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THE ROAD
By Jack London
1907
(New York: Macmillan)
TO
JOSIAH FLYNT
The Real Thing, Blowed in the Glass
"Speakin' in general, I 'ave tried 'em all,
The 'appy roads that take you o'er the world.
Speakin' in general, I 'ave found them good
For such as cannot use one bed too long,
But must get 'ence, the same as I 'ave done,
An' go observin' matters till they die."
—Sestina of the Tramp-Royal
There is a woman in the state of Nevada to whom I once lied continuously,
consistently, and shamelessly, for the matter of a couple of hours. I
don't want to apologize to her. Far be it from me. But I do want to
explain. Unfortunately, I do not know her name, much less her present
address. If her eyes should chance upon these lines, I hope she will write
to me.
It was in Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1892. Also, it was fair-time, and
the town was filled with petty crooks and tin-horns, to say nothing of a
vast and hungry horde of hoboes. It was the hungry hoboes that made the
town a "hungry" town. They "battered" the back doors of the homes of the
citizens until the back doors became unresponsive.
A hard town for "scoffings," was what the hoboes called it at that time. I
know that I missed many a meal, in spite of the fact that I could "throw
my feet" with the next one when it came to "slamming a gate" for a
"poke-out" or a "set-down," or hitting for a "light piece" on the street.
Why, I was so hard put in that town, one day, that I gave the porter the
slip and invaded the private car of some itinerant millionnaire. The train
started as I made the platform, and I headed for the aforesaid
millionnaire with the porter one jump behind and reaching for me. It was a
dead heat, for I reached the millionnaire at the same instant that the
porter reached me. I had no time for formalities. "Gimme a quarter to eat
on," I blurted out. And as I live, that millionnaire dipped into his
pocket and gave me ... just ... precisely ... a quarter. It is my
conviction that he was so flabbergasted that he obeyed automatically, and
it has been a matter of keen regret ever since, on my part, that I didn't
ask him for a dollar. I know that I'd have got it. I swung off the
platform of that private car with the porter manoeuvring to kick me in the
face. He missed me. One is at a terrible disadvantage when trying to swing
off the lowest step of a car and not break his neck on the right of way,
with, at the same time, an irate Ethiopian on the platform above trying
to land him in the face with a number eleven. But I got the quarter! I got
it!
But to return to the woman to whom I so shamelessly lied. It was in the
evening of my last day in Reno. I had been out to the race-track watching
the ponies run, and had missed my dinner (i.e. the mid-day meal). I was
hungry, and, furthermore, a committee of public safety had just been
organized to rid the town of just such hungry mortals as I. Already a lot
of my brother hoboes had been gathered in by John Law, and I could hear
the sunny valleys of California calling to me over the cold crests of the
Sierras. Two acts remained for me to perform before I shook the dust of
Reno from my feet. One was to catch the blind baggage on the westbound
overland that night. The other was first to get something to eat. Even
youth will hesitate at an all-night ride, on an empty stomach, outside a
train that is tearing the atmosphere through the snow-sheds, tunnels, and
eternal snows of heaven-aspiring mountains.
But that something to eat was a hard proposition. I was "turned down" at a
dozen houses. Sometimes I received insulting remarks and was informed of
the barred domicile that should be mine if I had my just deserts. The
worst of it was that such assertions were only too true. That was why I
was pulling west that night. John Law was abroad in the town, seeking
eagerly for the hungry and homeless, for by such was his barred domicile
tenanted.
At other houses the doors were slammed in my face, cutting short my
politely and humbly couched request for something to eat. At one house
they did not open the door. I stood on the porch and knocked, and they
looked out at me through the window. They even held one sturdy little boy
aloft so that he could see over the shoulders of his elders the tramp who
wasn't going to get anything to eat at their house.
It began to look as if I should be compelled to go to the very poor for my
food. The very poor constitute the last sure recourse of the hungry tramp.
The very poor can always be depended upon. They never turn away the
hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused
food by the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from
the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows
stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh, you
charity-mongers! Go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the
charitable. They neither give nor withhold from their excess. They have no
excess. They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for
themselves, and very often from what they cruelly need for themselves. A
bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog
when you are just as hungry as the dog.
There was one house in particular where I was turned down that evening.
The porch windows opened on the dining room, and through them I saw a man
eating pie—a big meat-pie. I stood in the open door, and while he talked
with me, he went on eating. He was prosperous, and out of his prosperity
had been bred resentment against his less fortunate brothers.
He cut short my request for something to eat, snapping out, "I don't
believe you want to work."
Now this was irrelevant. I hadn't said anything about work. The topic of
conversation I had introduced was "food." In fact, I didn't want to work.
I wanted to take the westbound overland that night.
"You wouldn't work if you had a chance," he bullied.
I glanced at his meek-faced wife, and knew that but for the presence of
this Cerberus I'd have a whack at that meat-pie myself. But Cerberus
sopped himself in the pie, and I saw that I must placate him if I were to
get a share of it. So I sighed to myself and accepted his work-morality.
"Of course I want work," I bluffed.
"Don't believe it," he snorted.
"Try me," I answered, warming to the bluff.
"All right," he said. "Come to the corner of blank and blank streets"—(I
have forgotten the address)—"to-morrow morning. You know where that
burned building is, and I'll put you to work tossing bricks."
"All right, sir; I'll be there."
He grunted and went on eating. I waited. After a couple of minutes he
looked up with an I-thought-you-were-gone expression on his face, and
demanded:—
"Well?"
"I ... I am waiting for something to eat," I said gently.
"I knew you wouldn't work!" he roared.
He was right, of course; but his conclusion must have been reached by
mind-reading, for his logic wouldn't bear it out. But the beggar at the
door must be humble, so I accepted his logic as I had accepted his
morality.
"You see, I am now hungry," I said still gently. "To-morrow morning I
shall be hungrier. Think how hungry I shall be when I have tossed bricks
all day without anything to eat. Now if you will give me something to eat,
I'll be in great shape for those bricks."
He gravely considered my plea, at the same time going on eating, while his
wife nearly trembled into propitiatory speech, but refrained.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said between mouthfuls. "You come to work
to-morrow, and in the middle of the day I'll advance you enough for your
dinner. That will show whether you are in earnest or not."
"In the meantime—" I began; but he interrupted.
"If I gave you something to eat now, I'd never see you again. Oh, I know
your kind. Look at me. I owe no man. I have never descended so low as to
ask any one for food. I have always earned my food. The trouble with you
is that you are idle and dissolute. I can see it in your face. I have
worked and been honest. I have made myself what I am. And you can do the
same, if you work and are honest."
"Like you?" I queried.
Alas, no ray of humor had ever penetrated the sombre work-sodden soul of
that man.
"Yes, like me," he answered.
"All of us?" I queried.
"Yes, all of you," he answered, conviction vibrating in his voice.
"But if we all became like you," I said, "allow me to point out that
there'd be nobody to toss bricks for you."
I swear there was a flicker of a smile in his wife's eye. As for him, he
was aghast—but whether at the awful possibility of a reformed humanity
that would not enable him to get anybody to toss bricks for him, or at my
impudence, I shall never know.
"I'll not waste words on you," he roared. "Get out of here, you
ungrateful whelp!"
I scraped my feet to advertise my intention of going, and queried:—
"And I don't get anything to eat?"
He arose suddenly to his feet. He was a large man. I was a stranger in a
strange land, and John Law was looking for me. I went away hurriedly. "But
why ungrateful?" I asked myself as I slammed his gate. "What in the
dickens did he give me to be ungrateful about?" I looked back. I could
still see him through the window. He had returned to his pie.
By this time I had lost heart. I passed many houses by without venturing
up to them. All houses looked alike, and none looked "good." After walking
half a dozen blocks I shook off my despondency and gathered my "nerve."
This begging for food was all a game, and if I didn't like the cards, I
could always call for a new deal. I made up my mind to tackle the next
house. I approached it in the deepening twilight, going around to the
kitchen door.
I knocked softly, and when I saw the kind face of the middle-aged woman
who answered, as by inspiration came to me the "story" I was to tell. For
know that upon his ability to tell a good story depends the success of the
beggar. First of all, and on the instant, the beggar must "size up" his
victim. After that, he must tell a story that will appeal to the peculiar
personality and temperament of that particular victim. And right here
arises the great difficulty: in the instant that he is sizing up the
victim he must begin his story. Not a minute is allowed for preparation.
As in a lightning flash he must divine the nature of the victim and
conceive a tale that will hit home. The successful hobo must be an artist.
He must create spontaneously and instantaneously—and not upon a theme
selected from the plenitude of his own imagination, but upon the theme he
reads in the face of the person who opens the door, be it man, woman, or
child, sweet or crabbed, generous or miserly, good-natured or
cantankerous, Jew or Gentile, black or white, race-prejudiced or
brotherly, provincial or universal, or whatever else it may be. I have
often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my
success as a story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I
was compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of
inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity laid
down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also, I quite
believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of me.
Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door
for grub.
After all, art is only consummate artfulness, and artfulness saves many a
"story." I remember lying in a police station at Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was
bound west over the Canadian Pacific. Of course, the police wanted my
story, and I gave it to them—on the spur of the moment. They were
landlubbers, in the heart of the continent, and what better story for them
than a sea story? They could never trip me up on that. And so I told a
tearful tale of my life on the hell-ship Glenmore. (I had once seen the
Glenmore lying at anchor in San Francisco Bay.)
I was an English apprentice, I said. And they said that I didn't talk like
an English boy. It was up to me to create on the instant. I had been born
and reared in the United States. On the death of my parents, I had been
sent to England to my grandparents. It was they who had apprenticed me on
the Glenmore. I hope the captain of the Glenmore will forgive me, for
I gave him a character that night in the Winnipeg police station. Such
cruelty! Such brutality! Such diabolical ingenuity of torture! It
explained why I had deserted the Glenmore at Montreal.
But why was I in the middle of Canada going west, when my grandparents
lived in England? Promptly I created a married sister who lived in
California. She would take care of me. I developed at length her loving
nature. But they were not done with me, those hard-hearted policemen. I
had joined the Glenmore in England; in the two years that had elapsed
before my desertion at Montreal, what had the Glenmore done and where
had she been? And thereat I took those landlubbers around the world with
me. Buffeted by pounding seas and stung with flying spray, they fought a
typhoon with me off the coast of Japan. They loaded and unloaded cargo
with me in all the ports of the Seven Seas. I took them to India, and
Rangoon, and China, and had them hammer ice with me around the Horn and
at last come to moorings at Montreal.
And then they said to wait a moment, and one policeman went forth into the
night while I warmed myself at the stove, all the while racking my brains
for the trap they were going to spring on me.
I groaned to myself when I saw him come in the door at the heels of the
policeman. No gypsy prank had thrust those tiny hoops of gold through the
ears; no prairie winds had beaten that skin into wrinkled leather; nor had
snow-drift and mountain-slope put in his walk that reminiscent roll. And
in those eyes, when they looked at me, I saw the unmistakable sun-wash of
the sea. Here was a theme, alas! with half a dozen policemen to watch me
read—I who had never sailed the China seas, nor been around the Horn, nor
looked with my eyes upon India and Rangoon.
I was desperate. Disaster stalked before me incarnate in the form of that
gold-ear-ringed, weather-beaten son of the sea. Who was he? What was he? I
must solve him ere he solved me. I must take a new orientation, or else
those wicked policemen would orientate me to a cell, a police court, and
more cells. If he questioned me first, before I knew how much he knew, I
was lost.
But did I betray my desperate plight to those lynx-eyed guardians of the
public welfare of Winnipeg? Not I. I met that aged sailorman glad-eyed and
beaming, with all the simulated relief at deliverance that a drowning man
would display on finding a life-preserver in his last despairing clutch.
Here was a man who understood and who would verify my true story to the
faces of those sleuth-hounds who did not understand, or, at least, such
was what I endeavored to play-act. I seized upon him; I volleyed him with
questions about himself. Before my judges I would prove the character of
my savior before he saved me.
He was a kindly sailorman—an "easy mark." The policemen grew impatient
while I questioned him. At last one of them told me to shut up. I shut up;
but while I remained shut up, I was busy creating, busy sketching the
scenario of the next act. I had learned enough to go on with. He was a
Frenchman. He had sailed always on French merchant vessels, with the one
exception of a voyage on a "lime-juicer." And last of all—blessed
fact!—he had not been on the sea for twenty years.
The policeman urged him on to examine me.
"You called in at Rangoon?" he queried.
I nodded. "We put our third mate ashore there. Fever."
If he had asked me what kind of fever, I should have answered, "Enteric,"
though for the life of me I didn't know what enteric was. But he didn't
ask me. Instead, his next question was:—
"And how is Rangoon?"
"All right. It rained a whole lot when we were there."
"Did you get shore-leave?"
"Sure," I answered. "Three of us apprentices went ashore together."
"Do you remember the temple?"
"Which temple?" I parried.
"The big one, at the top of the stairway."
If I remembered that temple, I knew I'd have to describe it. The gulf
yawned for me.
I shook my head.
"You can see it from all over the harbor," he informed me. "You don't need
shore-leave to see that temple."
I never loathed a temple so in my life. But I fixed that particular temple
at Rangoon.
"You can't see it from the harbor," I contradicted. "You can't see it from
the town. You can't see it from the top of the stairway. Because—" I
paused for the effect. "Because there isn't any temple there."
"But I saw it with my own eyes!" he cried.
"That was in—?" I queried.
"Seventy-one."
"It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1887," I explained. "It was
very old."
There was a pause. He was busy reconstructing in his old eyes the youthful
vision of that fair temple by the sea.
"The stairway is still there," I aided him. "You can see it from all over
the harbor. And you remember that little island on the right-hand side
coming into the harbor?" I guess there must have been one there (I was
prepared to shift it over to the left-hand side), for he nodded. "Gone,"
I said. "Seven fathoms of water there now."
I had gained a moment for breath. While he pondered on time's changes, I
prepared the finishing touches of my story.
"You remember the custom-house at Bombay?"
He remembered it.
"Burned to the ground," I announced.
"Do you remember Jim Wan?" he came back at me.
"Dead," I said; but who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn't the slightest idea.
I was on thin ice again.
"Do you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?" I queried back at him
quickly.
That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but the Billy Harper of my
imagination was beyond his faded memory.
"Of course you remember Billy Harper," I insisted. "Everybody knows him.
