| Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Chicago Poems. 1916. |
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| 135. ’Boes |
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| I WAITED today for a freight train to pass. | |
| Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the bars, went by. | |
| And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between cars. | |
| Well, the cattle are respectable, I thought. | |
| Every steer has its transportation paid for by the farmer sending it to market, | 5 |
| While the hoboes are law-breakers in riding a railroad train without a ticket. | |
| It reminded me of ten days I spent in the Allegheny County jail in Pittsburgh. | |
| I got ten days even though I was a veteran of the Spanish-American war. | |
| Cooped in the same cell with me was an old man, a bricklayer and a booze-fighter. | |
| But it just happened he, too, was a veteran soldier, and he had fought to preserve the Union and free the niggers. | 10 |
| We were three in all, the other being a Lithuanian who got drunk on pay day at the steel works and got to fighting a policeman; | |
| All the clothes he had was a shirt, pants and shoes—somebody got his hat and coat and what money he had left over when he got drunk. | |
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