldn’t eat him while he slept. He was tired, scared, cold, hungry and thirsty. Henry curled up into a ball, pulled his coat around him against the night chill and fell asleep.