He's been there forty years. Well, he's still there, that's all."
And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy Harper.
Perhaps there was a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in Shanghai for
forty years and was still there; but it was news to me.
For fully half an hour longer, the sailorman and I talked on in similar
fashion. In the end he told the policemen that I was what I represented
myself to be, and after a night's lodging and a breakfast I was released
to wander on westward to my married sister in San Francisco.
But to return to the woman in Reno who opened her door to me in the
deepening twilight. At the first glimpse of her kindly face I took my cue.
I became a sweet, innocent, unfortunate lad. I couldn't speak. I opened my
mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I asked any one for
food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was ashamed. I, who looked
upon begging as a delightful whimsicality, thumbed myself over into a true
son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all her bourgeois morality. Only the
harsh pangs of the belly-need could compel me to do so degraded and
ignoble a thing as beg for food. And into my face I strove to throw all
the wan wistfulness of famished and ingenuous youth unused to mendicancy.
"You are hungry, my poor boy," she said.
I had made her speak first.
I nodded my head and gulped.
"It is the first time I have ever ... asked," I faltered.
"Come right in." The door swung open. "We have already finished eating,
but the fire is burning and I can get something up for you."
She looked at me closely when she got me into the light.
"I wish my boy were as healthy and strong as you," she said. "But he is
not strong. He sometimes falls down. He just fell down this afternoon and
hurt himself badly, the poor dear."
She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it that I
yearned to appropriate. I glanced at him. He sat across the table, slender
and pale, his head swathed in bandages. He did not move, but his eyes,
bright in the lamplight, were fixed upon me in a steady and wondering
stare.
"Just like my poor father," I said. "He had the falling sickness. Some
kind of vertigo. It puzzled the doctors. They never could make out what
was the matter with him."
"He is dead?" she queried gently, setting before me half a dozen
soft-boiled eggs.
"Dead," I gulped. "Two weeks ago. I was with him when it happened. We were
crossing the street together. He fell right down. He was never conscious
again. They carried him into a drug-store. He died there."
And thereat I developed the pitiful tale of my father—how, after my
mother's death, he and I had gone to San Francisco from the ranch; how his
pension (he was an old soldier), and the little other money he had, was
not enough; and how he had tried book-canvassing. Also, I narrated my own
woes during the few days after his death that I had spent alone and
forlorn on the streets of San Francisco. While that good woman warmed up
biscuits, fried bacon, and cooked more eggs, and while I kept pace with
her in taking care of all that she placed before me, I enlarged the
picture of that poor orphan boy and filled in the details. I became that
poor boy. I believed in him as I believed in the beautiful eggs I was
devouring. I could have wept for myself. I know the tears did get into my
voice at times. It was very effective.
In fact, with every touch I added to the picture, that kind soul gave me
something also. She made up a lunch for me to carry away. She put in many
boiled eggs, pepper and salt, and other things, and a big apple. She
provided me with three pairs of thick red woollen socks. She gave me clean
handkerchiefs and other things which I have since forgotten. And all the
time she cooked more and more and I ate more and more. I gorged like a
savage; but then it was a far cry across the Sierras on a blind baggage,
and I knew not when nor where I should find my next meal. And all the
while, like a death's-head at the feast, silent and motionless, her own
unfortunate boy sat and stared at me across the table. I suppose I
represented to him mystery, and romance, and adventure—all that was
denied the feeble flicker of life that was in him. And yet I could not
forbear, once or twice, from wondering if he saw through me down to the
bottom of my mendacious heart.
"But where are you going to?" she asked me.
"Salt Lake City," said I. "I have a sister there—a married sister." (I
debated if I should make a Mormon out of her, and decided against it.)
"Her husband is a plumber—a contracting plumber."
Now I knew that contracting plumbers were usually credited with making
lots of money. But I had spoken. It was up to me to qualify.
"They would have sent me the money for my fare if I had asked for it," I
explained, "but they have had sickness and business troubles. His partner
cheated him. And so I wouldn't write for the money. I knew I could make my
way there somehow. I let them think I had enough to get me to Salt Lake
City. She is lovely, and so kind. She was always kind to me. I guess I'll
go into the shop and learn the trade. She has two daughters. They are
younger than I. One is only a baby."
Of all my married sisters that I have distributed among the cities of the
United States, that Salt Lake sister is my favorite. She is quite real,
too. When I tell about her, I can see her, and her two little girls, and
her plumber husband. She is a large, motherly woman, just verging on
beneficent stoutness—the kind, you know, that always cooks nice things
and that never gets angry. She is a brunette. Her husband is a quiet,
easy-going fellow. Sometimes I almost know him quite well. And who knows
but some day I may meet him? If that aged sailorman could remember Billy
Harper, I see no reason why I should not some day meet the husband of my
sister who lives in Salt Lake City.
On the other hand, I have a feeling of certitude within me that I shall
never meet in the flesh my many parents and grandparents—you see, I
invariably killed them off. Heart disease was my favorite way of getting
rid of my mother, though on occasion I did away with her by means of
consumption, pneumonia, and typhoid fever. It is true, as the Winnipeg
policemen will attest, that I have grandparents living in England; but
that was a long time ago and it is a fair assumption that they are dead by
now. At any rate, they have never written to me.
I hope that woman in Reno will read these lines and forgive me my
gracelessness and unveracity. I do not apologize, for I am unashamed. It
was youth, delight in life, zest for experience, that brought me to her
door. It did me good. It taught me the intrinsic kindliness of human
nature. I hope it did her good. Anyway, she may get a good laugh out of it
now that she learns the real inwardness of the situation.
To her my story was "true." She believed in me and all my family, and she
was filled with solicitude for the dangerous journey I must make ere I won
to Salt Lake City. This solicitude nearly brought me to grief. Just as I
was leaving, my arms full of lunch and my pockets bulging with fat woollen
socks, she bethought herself of a nephew, or uncle, or relative of some
sort, who was in the railway mail service, and who, moreover, would come
through that night on the very train on which I was going to steal my
ride. The very thing! She would take me down to the depot, tell him my
story, and get him to hide me in the mail car. Thus, without danger or
hardship, I would be carried straight through to Ogden. Salt Lake City was
only a few miles farther on. My heart sank. She grew excited as she
developed the plan and with my sinking heart I had to feign unbounded
gladness and enthusiasm at this solution of my difficulties.
Solution! Why I was bound west that night, and here was I being trapped
into going east. It was a trap, and I hadn't the heart to tell her that
it was all a miserable lie. And while I made believe that I was delighted,
I was busy cudgelling my brains for some way to escape. But there was no
way. She would see me into the mail-car—she said so herself—and then
that mail-clerk relative of hers would carry me to Ogden. And then I would
have to beat my way back over all those hundreds of miles of desert.
But luck was with me that night. Just about the time she was getting ready
to put on her bonnet and accompany me, she discovered that she had made a
mistake. Her mail-clerk relative was not scheduled to come through that
night. His run had been changed. He would not come through until two
nights afterward. I was saved, for of course my boundless youth would
never permit me to wait those two days. I optimistically assured her that
I'd get to Salt Lake City quicker if I started immediately, and I departed
with her blessings and best wishes ringing in my ears.
But those woollen socks were great. I know. I wore a pair of them that
night on the blind baggage of the overland, and that overland went west.
Barring accidents, a good hobo, with youth and agility, can hold a train
down despite all the efforts of the train-crew to "ditch" him—given, of
course, night-time as an essential condition. When such a hobo, under such
conditions, makes up his mind that he is going to hold her down, either he
does hold her down, or chance trips him up. There is no legitimate way,
short of murder, whereby the train-crew can ditch him. That train-crews
have not stopped short of murder is a current belief in the tramp world.
Not having had that particular experience in my tramp days I cannot vouch
for it personally.
But this I have heard of the "bad" roads. When a tramp has "gone
underneath," on the rods, and the train is in motion, there is apparently
no way of dislodging him until the train stops. The tramp, snugly
ensconced inside the truck, with the four wheels and all the framework
around him, has the "cinch" on the crew—or so he thinks, until some day
he rides the rods on a bad road. A bad road is usually one on which a
short time previously one or several trainmen have been killed by tramps.
Heaven pity the tramp who is caught "underneath" on such a road—for
caught he is, though the train be going sixty miles an hour.
The "shack" (brakeman) takes a coupling-pin and a length of bell-cord to
the platform in front of the truck in which the tramp is riding. The shack
fastens the coupling-pin to the bell-cord, drops the former down between
the platforms, and pays out the latter. The coupling-pin strikes the ties
between the rails, rebounds against the bottom of the car, and again
strikes the ties. The shack plays it back and forth, now to this side, now
to the other, lets it out a bit and hauls it in a bit, giving his weapon
opportunity for every variety of impact and rebound. Every blow of that
flying coupling-pin is freighted with death, and at sixty miles an hour it
beats a veritable tattoo of death. The next day the remains of that tramp
are gathered up along the right of way, and a line in the local paper
mentions the unknown man, undoubtedly a tramp, assumably drunk, who had
probably fallen asleep on the track.
As a characteristic illustration of how a capable hobo can hold her down,
I am minded to give the following experience. I was in Ottawa, bound west
over the Canadian Pacific. Three thousand miles of that road stretched
before me; it was the fall of the year, and I had to cross Manitoba and
the Rocky Mountains. I could expect "crimpy" weather, and every moment of
delay increased the frigid hardships of the journey. Furthermore, I was
disgusted. The distance between Montreal and Ottawa is one hundred and
twenty miles. I ought to know, for I had just come over it and it had
taken me six days. By mistake I had missed the main line and come over a
small "jerk" with only two locals a day on it. And during these six days I
had lived on dry crusts, and not enough of them, begged from the French
peasants.
Furthermore, my disgust had been heightened by the one day I had spent in
Ottawa trying to get an outfit of clothing for my long journey. Let me put
it on record right here that Ottawa, with one exception, is the hardest
town in the United States and Canada to beg clothes in; the one exception
is Washington, D.C. The latter fair city is the limit. I spent two weeks
there trying to beg a pair of shoes, and then had to go on to Jersey City
before I got them.
But to return to Ottawa. At eight sharp in the morning I started out after
clothes. I worked energetically all day. I swear I walked forty miles. I
interviewed the housewives of a thousand homes. I did not even knock off
work for dinner. And at six in the afternoon, after ten hours of
unremitting and depressing toil, I was still shy one shirt, while the pair
of trousers I had managed to acquire was tight and, moreover, was showing
all the signs of an early disintegration.
At six I quit work and headed for the railroad yards, expecting to pick up
something to eat on the way. But my hard luck was still with me. I was
refused food at house after house. Then I got a "hand-out." My spirits
soared, for it was the largest hand-out I had ever seen in a long and
varied experience. It was a parcel wrapped in newspapers and as big as a
mature suit-case. I hurried to a vacant lot and opened it. First, I saw
cake, then more cake, all kinds and makes of cake, and then some. It was
all cake. No bread and butter with thick firm slices of meat
between—nothing but cake; and I who of all things abhorred cake most! In
another age and clime they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. And
in a vacant lot in Canada's proud capital, I, too, sat down and wept ...
over a mountain of cake. As one looks upon the face of his dead son, so
looked I upon that multitudinous pastry. I suppose I was an ungrateful
tramp, for I refused to partake of the bounteousness of the house that had
had a party the night before. Evidently the guests hadn't liked cake
either.
That cake marked the crisis in my fortunes. Than it nothing could be
worse; therefore things must begin to mend. And they did. At the very next
house I was given a "set-down." Now a "set-down" is the height of bliss.
One is taken inside, very often is given a chance to wash, and is then
"set-down" at a table. Tramps love to throw their legs under a table. The
house was large and comfortable, in the midst of spacious grounds and fine
trees, and sat well back from the street. They had just finished eating,
and I was taken right into the dining room—in itself a most unusual
happening, for the tramp who is lucky enough to win a set-down usually
receives it in the kitchen. A grizzled and gracious Englishman, his
matronly wife, and a beautiful young Frenchwoman talked with me while I
ate.
I wonder if that beautiful young Frenchwoman would remember, at this late
day, the laugh I gave her when I uttered the barbaric phrase, "two-bits."
You see, I was trying delicately to hit them for a "light piece." That was
how the sum of money came to be mentioned. "What?" she said. "Two-bits,"
said I. Her mouth was twitching as she again said, "What?" "Two-bits,"
said I. Whereat she burst into laughter. "Won't you repeat it?" she said,
when she had regained control of herself. "Two-bits," said I. And once
more she rippled into uncontrollable silvery laughter. "I beg your
pardon," said she; "but what ... what was it you said?" "Two-bits," said
I; "is there anything wrong about it?" "Not that I know of," she gurgled
between gasps; "but what does it mean?" I explained, but I do not remember
now whether or not I got that two-bits out of her; but I have often
wondered since as to which of us was the provincial.
When I arrived at the depot, I found, much to my disgust, a bunch of at
least twenty tramps that were waiting to ride out the blind baggages of
the overland. Now two or three tramps on the blind baggage are all right.
They are inconspicuous. But a score! That meant trouble. No train-crew
would ever let all of us ride.
I may as well explain here what a blind baggage is. Some mail-cars are
built without doors in the ends; hence, such a car is "blind." The
mail-cars that possess end doors, have those doors always locked. Suppose,
after the train has started, that a tramp gets on to the platform of one
of these blind cars. There is no door, or the door is locked. No conductor
or brakeman can get to him to collect fare or throw him off. It is clear
that the tramp is safe until the next time the train stops. Then he must
get off, run ahead in the darkness, and when the train pulls by, jump on
to the blind again. But there are ways and ways, as you shall see.
When the train pulled out, those twenty tramps swarmed upon the three
blinds. Some climbed on before the train had run a car-length. They were
awkward dubs, and I saw their speedy finish. Of course, the train-crew was
"on," and at the first stop the trouble began. I jumped off and ran
forward along the track. I noticed that I was accompanied by a number of
the tramps. They evidently knew their business. When one is beating an
overland, he must always keep well ahead of the train at the stops. I ran
ahead, and as I ran, one by one those that accompanied me dropped out.
This dropping out was the measure of their skill and nerve in boarding a
train.
