Filch Burgoo had always liked Nebraska. At least, he told himself, he had always liked watching the vast Nebraska plains roll past outside the open door of a comfortable boxcar like the one he and his pals were in. They were headed east toward the big switching yards outside Omaha, where Filch was thinking of heading down to New Orleans for a while. Maybe pick up some work on a shrimper; he’d done that before and he liked life on the water. And you couldn’t beat the food.
“Hey Filch,” said Bill the Fiddleman from his seat on a crate of oranges straight from California. Bill himself, this trip, was straight from California too. He’d probably picked some of the oranges in that crate. Filch knew Bill wasn’t one to stick around for long for any work like picking oranges. It was tough labor and Bill, he knew, was really a musician. He’d play his fiddle — or just about any box with strings he could lay his hands on — around the fire in the evening for hours, but picking just wasn’t up Bill’s alley.
“What’s up, Bill?” asked Filch.
“I was just thinkin’ about the last time I got run off by the pinkertons,” said Bill. “And I noticed somethin’.”
“What’s that, Bill?” said Filch. Bill sure was one to notice little things, and the way he could tell it, they usually turned out pretty fascinating. Besides, they were still a few hours out of Omaha and much as he liked Nebraska, there was an awful lot of it.
“I noticed they told me to ‘bug off’, said Bill. “Now, these bulls were Fresno men, and I reckon that’s why.”
“Why what?”
“Why they said ‘bug off’. Instead of ‘get lost’, which is what they yell at you in Chi-town. Or ‘beat it’ like you hear in Jersey.
“Say, Bill, you’re on to somethin’ there,” said Filch, turning to look at him from where he was sitting, feet hanging out the open boxcar door. “In Houston they’d say ‘scram.’”
“In Beantown it’s ‘skedaddle’,” spoke up Little Frank, who Filch had thought was asleep.
“Kiss off,” said Old Blue Slim from the back of the boxcar, “they’ll tell you that up and down the B&O road.
“I’ve heard that one,” nodded Filch. “And there was this one old guy in Billings Montana — a fine old gentleman, tell ya the truth, no idea how he ended up doing that kind of work — who said to me ‘be off with you’. He had that way of speaking, y’see, kind of old-timey and fancy. I reckon he had a few stories he could tell, but I didn’t stick around to hear ’em.”
“I heard a good one down around Miami one time,” said Old Blue Slim, “‘sweep on’ was the term. I had to think a bit to work it out, but I did that later. It was clear as mud what the man meant at the time.”
“It always is,” agreed Filch. “There’s always that one screwball in a crew who’ll say a thing like that and half the time you can see his pals give him a sideways look, like what they wanna say is ‘shut up and get to business, you’, but they can’t do that.”
“You’ll hear ‘git’ anywhere, though,” said Little Frank. “Ever’body knows that one.”
“Sure do,” said Bill the Fiddleman. “Same for ‘scram’, and sometimes you’ll hear ‘shoo’ from a nervous nellie who thinks you’re after the pie she’s got coolin’ on the sill.”
“Like as not I _am_ after that pie,” laughed Old Blue Slim. Everybody chuckled at that.
“Bull outside of Denver told me ‘take a hike’ two weeks back,” said Filch. “I didn’t know how much to read into that one.”
“That’s easy, Filch,” said Bill, “you were supposed to take up walking!”
“Well I sure did right then,” said Filch. “But as you see, I couldn’t stick with it, boys.” He indicated the boxcar with a wave of his arm and everybody laughed again.
“You used to hear ‘go fly a kite’, said Old Blue Slim, “back in the old days before everything got tense. But you don’t hear that nowadays. Now it’s ‘go saw your timber’ or ‘sling your hook’.”
“You got that right,” said Little Frank, “things are tense compared to the old days.”
“It’s just ’cause we got this depression on,” said Filch, “everybody will ease up once things get better, you’ll see.”
“Things are about to get better a lot quicker than that,” called out Old Blue Slim from the back of the car. “Come grab a bite, boys, dinner’s ready!”
Filch got up and headed back to where Old Blue Slim had been cooking something up. He took another look out the boxcar door. He’d always liked Nebraska.