For this is the way it works. When the train starts, the shack rides out
the blind. There is no way for him to get back into the train proper
except by jumping off the blind and catching a platform where the car-ends
are not "blind." When the train is going as fast as the shack cares to
risk, he therefore jumps off the blind, lets several cars go by, and gets
on to the train. So it is up to the tramp to run so far ahead that before
the blind is opposite him the shack will have already vacated it.
I dropped the last tramp by about fifty feet, and waited. The train
started. I saw the lantern of the shack on the first blind. He was riding
her out. And I saw the dubs stand forlornly by the track as the blind went
by. They made no attempt to get on. They were beaten by their own
inefficiency at the very start. After them, in the line-up, came the
tramps that knew a little something about the game. They let the first
blind, occupied by the shack, go by, and jumped on the second and third
blinds. Of course, the shack jumped off the first and on to the second as
it went by, and scrambled around there, throwing off the men who had
boarded it. But the point is that I was so far ahead that when the first
blind came opposite me, the shack had already left it and was tangled up
with the tramps on the second blind. A half dozen of the more skilful
tramps, who had run far enough ahead, made the first blind, too.
At the next stop, as we ran forward along the track, I counted but fifteen
of us. Five had been ditched. The weeding-out process had begun nobly, and
it continued station by station. Now we were fourteen, now twelve, now
eleven, now nine, now eight. It reminded me of the ten little niggers of
the nursery rhyme. I was resolved that I should be the last little nigger
of all. And why not? Was I not blessed with strength, agility, and youth?
(I was eighteen, and in perfect condition.) And didn't I have my "nerve"
with me? And furthermore, was I not a tramp-royal? Were not these other
tramps mere dubs and "gay-cats" and amateurs alongside of me? If I weren't
the last little nigger, I might as well quit the game and get a job on an
alfalfa farm somewhere.
By the time our number had been reduced to four, the whole train-crew had
become interested. From then on it was a contest of skill and wits, with
the odds in favor of the crew. One by one the three other survivors turned
up missing, until I alone remained. My, but I was proud of myself! No
Croesus was ever prouder of his first million. I was holding her down in
spite of two brakemen, a conductor, a fireman, and an engineer.
And here are a few samples of the way I held her down. Out ahead, in the
darkness,—so far ahead that the shack riding out the blind must perforce
get off before it reaches me,—I get on. Very well. I am good for another
station. When that station is reached, I dart ahead again to repeat the
manoeuvre. The train pulls out. I watch her coming. There is no light of a
lantern on the blind. Has the crew abandoned the fight? I do not know. One
never knows, and one must be prepared every moment for anything. As the
first blind comes opposite me, and I run to leap aboard, I strain my eyes
to see if the shack is on the platform. For all I know he may be there,
with his lantern doused, and even as I spring upon the steps that lantern
may smash down upon my head. I ought to know. I have been hit by lanterns
two or three times.
But no, the first blind is empty. The train is gathering speed. I am safe
for another station. But am I? I feel the train slacken speed. On the
instant I am alert. A manoeuvre is being executed against me, and I do not
know what it is. I try to watch on both sides at once, not forgetting to
keep track of the tender in front of me. From any one, or all, of these
three directions, I may be assailed.
Ah, there it comes. The shack has ridden out the engine. My first warning
is when his feet strike the steps of the right-hand side of the blind.
Like a flash I am off the blind to the left and running ahead past the
engine. I lose myself in the darkness. The situation is where it has been
ever since the train left Ottawa. I am ahead, and the train must come past
me if it is to proceed on its journey. I have as good a chance as ever for
boarding her.
I watch carefully. I see a lantern come forward to the engine, and I do
not see it go back from the engine. It must therefore be still on the
engine, and it is a fair assumption that attached to the handle of that
lantern is a shack. That shack was lazy, or else he would have put out his
lantern instead of trying to shield it as he came forward. The train pulls
out. The first blind is empty, and I gain it. As before the train
slackens, the shack from the engine boards the blind from one side, and I
go off the other side and run forward.
As I wait in the darkness I am conscious of a big thrill of pride. The
overland has stopped twice for me—for me, a poor hobo on the bum. I alone
have twice stopped the overland with its many passengers and coaches, its
government mail, and its two thousand steam horses straining in the
engine. And I weigh only one hundred and sixty pounds, and I haven't a
five-cent piece in my pocket!
Again I see the lantern come forward to the engine. But this time it comes
conspicuously. A bit too conspicuously to suit me, and I wonder what is
up. At any rate I have something else to be afraid of than the shack on
the engine. The train pulls by. Just in time, before I make my spring, I
see the dark form of a shack, without a lantern, on the first blind. I let
it go by, and prepare to board the second blind. But the shack on the
first blind has jumped off and is at my heels. Also, I have a fleeting
glimpse of the lantern of the shack who rode out the engine. He has jumped
off, and now both shacks are on the ground on the same side with me. The
next moment the second blind comes by and I am aboard it. But I do not
linger. I have figured out my countermove. As I dash across the platform I
hear the impact of the shack's feet against the steps as he boards. I jump
off the other side and run forward with the train. My plan is to run
forward and get on the first blind. It is nip and tuck, for the train is
gathering speed. Also, the shack is behind me and running after me. I
guess I am the better sprinter, for I make the first blind. I stand on the
steps and watch my pursuer. He is only about ten feet back and running
hard; but now the train has approximated his own speed, and, relative to
me, he is standing still. I encourage him, hold out my hand to him; but he
explodes in a mighty oath, gives up and makes the train several cars back.
The train is speeding along, and I am still chuckling to myself, when,
without warning, a spray of water strikes me. The fireman is playing the
hose on me from the engine. I step forward from the car-platform to the
rear of the tender, where I am sheltered under the overhang. The water
flies harmlessly over my head. My fingers itch to climb up on the tender
and lam that fireman with a chunk of coal; but I know if I do that, I'll
be massacred by him and the engineer, and I refrain.
At the next stop I am off and ahead in the darkness. This time, when the
train pulls out, both shacks are on the first blind. I divine their game.
They have blocked the repetition of my previous play. I cannot again take
the second blind, cross over, and run forward to the first. As soon as
the first blind passes and I do not get on, they swing off, one on each
side of the train. I board the second blind, and as I do so I know that a
moment later, simultaneously, those two shacks will arrive on both sides
of me. It is like a trap. Both ways are blocked. Yet there is another way
out, and that way is up.
So I do not wait for my pursuers to arrive. I climb upon the upright
ironwork of the platform and stand upon the wheel of the hand-brake. This
has taken up the moment of grace and I hear the shacks strike the steps on
either side. I don't stop to look. I raise my arms overhead until my hands
rest against the down-curving ends of the roofs of the two cars. One hand,
of course, is on the curved roof of one car, the other hand on the curved
roof of the other car. By this time both shacks are coming up the steps. I
know it, though I am too busy to see them. All this is happening in the
space of only several seconds. I make a spring with my legs and "muscle"
myself up with my arms. As I draw up my legs, both shacks reach for me and
clutch empty air. I know this, for I look down and see them. Also I hear
them swear.
I am now in a precarious position, riding the ends of the down-curving
roofs of two cars at the same time. With a quick, tense movement, I
transfer both legs to the curve of one roof and both hands to the curve of
the other roof. Then, gripping the edge of that curving roof, I climb over
the curve to the level roof above, where I sit down to catch my breath,
holding on the while to a ventilator that projects above the surface. I am
on top of the train—on the "decks," as the tramps call it, and this
process I have described is by them called "decking her." And let me say
right here that only a young and vigorous tramp is able to deck a
passenger train, and also, that the young and vigorous tramp must have his
nerve with him as well.
The train goes on gathering speed, and I know I am safe until the next
stop—but only until the next stop. If I remain on the roof after the
train stops, I know those shacks will fusillade me with rocks. A healthy
shack can "dewdrop" a pretty heavy chunk of stone on top of a car—say
anywhere from five to twenty pounds. On the other hand, the chances are
large that at the next stop the shacks will be waiting for me to descend
at the place I climbed up. It is up to me to climb down at some other
platform.
Registering a fervent hope that there are no tunnels in the next half
mile, I rise to my feet and walk down the train half a dozen cars. And let
me say that one must leave timidity behind him on such a passear. The
roofs of passenger coaches are not made for midnight promenades. And if
any one thinks they are, let me advise him to try it. Just let him walk
along the roof of a jolting, lurching car, with nothing to hold on to but
the black and empty air, and when he comes to the down-curving end of the
roof, all wet and slippery with dew, let him accelerate his speed so as to
step across to the next roof, down-curving and wet and slippery. Believe
me, he will learn whether his heart is weak or his head is giddy.
As the train slows down for a stop, half a dozen platforms from where I
had decked her I come down. No one is on the platform. When the train
comes to a standstill, I slip off to the ground. Ahead, and between me and
the engine, are two moving lanterns. The shacks are looking for me on the
roofs of the cars. I note that the car beside which I am standing is a
"four-wheeler"—by which is meant that it has only four wheels to each
truck. (When you go underneath on the rods, be sure to avoid the
"six-wheelers,"—they lead to disasters.)
I duck under the train and make for the rods, and I can tell you I am
mighty glad that the train is standing still. It is the first time I have
ever gone underneath on the Canadian Pacific, and the internal
arrangements are new to me. I try to crawl over the top of the truck,
between the truck and the bottom of the car. But the space is not large
enough for me to squeeze through. This is new to me. Down in the United
States I am accustomed to going underneath on rapidly moving trains,
seizing a gunnel and swinging my feet under to the brake-beam, and from
there crawling over the top of the truck and down inside the truck to a
seat on the cross-rod.
Feeling with my hands in the darkness, I learn that there is room between
the brake-beam and the ground. It is a tight squeeze. I have to lie flat
and worm my way through. Once inside the truck, I take my seat on the rod
and wonder what the shacks are thinking has become of me. The train gets
under way. They have given me up at last.
But have they? At the very next stop, I see a lantern thrust under the
next truck to mine at the other end of the car. They are searching the
rods for me. I must make my get-away pretty lively. I crawl on my stomach
under the brake-beam. They see me and run for me, but I crawl on hands and
knees across the rail on the opposite side and gain my feet. Then away I
go for the head of the train. I run past the engine and hide in the
sheltering darkness. It is the same old situation. I am ahead of the
train, and the train must go past me.
The train pulls out. There is a lantern on the first blind. I lie low, and
see the peering shack go by. But there is also a lantern on the second
blind. That shack spots me and calls to the shack who has gone past on the
first blind. Both jump off. Never mind, I'll take the third blind and deck
her. But heavens, there is a lantern on the third blind, too. It is the
conductor. I let it go by. At any rate I have now the full train-crew in
front of me. I turn and run back in the opposite direction to what the
train is going. I look over my shoulder. All three lanterns are on the
ground and wobbling along in pursuit. I sprint. Half the train has gone
by, and it is going quite fast, when I spring aboard. I know that the two
shacks and the conductor will arrive like ravening wolves in about two
seconds. I spring upon the wheel of the hand-brake, get my hands on the
curved ends of the roofs, and muscle myself up to the decks; while my
disappointed pursuers, clustering on the platform beneath like dogs that
have treed a cat, howl curses up at me and say unsocial things about my
ancestors.
But what does that matter? It is five to one, including the engineer and
fireman, and the majesty of the law and the might of a great corporation
are behind them, and I am beating them out. I am too far down the train,
and I run ahead over the roofs of the coaches until I am over the fifth or
sixth platform from the engine. I peer down cautiously. A shack is on that
platform. That he has caught sight of me, I know from the way he makes a
swift sneak inside the car; and I know, also, that he is waiting inside
the door, all ready to pounce out on me when I climb down. But I make
believe that I don't know, and I remain there to encourage him in his
error. I do not see him, yet I know that he opens the door once and peeps
up to assure himself that I am still there.
The train slows down for a station. I dangle my legs down in a tentative
way. The train stops. My legs are still dangling. I hear the door unlatch
softly. He is all ready for me. Suddenly I spring up and run forward over
the roof. This is right over his head, where he lurks inside the door. The
train is standing still; the night is quiet, and I take care to make
plenty of noise on the metal roof with my feet. I don't know, but my
assumption is that he is now running forward to catch me as I descend at
the next platform. But I don't descend there. Halfway along the roof of
the coach, I turn, retrace my way softly and quickly to the platform both
the shack and I have just abandoned. The coast is clear. I descend to the
ground on the off-side of the train and hide in the darkness. Not a soul
has seen me.
I go over to the fence, at the edge of the right of way, and watch. Ah,
ha! What's that? I see a lantern on top of the train, moving along from
front to rear. They think I haven't come down, and they are searching the
roofs for me. And better than that—on the ground on each side of the
train, moving abreast with the lantern on top, are two other lanterns. It
is a rabbit-drive, and I am the rabbit. When the shack on top flushes me,
the ones on each side will nab me. I roll a cigarette and watch the
procession go by. Once past me, I am safe to proceed to the front of the
train. She pulls out, and I make the front blind without opposition. But
before she is fully under way and just as I am lighting my cigarette, I am
aware that the fireman has climbed over the coal to the back of the tender
and is looking down at me. I am filled with apprehension. From his
position he can mash me to a jelly with lumps of coal. Instead of which he
addresses me, and I note with relief the admiration in his voice.
"You son-of-a-gun," is what he says.
It is a high compliment, and I thrill as a schoolboy thrills on receiving
a reward of merit.
"Say," I call up to him, "don't you play the hose on me any more."
"All right," he answers, and goes back to his work.
I have made friends with the engine, but the shacks are still looking for
me. At the next stop, the shacks ride out all three blinds, and as before,
I let them go by and deck in the middle of the train. The crew is on its
mettle by now, and the train stops. The shacks are going to ditch me or
know the reason why. Three times the mighty overland stops for me at that
station, and each time I elude the shacks and make the decks. But it is
hopeless, for they have finally come to an understanding of the situation.
I have taught them that they cannot guard the train from me. They must do
something else.
And they do it. When the train stops that last time, they take after me
hot-footed. Ah, I see their game. They are trying to run me down. At first
they herd me back toward the rear of the train. I know my peril. Once to
the rear of the train, it will pull out with me left behind. I double, and
twist, and turn, dodge through my pursuers, and gain the front of the
train. One shack still hangs on after me. All right, I'll give him the run
of his life, for my wind is good. I run straight ahead along the track. It
doesn't matter. If he chases me ten miles, he'll nevertheless have to
catch the train, and I can board her at any speed that he can.
So I run on, keeping just comfortably ahead of him and straining my eyes
in the gloom for cattle-guards and switches that may bring me to grief.
Alas! I strain my eyes too far ahead, and trip over something just under
my feet, I know not what, some little thing, and go down to earth in a
long, stumbling fall. The next moment I am on my feet, but the shack has
me by the collar. I do not struggle. I am busy with breathing deeply and
with sizing him up. He is narrow-shouldered, and I have at least thirty
pounds the better of him in weight. Besides, he is just as tired as I am,
and if he tries to slug me, I'll teach him a few things.
But he doesn't try to slug me, and that problem is settled. Instead, he
starts to lead me back toward the train, and another possible problem
arises. I see the lanterns of the conductor and the other shack. We are
approaching them. Not for nothing have I made the acquaintance of the New
York police. Not for nothing, in box-cars, by water-tanks, and in
prison-cells, have I listened to bloody tales of man-handling. What if
these three men are about to man-handle me? Heaven knows I have given them
provocation enough. I think quickly. We are drawing nearer and nearer to
the other two trainmen. I line up the stomach and the jaw of my captor,
and plan the right and left I'll give him at the first sign of trouble.
Pshaw! I know another trick I'd like to work on him, and I almost regret
that I did not do it at the moment I was captured. I could make him sick,
what of his clutch on my collar. His fingers, tight-gripping, are buried
inside my collar. My coat is tightly buttoned. Did you ever see a
tourniquet? Well, this is one. All I have to do is to duck my head under
his arm and begin to twist. I must twist rapidly—very rapidly. I know how
to do it; twisting in a violent, jerky way, ducking my head under his arm
with each revolution. Before he knows it, those detaining fingers of his
will be detained. He will be unable to withdraw them. It is a powerful
leverage. Twenty seconds after I have started revolving, the blood will be
bursting out of his finger-ends, the delicate tendons will be rupturing,
and all the muscles and nerves will be mashing and crushing together in a
shrieking mass. Try it sometime when somebody has you by the collar. But
be quick—quick as lightning. Also, be sure to hug yourself while you are
revolving—hug your face with your left arm and your abdomen with your
right. You see, the other fellow might try to stop you with a punch from
his free arm. It would be a good idea, too, to revolve away from that free
arm rather than toward it. A punch going is never so bad as a punch
coming.
That shack will never know how near he was to being made very, very sick.
All that saves him is that it is not in their plan to man-handle me. When
we draw near enough, he calls out that he has me, and they signal the
train to come on. The engine passes us, and the three blinds. After that,
the conductor and the other shack swing aboard. But still my captor holds
on to me. I see the plan. He is going to hold me until the rear of the
train goes by. Then he will hop on, and I shall be left behind—ditched.
But the train has pulled out fast, the engineer trying to make up for lost
time. Also, it is a long train. It is going very lively, and I know the
shack is measuring its speed with apprehension.
"Think you can make it?" I query innocently.
He releases my collar, makes a quick run, and swings aboard. A number of
coaches are yet to pass by. He knows it, and remains on the steps, his
head poked out and watching me. In that moment my next move comes to me.
I'll make the last platform. I know she's going fast and faster, but I'll
only get a roll in the dirt if I fail, and the optimism of youth is mine.
I do not give myself away. I stand with a dejected droop of shoulder,
advertising that I have abandoned hope. But at the same time I am feeling
with my feet the good gravel. It is perfect footing. Also I am watching
the poked-out head of the shack. I see it withdrawn. He is confident that
the train is going too fast for me ever to make it.
And the train is going fast—faster than any train I have ever tackled.
As the last coach comes by I sprint in the same direction with it. It is a
swift, short sprint. I cannot hope to equal the speed of the train, but I
can reduce the difference of our speed to the minimum, and, hence, reduce
the shock of impact, when I leap on board. In the fleeting instant of
darkness I do not see the iron hand-rail of the last platform; nor is
there time for me to locate it. I reach for where I think it ought to be,
and at the same instant my feet leave the ground. It is all in the toss.
The next moment I may be rolling in the gravel with broken ribs, or arms,
or head. But my fingers grip the hand-hold, there is a jerk on my arms
that slightly pivots my body, and my feet land on the steps with sharp
violence.
I sit down, feeling very proud of myself. In all my hoboing it is the best
bit of train-jumping I have done. I know that late at night one is always
good for several stations on the last platform, but I do not care to trust
myself at the rear of the train. At the first stop I run forward on the
off-side of the train, pass the Pullmans, and duck under and take a rod
under a day-coach. At the next stop I run forward again and take another
rod.
I am now comparatively safe. The shacks think I am ditched. But the long
day and the strenuous night are beginning to tell on me. Also, it is not
so windy nor cold underneath, and I begin to doze. This will never do.
Sleep on the rods spells death, so I crawl out at a station and go forward
to the second blind. Here I can lie down and sleep; and here I do
sleep—how long I do not know—for I am awakened by a lantern thrust into
my face. The two shacks are staring at me. I scramble up on the defensive,
wondering as to which one is going to make the first "pass" at me. But
slugging is far from their minds.
"I thought you was ditched," says the shack who had held me by the collar.
"If you hadn't let go of me when you did, you'd have been ditched along
with me," I answer.
"How's that?" he asks.
"I'd have gone into a clinch with you, that's all," is my reply.
They hold a consultation, and their verdict is summed up in:—
"Well, I guess you can ride, Bo. There's no use trying to keep you off."
And they go away and leave me in peace to the end of their division.
I have given the foregoing as a sample of what "holding her down" means.
Of course, I have selected a fortunate night out of my experiences, and
said nothing of the nights—and many of them—when I was tripped up by
accident and ditched.
In conclusion, I want to tell of what happened when I reached the end of
the division. On single-track, transcontinental lines, the freight trains
wait at the divisions and follow out after the passenger trains. When the
division was reached, I left my train, and looked for the freight that
would pull out behind it. I found the freight, made up on a side-track and
waiting. I climbed into a box-car half full of coal and lay down. In no
time I was asleep.
I was awakened by the sliding open of the door. Day was just dawning, cold
and gray, and the freight had not yet started. A "con" (conductor) was
poking his head inside the door.
"Get out of that, you blankety-blank-blank!" he roared at me.
I got, and outside I watched him go down the line inspecting every car in
the train. When he got out of sight I thought to myself that he would
never think I'd have the nerve to climb back into the very car out of
which he had fired me. So back I climbed and lay down again.
Now that con's mental processes must have been paralleling, mine, for he
reasoned that it was the very thing I would do. For back he came and fired
me out.
Now, surely, I reasoned, he will never dream that I'd do it a third time.
Back I went, into the very same car. But I decided to make sure. Only one
side-door could be opened. The other side-door was nailed up. Beginning at
the top of the coal, I dug a hole alongside of that door and lay down in
it. I heard the other door open. The con climbed up and looked in over the
top of the coal. He couldn't see me. He called to me to get out. I tried
to fool him by remaining quiet. But when he began tossing chunks of coal
into the hole on top of me, I gave up and for the third time was fired
out. Also, he informed me in warm terms of what would happen to me if he
caught me in there again.
I changed my tactics. When a man is paralleling your mental processes,
ditch him. Abruptly break off your line of reasoning, and go off on a new
line. This I did. I hid between some cars on an adjacent side-track, and
watched. Sure enough, that con came back again to the car. He opened the
door, he climbed up, he called, he threw coal into the hole I had made. He
even crawled over the coal and looked into the hole. That satisfied him.
Five minutes later the freight was pulling out, and he was not in sight. I
ran alongside the car, pulled the door open, and climbed in. He never
looked for me again, and I rode that coal-car precisely one thousand and
twenty-two miles, sleeping most of the time and getting out at divisions
(where the freights always stop for an hour or so) to beg my food. And at
the end of the thousand and twenty-two miles I lost that car through a
happy incident. I got a "set-down," and the tramp doesn't live who won't
miss a train for a set-down any time.
Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In
Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria,
where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at
every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the
next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned
the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along
with the whimsicalities of Chance.
Often I think over my tramp days, and ever I marvel at the swift
succession of pictures that flash up in my memory. It matters not where I
begin to think; any day of all the days is a day apart, with a record of
swift-moving pictures all its own. For instance, I remember a sunny summer
morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and immediately comes to my mind the
auspicious beginning of the day—a "set-down" with two maiden ladies, and
not in their kitchen, but in their dining room, with them beside me at the
table. We ate eggs, out of egg-cups! It was the first time I had ever seen
egg-cups, or heard of egg-cups! I was a bit awkward at first, I'll
confess; but I was hungry and unabashed. I mastered the egg-cup, and I
mastered the eggs in a way that made those two maiden ladies sit up.
Why, they ate like a couple of canaries, dabbling with the one egg each
they took, and nibbling at tiny wafers of toast. Life was low in their
bodies; their blood ran thin; and they had slept warm all night. I had
been out all night, consuming much fuel of my body to keep warm, beating
my way down from a place called Emporium, in the northern part of the
state. Wafers of toast! Out of sight! But each wafer was no more than a
mouthful to me—nay, no more than a bite. It is tedious to have to reach
for another piece of toast each bite when one is potential with many
bites.
When I was a very little lad, I had a very little dog called Punch. I saw
to his feeding myself. Some one in the household had shot a lot of ducks,
and we had a fine meat dinner. When I had finished, I prepared Punch's
dinner—a large plateful of bones and tidbits. I went outside to give it
to him. Now it happened that a visitor had ridden over from a neighboring
ranch, and with him had come a Newfoundland dog as big as a calf. I set
the plate on the ground. Punch wagged his tail and began. He had before
him a blissful half-hour at least. There was a sudden rush. Punch was
brushed aside like a straw in the path of a cyclone, and that Newfoundland
swooped down upon the plate. In spite of his huge maw he must have been
trained to quick lunches, for, in the fleeting instant before he received
the kick in the ribs I aimed at him, he completely engulfed the contents
of the plate. He swept it clean. One last lingering lick of his tongue
removed even the grease stains.
As that big Newfoundland behaved at the plate of my dog Punch, so behaved
I at the table of those two maiden ladies of Harrisburg. I swept it bare.
I didn't break anything, but I cleaned out the eggs and the toast and the
coffee. The servant brought more, but I kept her busy, and ever she
brought more and more. The coffee was delicious, but it needn't have been
served in such tiny cups. What time had I to eat when it took all my time
to prepare the many cups of coffee for drinking?
At any rate, it gave my tongue time to wag. Those two maiden ladies, with
their pink-and-white complexions and gray curls, had never looked upon the
bright face of adventure. As the "Tramp-Royal" would have it, they had
worked all their lives "on one same shift." Into the sweet scents and
narrow confines of their uneventful existence I brought the large airs of
the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with
the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched
their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that
comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing
shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to
prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon their charity.
Ah, I can see them now, those dear, sweet ladies, just as I sat at their
breakfast table twelve years ago, discoursing upon the way of my feet in
the world, brushing aside their kindly counsel as a real devilish fellow
should, and thrilling them, not alone with my own adventures, but with the
adventures of all the other fellows with whom I had rubbed shoulders and
exchanged confidences. I appropriated them all, the adventures of the
other fellows, I mean; and if those maiden ladies had been less trustful
and guileless, they could have tangled me up beautifully in my chronology.
Well, well, and what of it? It was fair exchange. For their many cups of
coffee, and eggs, and bites of toast, I gave full value. Right royally I
gave them entertainment. My coming to sit at their table was their
adventure, and adventure is beyond price anyway.
Coming along the street, after parting from the maiden ladies, I gathered
in a newspaper from the doorway of some late-riser, and in a grassy park
lay down to get in touch with the last twenty-four hours of the world.
There, in the park, I met a fellow-hobo who told me his life-story and who
wrestled with me to join the United States Army. He had given in to the
recruiting officer and was just about to join, and he couldn't see why I
shouldn't join with him. He had been a member of Coxey's Army in the march
to Washington several months before, and that seemed to have given him a
taste for army life. I, too, was a veteran, for had I not been a private
in Company L of the Second Division of Kelly's Industrial Army?—said
Company L being commonly known as the "Nevada push." But my army
experience had had the opposite effect on me; so I left that hobo to go
his way to the dogs of war, while I "threw my feet" for dinner.
This duty performed, I started to walk across the bridge over the
Susquehanna to the west shore. I forget the name of the railroad that ran
down that side, but while lying in the grass in the morning the idea had
come to me to go to Baltimore; so to Baltimore I was going on that
railroad, whatever its name was. It was a warm afternoon, and part way
across the bridge I came to a lot of fellows who were in swimming off one
of the piers. Off went my clothes and in went I. The water was fine; but
when I came out and dressed, I found I had been robbed. Some one had gone
through my clothes. Now I leave it to you if being robbed isn't in itself
adventure enough for one day. I have known men who have been robbed and
who have talked all the rest of their lives about it. True, the thief that
went through my clothes didn't get much—some thirty or forty cents in
nickels and pennies, and my tobacco and cigarette papers; but it was all I
had, which is more than most men can be robbed of, for they have something
left at home, while I had no home. It was a pretty tough gang in swimming
there. I sized up, and knew better than to squeal. So I begged "the
makings," and I could have sworn it was one of my own papers I rolled the
tobacco in.
Then on across the bridge I hiked to the west shore. Here ran the railroad
I was after. No station was in sight. How to catch a freight without
walking to a station was the problem. I noticed that the track came up a
steep grade, culminating at the point where I had tapped it, and I knew
that a heavy freight couldn't pull up there any too lively. But how
lively? On the opposite side of the track rose a high bank. On the edge,
at the top, I saw a man's head sticking up from the grass. Perhaps he knew
how fast the freights took the grade, and when the next one went south. I
called out my questions to him, and he motioned to me to come up.
I obeyed, and when I reached the top, I found four other men lying in the
grass with him. I took in the scene and knew them for what they
were—American gypsies. In the open space that extended back among the
trees from the edge of the bank were several nondescript wagons. Ragged,
half-naked children swarmed over the camp, though I noticed that they took
care not to come near and bother the men-folk. Several lean, unbeautiful,
and toil-degraded women were pottering about with camp-chores, and one I
noticed who sat by herself on the seat of one of the wagons, her head
drooped forward, her knees drawn up to her chin and clasped limply by her
arms. She did not look happy. She looked as if she did not care for
anything—in this I was wrong, for later I was to learn that there was
something for which she did care. The full measure of human suffering was
in her face, and, in addition, there was the tragic expression of
incapacity for further suffering. Nothing could hurt any more, was what
her face seemed to portray; but in this, too, I was wrong.
I lay in the grass on the edge of the steep and talked with the men-folk.
We were kin—brothers. I was the American hobo, and they were the American
gypsy. I knew enough of their argot for conversation, and they knew enough
of mine. There were two more in their gang, who were across the river
"mushing" in Harrisburg. A "musher" is an itinerant fakir. This word is
not to be confounded with the Klondike "musher," though the origin of both
terms may be the same; namely, the corruption of the French marche ons,
to march, to walk, to "mush." The particular graft of the two mushers who
had crossed the river was umbrella-mending; but what real graft lay behind
their umbrella-mending, I was not told, nor would it have been polite to
ask.
It was a glorious day. Not a breath of wind was stirring, and we basked in
the shimmering warmth of the sun. From everywhere arose the drowsy hum of
insects, and the balmy air was filled with scents of the sweet earth and
the green growing things. We were too lazy to do more than mumble on in
intermittent conversation. And then, all abruptly, the peace and quietude
was jarred awry by man.
Two bare-legged boys of eight or nine in some minor way broke some rule of
the camp—what it was I did not know; and a man who lay beside me suddenly
sat up and called to them. He was chief of the tribe, a man with narrow
forehead and narrow-slitted eyes, whose thin lips and twisted sardonic
features explained why the two boys jumped and tensed like startled deer
at the sound of his voice. The alertness of fear was in their faces, and
they turned, in a panic, to run. He called to them to come back, and one
boy lagged behind reluctantly, his meagre little frame portraying in
pantomime the struggle within him between fear and reason. He wanted to
come back. His intelligence and past experience told him that to come back
was a lesser evil than to run on; but lesser evil that it was, it was
great enough to put wings to his fear and urge his feet to flight.
Still he lagged and struggled until he reached the shelter of the trees,
where he halted. The chief of the tribe did not pursue. He sauntered over
to a wagon and picked up a heavy whip. Then he came back to the centre of
the open space and stood still. He did not speak. He made no gestures. He
was the Law, pitiless and omnipotent. He merely stood there and waited.
And I knew, and all knew, and the two boys in the shelter of the trees
knew, for what he waited.
The boy who had lagged slowly came back. His face was stamped with
quivering resolution. He did not falter. He had made up his mind to take
his punishment. And mark you, the punishment was not for the original
offence, but for the offence of running away. And in this, that tribal
chieftain but behaved as behaves the exalted society in which he lived. We
punish our criminals, and when they escape and run away, we bring them
back and add to their punishment.
Straight up to the chief the boy came, halting at the proper distance for
the swing of the lash. The whip hissed through the air, and I caught
myself with a start of surprise at the weight of the blow. The thin little
leg was so very thin and little. The flesh showed white where the lash had
curled and bitten, and then, where the white had shown, sprang up the
savage welt, with here and there along its length little scarlet oozings
where the skin had broken. Again the whip swung, and the boy's whole body
winced in anticipation of the blow, though he did not move from the spot.
His will held good. A second welt sprang up, and a third. It was not until
the fourth landed that the boy screamed. Also, he could no longer stand
still, and from then on, blow after blow, he danced up and down in his
anguish, screaming; but he did not attempt to run away. If his involuntary
dancing took him beyond the reach of the whip, he danced back into range
again. And when it was all over—a dozen blows—he went away, whimpering
and squealing, among the wagons.
The chief stood still and waited. The second boy came out from the trees.
But he did not come straight. He came like a cringing dog, obsessed by
little panics that made him turn and dart away for half a dozen steps. But
always he turned and came back, circling nearer and nearer to the man,
whimpering, making inarticulate animal-noises in his throat. I saw that he
never looked at the man. His eyes always were fixed upon the whip, and in
his eyes was a terror that made me sick—the frantic terror of an
inconceivably maltreated child. I have seen strong men dropping right and
left out of battle and squirming in their death-throes, I have seen them
by scores blown into the air by bursting shells and their bodies torn
asunder; believe me, the witnessing was as merrymaking and laughter and
song to me in comparison with the way the sight of that poor child
affected me.
The whipping began. The whipping of the first boy was as play compared
with this one. In no time the blood was running down his thin little legs.
He danced and squirmed and doubled up till it seemed almost that he was
some grotesque marionette operated by strings. I say "seemed," for his
screaming gave the lie to the seeming and stamped it with reality. His
shrieks were shrill and piercing; within them no hoarse notes, but only
the thin sexlessness of the voice of a child. The time came when the boy
could stand it no more. Reason fled, and he tried to run away. But now the
man followed up, curbing his flight, herding him with blows back always
into the open space.
Then came interruption. I heard a wild smothered cry. The woman who sat in
the wagon seat had got out and was running to interfere. She sprang
between the man and boy.
"You want some, eh?" said he with the whip. "All right, then."
He swung the whip upon her. Her skirts were long, so he did not try for
her legs. He drove the lash for her face, which she shielded as best she
could with her hands and forearms, drooping her head forward between her
lean shoulders, and on the lean shoulders and arms receiving the blows.
Heroic mother! She knew just what she was doing. The boy, still shrieking,
was making his get-away to the wagons.
And all the while the four men lay beside me and watched and made no move.
Nor did I move, and without shame I say it; though my reason was compelled
to struggle hard against my natural impulse to rise up and interfere. I
knew life. Of what use to the woman, or to me, would be my being beaten to
death by five men there on the bank of the Susquehanna? I once saw a man
hanged, and though my whole soul cried protest, my mouth cried not. Had it
cried, I should most likely have had my skull crushed by the butt of a
revolver, for it was the law that the man should hang. And here, in this
gypsy group, it was the law that the woman should be whipped.
Even so, the reason in both cases that I did not interfere was not that it
was the law, but that the law was stronger than I. Had it not been for
those four men beside me in the grass, right gladly would I have waded
into the man with the whip. And, barring the accident of the landing on me
with a knife or a club in the hands of some of the various women of the
camp, I am confident that I should have beaten him into a mess. But the
four men were beside me in the grass. They made their law stronger than
I.
Oh, believe me, I did my own suffering. I had seen women beaten before,
often, but never had I seen such a beating as this. Her dress across the
shoulders was cut into shreds. One blow that had passed her guard, had
raised a bloody welt from cheek to chin. Not one blow, nor two, not one
dozen, nor two dozen, but endlessly, infinitely, that whip-lash smote and
curled about her. The sweat poured from me, and I breathed hard, clutching
at the grass with my hands until I strained it out by the roots. And all
the time my reason kept whispering, "Fool! Fool!" That welt on the face
nearly did for me. I started to rise to my feet; but the hand of the man
next to me went out to my shoulder and pressed me down.
"Easy, pardner, easy," he warned me in a low voice. I looked at him. His
eyes met mine unwaveringly. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and
heavy-muscled; and his face was lazy, phlegmatic, slothful, withal kindly,
yet without passion, and quite soulless—a dim soul, unmalicious, unmoral,
bovine, and stubborn. Just an animal he was, with no more than a faint
flickering of intelligence, a good-natured brute with the strength and
mental caliber of a gorilla. His hand pressed heavily upon me, and I knew
the weight of the muscles behind. I looked at the other brutes, two of
them unperturbed and incurious, and one of them that gloated over the
spectacle; and my reason came back to me, my muscles relaxed, and I sank
down in the grass.
My mind went back to the two maiden ladies with whom I had had breakfast
that morning. Less than two miles, as the crow flies, separated them from
this scene. Here, in the windless day, under a beneficent sun, was a
sister of theirs being beaten by a brother of mine. Here was a page of
life they could never see—and better so, though for lack of seeing they
would never be able to understand their sisterhood, nor themselves, nor
know the clay of which they were made. For it is not given to woman to
live in sweet-scented, narrow rooms and at the same time be a little
sister to all the world.
The whipping was finished, and the woman, no longer screaming, went back
to her seat in the wagon. Nor did the other women come to her—just then.
They were afraid. But they came afterward, when a decent interval had
elapsed. The man put the whip away and rejoined us, flinging himself down
on the other side of me. He was breathing hard from his exertions. He
wiped the sweat from his eyes on his coat-sleeve, and looked challengingly
at me. I returned his look carelessly; what he had done was no concern of
mine. I did not go away abruptly. I lay there half an hour longer, which,
under the circumstances, was tact and etiquette. I rolled cigarettes from
tobacco I borrowed from them, and when I slipped down the bank to the
railroad, I was equipped with the necessary information for catching the
next freight bound south.
Well, and what of it? It was a page out of life, that's all; and there are
many pages worse, far worse, that I have seen. I have sometimes held forth
(facetiously, so my listeners believed) that the chief distinguishing
trait between man and the other animals is that man is the only animal
that maltreats the females of his kind. It is something of which no wolf
nor cowardly coyote is ever guilty. It is something that even the dog,
degenerated by domestication, will not do. The dog still retains the wild
instinct in this matter, while man has lost most of his wild instincts—at
least, most of the good ones.
Worse pages of life than what I have described? Read the reports on child
labor in the United States,—east, west, north, and south, it doesn't
matter where,—and know that all of us, profit-mongers that we are, are
typesetters and printers of worse pages of life than that mere page of
wife-beating on the Susquehanna.
I went down the grade a hundred yards to where the footing beside the
track was good. Here I could catch my freight as it pulled slowly up the
hill, and here I found half a dozen hoboes waiting for the same purpose.
Several were playing seven-up with an old pack of cards. I took a hand. A
coon began to shuffle the deck. He was fat, and young, and moon-faced. He
beamed with good-nature. It fairly oozed from him. As he dealt the first
card to me, he paused and said:—
"Say, Bo, ain't I done seen you befo'?"
"You sure have," I answered. "An' you didn't have those same duds on,
either."
He was puzzled.
"D'ye remember Buffalo?" I queried.
Then he knew me, and with laughter and ejaculation hailed me as a comrade;
for at Buffalo his clothes had been striped while he did his bit of time
in the Erie County Penitentiary. For that matter, my clothes had been
likewise striped, for I had been doing my bit of time, too.
The game proceeded, and I learned the stake for which we played. Down the
bank toward the river descended a steep and narrow path that led to a
spring some twenty-five feet beneath. We played on the edge of the bank.
The man who was "stuck" had to take a small condensed-milk can, and with
it carry water to the winners.
The first game was played and the coon was stuck. He took the small
milk-tin and climbed down the bank, while we sat above and guyed him. We
drank like fish. Four round trips he had to make for me alone, and the
others were equally lavish with their thirst. The path was very steep, and
sometimes the coon slipped when part way up, spilled the water, and had to
go back for more. But he didn't get angry. He laughed as heartily as any
of us; that was why he slipped so often. Also, he assured us of the
prodigious quantities of water he would drink when some one else got
stuck.
When our thirst was quenched, another game was started. Again the coon was
stuck, and again we drank our fill. A third game and a fourth ended the
same way, and each time that moon-faced darky nearly died with delight at
appreciation of the fate that Chance was dealing out to him. And we nearly
died with him, what of our delight. We laughed like careless children, or
gods, there on the edge of the bank. I know that I laughed till it seemed
the top of my head would come off, and I drank from the milk-tin till I
was nigh waterlogged. Serious discussion arose as to whether we could
successfully board the freight when it pulled up the grade, what of the
weight of water secreted on our persons. This particular phase of the
situation just about finished the coon. He had to break off from
water-carrying for at least five minutes while he lay down and rolled with
laughter.
The lengthening shadows stretched farther and farther across the river,
and the soft, cool twilight came on, and ever we drank water, and ever our
ebony cup-bearer brought more and more. Forgotten was the beaten woman of
the hour before. That was a page read and turned over; I was busy now with
this new page, and when the engine whistled on the grade, this page would
be finished and another begun; and so the book of life goes on, page after
page and pages without end—when one is young.
And then we played a game in which the coon failed to be stuck. The victim
was a lean and dyspeptic-looking hobo, the one who had laughed least of
all of us. We said we didn't want any water—which was the truth. Not the
wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, nor the pressure of a pneumatic ram, could
have forced another drop into my saturated carcass. The coon looked
disappointed, then rose to the occasion and guessed he'd have some. He
meant it, too. He had some, and then some, and then some. Ever the
melancholy hobo climbed down and up the steep bank, and ever the coon
called for more. He drank more water than all the rest of us put together.
The twilight deepened into night, the stars came out, and he still drank
on. I do believe that if the whistle of the freight hadn't sounded, he'd
be there yet, swilling water and revenge while the melancholy hobo toiled
down and up.
But the whistle sounded. The page was done. We sprang to our feet and
strung out alongside the track. There she came, coughing and spluttering
up the grade, the headlight turning night into day and silhouetting us in
sharp relief. The engine passed us, and we were all running with the
train, some boarding on the side-ladders, others "springing" the
side-doors of empty box-cars and climbing in. I caught a flat-car loaded
with mixed lumber and crawled away into a comfortable nook. I lay on my
back with a newspaper under my head for a pillow. Above me the stars were
winking and wheeling in squadrons back and forth as the train rounded the
curves, and watching them I fell asleep. The day was done—one day of all
my days. To-morrow would be another day, and I was young.
I rode into Niagara Falls in a "side-door Pullman," or, in common
parlance, a box-car. A flat-car, by the way, is known amongst the
fraternity as a "gondola," with the second syllable emphasized and
pronounced long. But to return. I arrived in the afternoon and headed
straight from the freight train to the falls. Once my eyes were filled
with that wonder-vision of down-rushing water, I was lost. I could not
tear myself away long enough to "batter" the "privates" (domiciles) for my
supper. Even a "set-down" could not have lured me away. Night came on, a
beautiful night of moonlight, and I lingered by the falls until after
eleven. Then it was up to me to hunt for a place to "kip."
"Kip," "doss," "flop," "pound your ear," all mean the same thing; namely,
to sleep. Somehow, I had a "hunch" that Niagara Falls was a "bad" town for
hoboes, and I headed out into the country. I climbed a fence and "flopped"
in a field. John Law would never find me there, I flattered myself. I lay
on my back in the grass and slept like a babe. It was so balmy warm that I
woke up not once all night. But with the first gray daylight my eyes
opened, and I remembered the wonderful falls. I climbed the fence and
started down the road to have another look at them. It was early—not more
than five o'clock—and not until eight o'clock could I begin to batter for
my breakfast. I could spend at least three hours by the river. Alas! I was
fated never to see the river nor the falls again.
The town was asleep when I entered it. As I came along the quiet street, I
saw three men coming toward me along the sidewalk. They were walking
abreast. Hoboes, I decided, like myself, who had got up early. In this
surmise I was not quite correct. I was only sixty-six and two-thirds per
cent correct. The men on each side were hoboes all right, but the man in
the middle wasn't. I directed my steps to the edge of the sidewalk in
order to let the trio go by. But it didn't go by. At some word from the
man in the centre, all three halted, and he of the centre addressed me.
I piped the lay on the instant. He was a "fly-cop" and the two hoboes
were his prisoners. John Law was up and out after the early worm. I was a
worm. Had I been richer by the experiences that were to befall me in the
next several months, I should have turned and run like the very devil. He
might have shot at me, but he'd have had to hit me to get me. He'd have
never run after me, for two hoboes in the hand are worth more than one on
the get-away. But like a dummy I stood still when he halted me. Our
conversation was brief.
"What hotel are you stopping at?" he queried.
He had me. I wasn't stopping at any hotel, and, since I did not know the
name of a hotel in the place, I could not claim residence in any of them.
Also, I was up too early in the morning. Everything was against me.
"I just arrived," I said.
"Well, you turn around and walk in front of me, and not too far in front.
There's somebody wants to see you."
I was "pinched." I knew who wanted to see me. With that "fly-cop" and the
two hoboes at my heels, and under the direction of the former, I led the
way to the city jail. There we were searched and our names registered. I
have forgotten, now, under which name I was registered. I gave the name of
Jack Drake, but when they searched me, they found letters addressed to
Jack London. This caused trouble and required explanation, all of which
has passed from my mind, and to this day I do not know whether I was
pinched as Jack Drake or Jack London. But one or the other, it should be
there to-day in the prison register of Niagara Falls. Reference can bring
it to light. The time was somewhere in the latter part of June, 1894. It
was only a few days after my arrest that the great railroad strike began.
From the office we were led to the "Hobo" and locked in. The "Hobo" is
that part of a prison where the minor offenders are confined together in a
large iron cage. Since hoboes constitute the principal division of the
minor offenders, the aforesaid iron cage is called the Hobo. Here we met
several hoboes who had already been pinched that morning, and every little
while the door was unlocked and two or three more were thrust in on us. At
last, when we totalled sixteen, we were led upstairs into the court-room.
And now I shall faithfully describe what took place in that court-room,
for know that my patriotic American citizenship there received a shock
from which it has never fully recovered.
In the court-room were the sixteen prisoners, the judge, and two bailiffs.
The judge seemed to act as his own clerk. There were no witnesses. There
were no citizens of Niagara Falls present to look on and see how justice
was administered in their community. The judge glanced at the list of
cases before him and called out a name. A hobo stood up. The judge glanced
at a bailiff. "Vagrancy, your Honor," said the bailiff. "Thirty days,"
said his Honor. The hobo sat down, and the judge was calling another name
and another hobo was rising to his feet.
The trial of that hobo had taken just about fifteen seconds. The trial of
the next hobo came off with equal celerity. The bailiff said, "Vagrancy,
your Honor," and his Honor said, "Thirty days." Thus it went like
clockwork, fifteen seconds to a hobo—and thirty days.
They are poor dumb cattle, I thought to myself. But wait till my turn
comes; I'll give his Honor a "spiel." Part way along in the performance,
his Honor, moved by some whim, gave one of us an opportunity to speak. As
chance would have it, this man was not a genuine hobo. He bore none of the
ear-marks of the professional "stiff." Had he approached the rest of us,
while waiting at a water-tank for a freight, should have unhesitatingly
classified him as a "gay-cat." Gay-cat is the synonym for tenderfoot in
Hobo Land. This gay-cat was well along in years—somewhere around
forty-five, I should judge. His shoulders were humped a trifle, and his
face was seamed by weather-beat.
For many years, according to his story, he had driven team for some firm
in (if I remember rightly) Lockport, New York. The firm had ceased to
prosper, and finally, in the hard times of 1893, had gone out of business.
He had been kept on to the last, though toward the last his work had been
very irregular. He went on and explained at length his difficulties in
getting work (when so many were out of work) during the succeeding months.
In the end, deciding that he would find better opportunities for work on
the Lakes, he had started for Buffalo. Of course he was "broke," and
there he was. That was all.
"Thirty days," said his Honor, and called another hobo's name.
Said hobo got up. "Vagrancy, your Honor," said the bailiff, and his Honor
said, "Thirty days."
And so it went, fifteen seconds and thirty days to each hobo. The machine
of justice was grinding smoothly. Most likely, considering how early it
was in the morning, his Honor had not yet had his breakfast and was in a
hurry.
But my American blood was up. Behind me were the many generations of my
American ancestry. One of the kinds of liberty those ancestors of mine had
fought and died for was the right of trial by jury. This was my heritage,
stained sacred by their blood, and it devolved upon me to stand up for it.
All right, I threatened to myself; just wait till he gets to me.
He got to me. My name, whatever it was, was called, and I stood up. The
bailiff said, "Vagrancy, your Honor," and I began to talk. But the judge
began talking at the same time, and he said, "Thirty days." I started to
protest, but at that moment his Honor was calling the name of the next
hobo on the list. His Honor paused long enough to say to me, "Shut up!"
The bailiff forced me to sit down. And the next moment that next hobo had
received thirty days and the succeeding hobo was just in process of
getting his.
When we had all been disposed of, thirty days to each stiff, his Honor,
just as he was about to dismiss us, suddenly turned to the teamster from
Lockport—the one man he had allowed to talk.
"Why did you quit your job?" his Honor asked.
Now the teamster had already explained how his job had quit him, and the
question took him aback.
"Your Honor," he began confusedly, "isn't that a funny question to ask?"
"Thirty days more for quitting your job," said his Honor, and the court
was closed. That was the outcome. The teamster got sixty days all
together, while the rest of us got thirty days.
We were taken down below, locked up, and given breakfast. It was a pretty
good breakfast, as prison breakfasts go, and it was the best I was to get
for a month to come.
As for me, I was dazed. Here was I, under sentence, after a farce of a
trial wherein I was denied not only my right of trial by jury, but my
right to plead guilty or not guilty. Another thing my fathers had fought
for flashed through my brain—habeas corpus. I'd show them. But when I
asked for a lawyer, I was laughed at. Habeas corpus was all right, but of
what good was it to me when I could communicate with no one outside the
jail? But I'd show them. They couldn't keep me in jail forever. Just wait
till I got out, that was all. I'd make them sit up. I knew something about
the law and my own rights, and I'd expose their maladministration of
justice. Visions of damage suits and sensational newspaper headlines were
dancing before my eyes when the jailers came in and began hustling us out
into the main office.
A policeman snapped a handcuff on my right wrist. (Ah, ha, thought I, a
new indignity. Just wait till I get out.) On the left wrist of a negro he
snapped the other handcuff of that pair. He was a very tall negro, well
past six feet—so tall was he that when we stood side by side his hand
lifted mine up a trifle in the manacles. Also, he was the happiest and the
raggedest negro I have ever seen.
We were all handcuffed similarly, in pairs. This accomplished, a bright
nickel-steel chain was brought forth, run down through the links of all
the handcuffs, and locked at front and rear of the double-line. We were
now a chain-gang. The command to march was given, and out we went upon the
street, guarded by two officers. The tall negro and I had the place of
honor. We led the procession.
After the tomb-like gloom of the jail, the outside sunshine was dazzling.
I had never known it to be so sweet as now, a prisoner with clanking
chains, I knew that I was soon to see the last of it for thirty days. Down
through the streets of Niagara Falls we marched to the railroad station,
stared at by curious passers-by, and especially by a group of tourists on
the veranda of a hotel that we marched past.
There was plenty of slack in the chain, and with much rattling and
clanking we sat down, two and two, in the seats of the smoking-car. Afire
with indignation as I was at the outrage that had been perpetrated on me
and my forefathers, I was nevertheless too prosaically practical to lose
my head over it. This was all new to me. Thirty days of mystery were
before me, and I looked about me to find somebody who knew the ropes. For
I had already learned that I was not bound for a petty jail with a hundred
or so prisoners in it, but for a full-grown penitentiary with a couple of
thousand prisoners in it, doing anywhere from ten days to ten years.
In the seat behind me, attached to the chain by his wrist, was a squat,
heavily-built, powerfully-muscled man. He was somewhere between
thirty-five and forty years of age. I sized him up. In the corners of his
eyes I saw humor and laughter and kindliness. As for the rest of him, he
was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all the passion and turgid
violence of the brute-beast. What saved him, what made him possible for
me, were those corners of his eyes—the humor and laughter and kindliness
of the beast when unaroused.
He was my "meat." I "cottoned" to him. While my cuff-mate, the tall negro,
mourned with chucklings and laughter over some laundry he was sure to lose
through his arrest, and while the train rolled on toward Buffalo, I talked
with the man in the seat behind me. He had an empty pipe. I filled it for
him with my precious tobacco—enough in a single filling to make a dozen
cigarettes. Nay, the more we talked the surer I was that he was my meat,
and I divided all my tobacco with him.
Now it happens that I am a fluid sort of an organism, with sufficient
kinship with life to fit myself in 'most anywhere. I laid myself out to
fit in with that man, though little did I dream to what extraordinary good
purpose I was succeeding. He had never been in the particular penitentiary
to which we were going, but he had done "one-," "two-," and "five-spots"
in various other penitentiaries (a "spot" is a year), and he was filled
with wisdom. We became pretty chummy, and my heart bounded when he
cautioned me to follow his lead. He called me "Jack," and I called him
"Jack."
The train stopped at a station about five miles from Buffalo, and we, the
chain-gang, got off. I do not remember the name of this station, but I am
confident that it is some one of the following: Rocklyn, Rockwood, Black
Rock, Rockcastle, or Newcastle. But whatever the name of the place, we
were walked a short distance and then put on a street-car. It was an
old-fashioned car, with a seat, running the full length, on each side. All
the passengers who sat on one side were asked to move over to the other
side, and we, with a great clanking of chain, took their places. We sat
facing them, I remember, and I remember, too, the awed expression on the
faces of the women, who took us, undoubtedly, for convicted murderers and
bank-robbers. I tried to look my fiercest, but that cuff-mate of mine, the
too happy negro, insisted on rolling his eyes, laughing, and reiterating,
"O Lawdy! Lawdy!"
We left the car, walked some more, and were led into the office of the
Erie County Penitentiary. Here we were to register, and on that register
one or the other of my names will be found. Also, we were informed that we
must leave in the office all our valuables: money, tobacco, matches,
pocketknives, and so forth.
My new pal shook his head at me.
"If you do not leave your things here, they will be confiscated inside,"
warned the official.
Still my pal shook his head. He was busy with his hands, hiding his
movements behind the other fellows. (Our handcuffs had been removed.) I
watched him, and followed suit, wrapping up in a bundle in my handkerchief
all the things I wanted to take in. These bundles the two of us thrust
into our shirts. I noticed that our fellow-prisoners, with the exception
of one or two who had watches, did not turn over their belongings to the
man in the office. They were determined to smuggle them in somehow,
trusting to luck; but they were not so wise as my pal, for they did not
wrap their things in bundles.
Our erstwhile guardians gathered up the handcuffs and chain and departed
for Niagara Falls, while we, under new guardians, were led away into the
prison. While we were in the office, our number had been added to by other
squads of newly arrived prisoners, so that we were now a procession forty
or fifty strong.
Know, ye unimprisoned, that traffic is as restricted inside a large prison
as commerce was in the Middle Ages. Once inside a penitentiary, one cannot
move about at will. Every few steps are encountered great steel doors or
gates which are always kept locked. We were bound for the barber-shop, but
we encountered delays in the unlocking of doors for us. We were thus
delayed in the first "hall" we entered. A "hall" is not a corridor.
Imagine an oblong cube, built out of bricks and rising six stories high,
each story a row of cells, say fifty cells in a row—in short, imagine a
cube of colossal honeycomb. Place this cube on the ground and enclose it
in a building with a roof overhead and walls all around. Such a cube and
encompassing building constitute a "hall" in the Erie County Penitentiary.
Also, to complete the picture, see a narrow gallery, with steel railing,
running the full length of each tier of cells and at the ends of the
oblong cube see all these galleries, from both sides, connected by a
fire-escape system of narrow steel stairways.
We were halted in the first hall, waiting for some guard to unlock a door.
Here and there, moving about, were convicts, with close-cropped heads and
shaven faces, and garbed in prison stripes. One such convict I noticed
above us on the gallery of the third tier of cells. He was standing on the
gallery and leaning forward, his arms resting on the railing, himself
apparently oblivious of our presence. He seemed staring into vacancy. My
pal made a slight hissing noise. The convict glanced down. Motioned
signals passed between them. Then through the air soared the handkerchief
bundle of my pal. The convict caught it, and like a flash it was out of
sight in his shirt and he was staring into vacancy. My pal had told me to
follow his lead. I watched my chance when the guard's back was turned, and
my bundle followed the other one into the shirt of the convict.
A minute later the door was unlocked, and we filed into the barber-shop.
Here were more men in convict stripes. They were the prison barbers. Also,
there were bath-tubs, hot water, soap, and scrubbing-brushes. We were
ordered to strip and bathe, each man to scrub his neighbor's back—a
needless precaution, this compulsory bath, for the prison swarmed with
vermin. After the bath, we were each given a canvas clothes-bag.
"Put all your clothes in the bags," said the guard. "It's no good trying
to smuggle anything in. You've got to line up naked for inspection. Men
for thirty days or less keep their shoes and suspenders. Men for more than
thirty days keep nothing."
This announcement was received with consternation. How could naked men
smuggle anything past an inspection? Only my pal and I were safe. But it
was right here that the convict barbers got in their work. They passed
among the poor newcomers, kindly volunteering to take charge of their
precious little belongings, and promising to return them later in the day.
Those barbers were philanthropists—to hear them talk. As in the case of
Fra Lippo Lippi, never was there such prompt disemburdening. Matches,
tobacco, rice-paper, pipes, knives, money, everything, flowed into the
capacious shirts of the barbers. They fairly bulged with the spoil, and
the guards made believe not to see. To cut the story short, nothing was
ever returned. The barbers never had any intention of returning what they
had taken. They considered it legitimately theirs. It was the barber-shop
graft. There were many grafts in that prison, as I was to learn; and I,
too, was destined to become a grafter—thanks to my new pal.
There were several chairs, and the barbers worked rapidly. The quickest
shaves and hair-cuts I have ever seen were given in that shop. The men
lathered themselves, and the barbers shaved them at the rate of a minute
to a man. A hair-cut took a trifle longer. In three minutes the down of
eighteen was scraped from my face, and my head was as smooth as a
billiard-ball just sprouting a crop of bristles. Beards, mustaches, like
our clothes and everything, came off. Take my word for it, we were a
villainous-looking gang when they got through with us. I had not realized
before how really altogether bad we were.
Then came the line-up, forty or fifty of us, naked as Kipling's heroes who
stormed Lungtungpen. To search us was easy. There were only our shoes and
ourselves. Two or three rash spirits, who had doubted the barbers, had the
goods found on them—which goods, namely, tobacco, pipes, matches, and
small change, were quickly confiscated. This over, our new clothes were
brought to us—stout prison shirts, and coats and trousers conspicuously
striped. I had always lingered under the impression that the convict
stripes were put on a man only after he had been convicted of a felony. I
lingered no longer, but put on the insignia of shame and got my first
taste of marching the lock-step.
In single file, close together, each man's hands on the shoulders of the
man in front, we marched on into another large hall. Here we were ranged
up against the wall in a long line and ordered to strip our left arms. A
youth, a medical student who was getting in his practice on cattle such as
we, came down the line. He vaccinated just about four times as rapidly as
the barbers shaved. With a final caution to avoid rubbing our arms against
anything, and to let the blood dry so as to form the scab, we were led
away to our cells. Here my pal and I parted, but not before he had time to
whisper to me, "Suck it out."
As soon as I was locked in, I sucked my arm clean. And afterward I saw men
who had not sucked and who had horrible holes in their arms into which I
could have thrust my fist. It was their own fault. They could have sucked.
In my cell was another man. We were to be cell-mates. He was a young,
manly fellow, not talkative, but very capable, indeed as splendid a fellow
as one could meet with in a day's ride, and this in spite of the fact that
he had just recently finished a two-year term in some Ohio penitentiary.
Hardly had we been in our cell half an hour, when a convict sauntered down
the gallery and looked in. It was my pal. He had the freedom of the hall,
he explained. He was unlocked at six in the morning and not locked up
again till nine at night. He was in with the "push" in that hall, and had
been promptly appointed a trusty of the kind technically known as
"hall-man." The man who had appointed him was also a prisoner and a
trusty, and was known as "First Hall-man." There were thirteen hall-men in
that hall. Ten of them had charge each of a gallery of cells, and over
them were the First, Second, and Third Hall-men.
We newcomers were to stay in our cells for the rest of the day, my pal
informed me, so that the vaccine would have a chance to take. Then next
morning we would be put to hard labor in the prison-yard.
"But I'll get you out of the work as soon as I can," he promised. "I'll
get one of the hall-men fired and have you put in his place."
He put his hand into his shirt, drew out the handkerchief containing my
precious belongings, passed it in to me through the bars, and went on down
the gallery.
I opened the bundle. Everything was there. Not even a match was missing. I
shared the makings of a cigarette with my cell-mate. When I started to
strike a match for a light, he stopped me. A flimsy, dirty comforter lay
in each of our bunks for bedding. He tore off a narrow strip of the thin
cloth and rolled it tightly and telescopically into a long and slender
cylinder. This he lighted with a precious match. The cylinder of
tight-rolled cotton cloth did not flame. On the end a coal of fire slowly
smouldered. It would last for hours, and my cell-mate called it a "punk."
And when it burned short, all that was necessary was to make a new punk,
put the end of it against the old, blow on them, and so transfer the
glowing coal. Why, we could have given Prometheus pointers on the
conserving of fire.
At twelve o'clock dinner was served. At the bottom of our cage door was a
small opening like the entrance of a runway in a chicken-yard. Through
this were thrust two hunks of dry bread and two pannikins of "soup." A
portion of soup consisted of about a quart of hot water with floating on
its surface a lonely drop of grease. Also, there was some salt in that
water.
We drank the soup, but we did not eat the bread. Not that we were not
hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable. It was fairly good bread.
But we had reasons. My cell-mate had discovered that our cell was alive
with bed-bugs. In all the cracks and interstices between the bricks where
the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies. The natives even
ventured out in the broad daylight and swarmed over the walls and ceiling
by hundreds. My cell-mate was wise in the ways of the beasts. Like Childe
Roland, dauntless the slug-horn to his lips he bore. Never was there such
a battle. It lasted for hours. It was shambles. And when the last
survivors fled to their brick-and-mortar fastnesses, our work was only
half done. We chewed mouthfuls of our bread until it was reduced to the
consistency of putty. When a fleeing belligerent escaped into a crevice
between the bricks, we promptly walled him in with a daub of the chewed
bread. We toiled on until the light grew dim and until every hole, nook,
and cranny was closed. I shudder to think of the tragedies of starvation
and cannibalism that must have ensued behind those bread-plastered
ramparts.
We threw ourselves on our bunks, tired out and hungry, to wait for supper.
It was a good day's work well done. In the weeks to come we at least
should not suffer from the hosts of vermin. We had foregone our dinner,
saved our hides at the expense of our stomachs; but we were content. Alas
for the futility of human effort! Scarcely was our long task completed
when a guard unlocked our door. A redistribution of prisoners was being
made, and we were taken to another cell and locked in two galleries higher
up.
Early next morning our cells were unlocked, and down in the hall the
several hundred prisoners of us formed the lock-step and marched out into
the prison-yard to go to work. The Erie Canal runs right by the back yard
of the Erie County Penitentiary. Our task was to unload canal-boats,
carrying huge stay-bolts on our shoulders, like railroad ties, into the
prison. As I worked I sized up the situation and studied the chances for a
get-away. There wasn't the ghost of a show. Along the tops of the walls
marched guards armed with repeating rifles, and I was told, furthermore,
that there were machine-guns in the sentry-towers.
I did not worry. Thirty days were not so long. I'd stay those thirty days,
and add to the store of material I intended to use, when I got out,
against the harpies of justice. I'd show what an American boy could do
when his rights and privileges had been trampled on the way mine had. I
had been denied my right of trial by jury; I had been denied my right to
plead guilty or not guilty; I had been denied a trial even (for I couldn't
consider that what I had received at Niagara Falls was a trial); I had not
been allowed to communicate with a lawyer nor any one, and hence had been
denied my right of suing for a writ of habeas corpus; my face had been
shaved, my hair cropped close, convict stripes had been put upon my body;
I was forced to toil hard on a diet of bread and water and to march the
shameful lock-step with armed guards over me—and all for what? What had
I done? What crime had I committed against the good citizens of Niagara
Falls that all this vengeance should be wreaked upon me? I had not even
violated their "sleeping-out" ordinance. I had slept outside their
jurisdiction, in the country, that night. I had not even begged for a
meal, or battered for a "light piece" on their streets. All that I had
done was to walk along their sidewalk and gaze at their picayune
waterfall. And what crime was there in that? Technically I was guilty of
no misdemeanor. All right, I'd show them when I got out.
The next day I talked with a guard. I wanted to send for a lawyer. The
guard laughed at me. So did the other guards. I really was incommunicado
so far as the outside world was concerned. I tried to write a letter out,
but I learned that all letters were read, and censured or confiscated, by
the prison authorities, and that "short-timers" were not allowed to write
letters anyway. A little later I tried smuggling letters out by men who
were released, but I learned that they were searched and the letters found
and destroyed. Never mind. It all helped to make it a blacker case when I
did get out.
But as the prison days went by (which I shall describe in the next
chapter), I "learned a few." I heard tales of the police, and
police-courts, and lawyers, that were unbelievable and monstrous. Men,
prisoners, told me of personal experiences with the police of great cities
that were awful. And more awful were the hearsay tales they told me
concerning men who had died at the hands of the police and who therefore
could not testify for themselves. Years afterward, in the report of the
Lexow Committee, I was to read tales true and more awful than those told
to me. But in the meantime, during the first days of my imprisonment, I
scoffed at what I heard.
As the days went by, however, I began to grow convinced. I saw with my own
eyes, there in that prison, things unbelievable and monstrous. And the
more convinced I became, the profounder grew the respect in me for the
sleuth-hounds of the law and for the whole institution of criminal
justice.
My indignation ebbed away, and into my being rushed the tides of fear. I
saw at last, clear-eyed, what I was up against. I grew meek and lowly.
Each day I resolved more emphatically to make no rumpus when I got out.
All I asked, when I got out, was a chance to fade away from the landscape.
And that was just what I did do when I was released. I kept my tongue
between my teeth, walked softly, and sneaked for Pennsylvania, a wiser and
a humbler man.
For two days I toiled in the prison-yard. It was heavy work, and, in spite
of the fact that I malingered at every opportunity, I was played out. This
was because of the food. No man could work hard on such food. Bread and
water, that was all that was given us. Once a week we were supposed to get
meat; but this meat did not always go around, and since all nutriment had
first been boiled out of it in the making of soup, it didn't matter
whether one got a taste of it once a week or not.
Furthermore, there was one vital defect in the bread-and-water diet. While
we got plenty of water, we did not get enough of the bread. A ration of
bread was about the size of one's two fists, and three rations a day were
given to each prisoner. There was one good thing, I must say, about the
water—it was hot. In the morning it was called "coffee," at noon it was
dignified as "soup," and at night it masqueraded as "tea." But it was the
same old water all the time. The prisoners called it "water bewitched." In
the morning it was black water, the color being due to boiling it with
burnt bread-crusts. At noon it was served minus the color, with salt and a
drop of grease added. At night it was served with a purplish-auburn hue
that defied all speculation; it was darn poor tea, but it was dandy hot
water.
We were a hungry lot in the Erie County Pen. Only the "long-timers" knew
what it was to have enough to eat. The reason for this was that they would
have died after a time on the fare we "short-timers" received. I know that
the long-timers got more substantial grub, because there was a whole row
of them on the ground floor in our hall, and when I was a trusty, I used
to steal from their grub while serving them. Man cannot live on bread
alone and not enough of it.
My pal delivered the goods. After two days of work in the yard I was taken
out of my cell and made a trusty, a "hall-man." At morning and night we
served the bread to the prisoners in their cells; but at twelve o'clock a
different method was used. The convicts marched in from work in a long
line. As they entered the door of our hall, they broke the lock-step and
took their hands down from the shoulders of their line-mates. Just inside
the door were piled trays of bread, and here also stood the First Hall-man
and two ordinary hall-men. I was one of the two. Our task was to hold the
trays of bread as the line of convicts filed past. As soon as the tray,
say, that I was holding was emptied, the other hall-man took my place with
a full tray. And when his was emptied, I took his place with a full tray.
Thus the line tramped steadily by, each man reaching with his right hand
and taking one ration of bread from the extended tray.
The task of the First Hall-man was different. He used a club. He stood
beside the tray and watched. The hungry wretches could never get over the
delusion that sometime they could manage to get two rations of bread out
of the tray. But in my experience that sometime never came. The club of
the First Hall-man had a way of flashing out—quick as the stroke of a
tiger's claw—to the hand that dared ambitiously. The First Hall-man was a
good judge of distance, and he had smashed so many hands with that club
that he had become infallible. He never missed, and he usually punished
the offending convict by taking his one ration away from him and sending
him to his cell to make his meal off of hot water.
And at times, while all these men lay hungry in their cells, I have seen a
hundred or so extra rations of bread hidden away in the cells of the
hall-men. It would seem absurd, our retaining this bread. But it was one
of our grafts. We were economic masters inside our hall, turning the trick
in ways quite similar to the economic masters of civilization. We
controlled the food-supply of the population, and, just like our brother
bandits outside, we made the people pay through the nose for it. We
peddled the bread. Once a week, the men who worked in the yard received a
five-cent plug of chewing tobacco. This chewing tobacco was the coin of
the realm. Two or three rations of bread for a plug was the way we
exchanged, and they traded, not because they loved tobacco less, but
because they loved bread more. Oh, I know, it was like taking candy from a
baby, but what would you? We had to live. And certainly there should be
some reward for initiative and enterprise. Besides, we but patterned
ourselves after our betters outside the walls, who, on a larger scale,
and under the respectable disguise of merchants, bankers, and captains of
industry, did precisely what we were doing. What awful things would have
happened to those poor wretches if it hadn't been for us, I can't imagine.
Heaven knows we put bread into circulation in the Erie County Pen. Ay, and
we encouraged frugality and thrift ... in the poor devils who forewent
their tobacco. And then there was our example. In the breast of every
convict there we implanted the ambition to become even as we and run a
graft. Saviours of society—I guess yes.
Here was a hungry man without any tobacco. Maybe he was a profligate and
had used it all up on himself. Very good; he had a pair of suspenders. I
exchanged half a dozen rations of bread for it—or a dozen rations if the
suspenders were very good. Now I never wore suspenders, but that didn't
matter. Around the corner lodged a long-timer, doing ten years for
manslaughter. He wore suspenders, and he wanted a pair. I could trade them
to him for some of his meat. Meat was what I wanted. Or perhaps he had a
tattered, paper-covered novel. That was treasure-trove. I could read it
and then trade it off to the bakers for cake, or to the cooks for meat and
vegetables, or to the firemen for decent coffee, or to some one or other
for the newspaper that occasionally filtered in, heaven alone knows how.
The cooks, bakers, and firemen were prisoners like myself, and they lodged
in our hall in the first row of cells over us.
In short, a full-grown system of barter obtained in the Erie County Pen.
There was even money in circulation. This money was sometimes smuggled in
by the short-timers, more frequently came from the barber-shop graft,
where the newcomers were mulcted, but most of all flowed from the cells of
the long-timers—though how they got it I don't know.
What of his preeminent position, the First Hall-man was reputed to be
quite wealthy. In addition to his miscellaneous grafts, he grafted on us.
We farmed the general wretchedness, and the First Hall-man was
Farmer-General over all of us. We held our particular grafts by his
permission, and we had to pay for that permission. As I say, he was
reputed to be wealthy; but we never saw his money, and he lived in a cell
all to himself in solitary grandeur.
But that money was made in the Pen I had direct evidence, for I was
cell-mate quite a time with the Third Hall-man. He had over sixteen
dollars. He used to count his money every night after nine o'clock, when
we were locked in. Also, he used to tell me each night what he would do to
me if I gave away on him to the other hall-men. You see, he was afraid of
being robbed, and danger threatened him from three different directions.
There were the guards. A couple of them might jump upon him, give him a
good beating for alleged insubordination, and throw him into the
"solitaire" (the dungeon); and in the mix-up that sixteen dollars of his
would take wings. Then again, the First Hall-man could have taken it all
away from him by threatening to dismiss him and fire him back to hard
labor in the prison-yard. And yet again, there were the ten of us who were
ordinary hall-men. If we got an inkling of his wealth, there was a large
liability, some quiet day, of the whole bunch of us getting him into a
corner and dragging him down. Oh, we were wolves, believe me—just like
the fellows who do business in Wall Street.
He had good reason to be afraid of us, and so had I to be afraid of him.
He was a huge, illiterate brute, an ex-Chesapeake-Bay-oyster-pirate, an
"ex-con" who had done five years in Sing Sing, and a general all-around
stupidly carnivorous beast. He used to trap sparrows that flew into our
hall through the open bars. When he made a capture, he hurried away with
it into his cell, where I have seen him crunching bones and spitting out
feathers as he bolted it raw. Oh, no, I never gave away on him to the
other hall-men. This is the first time I have mentioned his sixteen
dollars.
But I grafted on him just the same. He was in love with a woman prisoner
who was confined in the "female department." He could neither read nor
write, and I used to read her letters to him and write his replies. And I
made him pay for it, too. But they were good letters. I laid myself out on
them, put in my best licks, and furthermore, I won her for him; though I
shrewdly guess that she was in love, not with him, but with the humble
scribe. I repeat, those letters were great.
Another one of our grafts was "passing the punk." We were the celestial
messengers, the fire-bringers, in that iron world of bolt and bar. When
the men came in from work at night and were locked in their cells, they
wanted to smoke. Then it was that we restored the divine spark, running
the galleries, from cell to cell, with our smouldering punks. Those who
were wise, or with whom we did business, had their punks all ready to
light. Not every one got divine sparks, however. The guy who refused to
dig up, went sparkless and smokeless to bed. But what did we care? We had
the immortal cinch on him, and if he got fresh, two or three of us would
pitch on him and give him "what-for."
You see, this was the working-theory of the hall-men. There were thirteen
of us. We had something like half a thousand prisoners in our hall. We
were supposed to do the work, and to keep order. The latter was the
function of the guards, which they turned over to us. It was up to us to
keep order; if we didn't, we'd be fired back to hard labor, most probably
with a taste of the dungeon thrown in. But so long as we maintained order,
that long could we work our own particular grafts.
Bear with me a moment and look at the problem. Here were thirteen beasts
of us over half a thousand other beasts. It was a living hell, that
prison, and it was up to us thirteen there to rule. It was impossible,
considering the nature of the beasts, for us to rule by kindness. We ruled
by fear. Of course, behind us, backing us up, were the guards. In
extremity we called upon them for help; but it would bother them if we
called upon them too often, in which event we could depend upon it that
they would get more efficient trusties to take our places. But we did not
call upon them often, except in a quiet sort of way, when we wanted a cell
unlocked in order to get at a refractory prisoner inside. In such cases
all the guard did was to unlock the door and walk away so as not to be a
witness of what happened when half a dozen hall-men went inside and did a
bit of man-handling.
As regards the details of this man-handling I shall say nothing. And after
all, man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of
the Erie County Pen. I say "unprintable"; and in justice I must also say
"unthinkable." They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no
spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human
degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie
County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of
things as I there saw them.
At times, say in the morning when the prisoners came down to wash, the
thirteen of us would be practically alone in the midst of them, and every
last one of them had it in for us. Thirteen against five hundred, and we
ruled by fear. We could not permit the slightest infraction of rules, the
slightest insolence. If we did, we were lost. Our own rule was to hit a
man as soon as he opened his mouth—hit him hard, hit him with anything. A
broom-handle, end-on, in the face, had a very sobering effect. But that
was not all. Such a man must be made an example of; so the next rule was
to wade right in and follow him up. Of course, one was sure that every
hall-man in sight would come on the run to join in the chastisement; for
this also was a rule. Whenever any hall-man was in trouble with a
prisoner, the duty of any other hall-man who happened to be around was to
lend a fist. Never mind the merits of the case—wade in and hit, and hit
with anything; in short, lay the man out.
I remember a handsome young mulatto of about twenty who got the insane
idea into his head that he should stand for his rights. And he did have
the right of it, too; but that didn't help him any. He lived on the
topmost gallery. Eight hall-men took the conceit out of him in just about
a minute and a half—for that was the length of time required to travel
along his gallery to the end and down five flights of steel stairs. He
travelled the whole distance on every portion of his anatomy except his
feet, and the eight hall-men were not idle. The mulatto struck the
pavement where I was standing watching it all. He regained his feet and
stood upright for a moment. In that moment he threw his arms wide apart
and omitted an awful scream of terror and pain and heartbreak. At the same
instant, as in a transformation scene, the shreds of his stout prison
clothes fell from him, leaving him wholly naked and streaming blood from
every portion of the surface of his body. Then he collapsed in a heap,
unconscious. He had learned his lesson, and every convict within those
walls who heard him scream had learned a lesson. So had I learned mine.
It is not a nice thing to see a man's heart broken in a minute and a half.
The following will illustrate how we drummed up business in the graft of
passing the punk. A row of newcomers is installed in your cells. You pass
along before the bars with your punk. "Hey, Bo, give us a light," some one
calls to you. Now this is an advertisement that that particular man has
tobacco on him. You pass in the punk and go your way. A little later you
come back and lean up casually against the bars. "Say, Bo, can you let us
have a little tobacco?" is what you say. If he is not wise to the game,
the chances are that he solemnly avers that he hasn't any more tobacco.
All very well. You condole with him and go your way. But you know that his
punk will last him only the rest of that day. Next day you come by, and he
says again, "Hey, Bo, give us a light." And you say, "You haven't any
tobacco and you don't need a light." And you don't give him any, either.
Half an hour after, or an hour or two or three hours, you will be passing
by and the man will call out to you in mild tones, "Come here, Bo." And
you come. You thrust your hand between the bars and have it filled with
precious tobacco. Then you give him a light.
Sometimes, however, a newcomer arrives, upon whom no grafts are to be
worked. The mysterious word is passed along that he is to be treated
decently. Where this word originated I could never learn. The one thing
patent is that the man has a "pull." It may be with one of the superior
hall-men; it may be with one of the guards in some other part of the
prison; it may be that good treatment has been purchased from grafters
higher up; but be it as it may, we know that it is up to us to treat him
decently if we want to avoid trouble.
We hall-men were middle-men and common carriers. We arranged trades
between convicts confined in different parts of the prison, and we put
through the exchange. Also, we took our commissions coming and going.
Sometimes the objects traded had to go through the hands of half a dozen
middle-men, each of whom took his whack, or in some way or another was
paid for his service.
Sometimes one was in debt for services, and sometimes one had others in
his debt. Thus, I entered the prison in debt to the convict who smuggled
in my things for me. A week or so afterward, one of the firemen passed a
letter into my hand. It had been given to him by a barber. The barber had
received it from the convict who had smuggled in my things. Because of my
debt to him I was to carry the letter on. But he had not written the
letter. The original sender was a long-timer in his hall. The letter was
for a woman prisoner in the female department. But whether it was intended
for her, or whether she, in turn, was one of the chain of go-betweens, I
did not know. All that I knew was her description, and that it was up to
me to get it into her hands.
Two days passed, during which time I kept the letter in my possession;
then the opportunity came. The women did the mending of all the clothes
worn by the convicts. A number of our hall-men had to go to the female
department to bring back huge bundles of clothes. I fixed it with the
First Hall-man that I was to go along. Door after door was unlocked for us
as we threaded our way across the prison to the women's quarters. We
entered a large room where the women sat working at their mending. My eyes
were peeled for the woman who had been described to me. I located her and
worked near to her. Two eagle-eyed matrons were on watch. I held the
letter in my palm, and I looked my intention at the woman. She knew I had
something for her; she must have been expecting it, and had set herself to
divining, at the moment we entered, which of us was the messenger. But one
of the matrons stood within two feet of her. Already the hall-men were
picking up the bundles they were to carry away. The moment was passing. I
delayed with my bundle, making believe that it was not tied securely.
Would that matron ever look away? Or was I to fail? And just then another
woman cut up playfully with one of the hall-men—stuck out her foot and
tripped him, or pinched him, or did something or other. The matron looked
that way and reprimanded the woman sharply. Now I do not know whether or
not this was all planned to distract the matron's attention, but I did
know that it was my opportunity. My particular woman's hand dropped from
her lap down by her side. I stooped to pick up my bundle. From my stooping
position I slipped the letter into her hand, and received another in
exchange. The next moment the bundle was on my shoulder, the matron's
gaze had returned to me because I was the last hall-man, and I was
hastening to catch up with my companions. The letter I had received from
the woman I turned over to the fireman, and thence it passed through the
hands of the barber, of the convict who had smuggled in my things, and on
to the long-timer at the other end.
Often we conveyed letters, the chain of communication of which was so
complex that we knew neither sender nor sendee. We were but links in the
chain. Somewhere, somehow, a convict would thrust a letter into my hand
with the instruction to pass it on to the next link. All such acts were
favors to be reciprocated later on, when I should be acting directly with
a principal in transmitting letters, and from whom I should be receiving
my pay. The whole prison was covered by a network of lines of
communication. And we who were in control of the system of communication,
naturally, since we were modelled after capitalistic society, exacted
heavy tolls from our customers. It was service for profit with a
vengeance, though we were at times not above giving service for love.
And all the time I was in the Pen I was making myself solid with my pal.
He had done much for me, and in return he expected me to do as much for
him. When we got out, we were to travel together, and, it goes without
saying, pull off "jobs" together. For my pal was a criminal—oh, not a
jewel of the first water, merely a petty criminal who would steal and rob,
commit burglary, and, if cornered, not stop short of murder. Many a quiet
hour we sat and talked together. He had two or three jobs in view for the
immediate future, in which my work was cut out for me, and in which I
joined in planning the details. I had been with and seen much of
criminals, and my pal never dreamed that I was only fooling him, giving
him a string thirty days long. He thought I was the real goods, liked me
because I was not stupid, and liked me a bit, too, I think, for myself. Of
course I had not the slightest intention of joining him in a life of
sordid, petty crime; but I'd have been an idiot to throw away all the good
things his friendship made possible. When one is on the hot lava of hell,
he cannot pick and choose his path, and so it was with me in the Erie
County Pen. I had to stay in with the "push," or do hard labor on bread
and water; and to stay in with the push I had to make good with my pal.
Life was not monotonous in the Pen. Every day something was happening: men
were having fits, going crazy, fighting, or the hall-men were getting
drunk. Rover Jack, one of the ordinary hall-men, was our star "oryide." He
was a true "profesh," a "blowed-in-the-glass" stiff, and as such received
all kinds of latitude from the hall-men in authority. Pittsburg Joe, who
was Second Hall-man, used to join Rover Jack in his jags; and it was a
saying of the pair that the Erie County Pen was the only place where a man
could get "slopped" and not be arrested. I never knew, but I was told that
bromide of potassium, gained in devious ways from the dispensary, was the
dope they used. But I do know, whatever their dope was, that they got good
and drunk on occasion.
Our hall was a common stews, filled with the ruck and the filth, the scum
and dregs, of society—hereditary inefficients, degenerates, wrecks,
lunatics, addled intelligences, epileptics, monsters, weaklings, in short,
a very nightmare of humanity. Hence, fits flourished with us. These fits
seemed contagious. When one man began throwing a fit, others followed his
lead. I have seen seven men down with fits at the same time, making the
air hideous with their cries, while as many more lunatics would be raging
and gibbering up and down. Nothing was ever done for the men with fits
except to throw cold water on them. It was useless to send for the medical
student or the doctor. They were not to be bothered with such trivial and
frequent occurrences.
There was a young Dutch boy, about eighteen years of age, who had fits
most frequently of all. He usually threw one every day. It was for that
reason that we kept him on the ground floor farther down in the row of
cells in which we lodged. After he had had a few fits in the prison-yard,
the guards refused to be bothered with him any more, and so he remained
locked up in his cell all day with a Cockney cell-mate, to keep him
company. Not that the Cockney was of any use. Whenever the Dutch boy had a
fit, the Cockney became paralyzed with terror.
The Dutch boy could not speak a word of English. He was a farmer's boy,
serving ninety days as punishment for having got into a scrap with some
one. He prefaced his fits with howling. He howled like a wolf. Also, he
took his fits standing up, which was very inconvenient for him, for his
fits always culminated in a headlong pitch to the floor. Whenever I heard
the long wolf-howl rising, I used to grab a broom and run to his cell. Now
the trusties were not allowed keys to the cells, so I could not get in to
him. He would stand up in the middle of his narrow cell, shivering
convulsively, his eyes rolled backward till only the whites were visible,
and howling like a lost soul. Try as I would, I could never get the
Cockney to lend him a hand. While he stood and howled, the Cockney
crouched and trembled in the upper bunk, his terror-stricken gaze fixed on
that awful figure, with eyes rolled back, that howled and howled. It was
hard on him, too, the poor devil of a Cockney. His own reason was not any
too firmly seated, and the wonder is that he did not go mad.
All that I could do was my best with the broom. I would thrust it through
the bars, train it on Dutchy's chest, and wait. As the crisis approached
he would begin swaying back and forth. I followed this swaying with the
broom, for there was no telling when he would take that dreadful forward
pitch. But when he did, I was there with the broom, catching him and
easing him down. Contrive as I would, he never came down quite gently, and
his face was usually bruised by the stone floor. Once down and writhing in
convulsions, I'd throw a bucket of water over him. I don't know whether
cold water was the right thing or not, but it was the custom in the Erie
County Pen. Nothing more than that was ever done for him. He would lie
there, wet, for an hour or so, and then crawl into his bunk. I knew better
than to run to a guard for assistance. What was a man with a fit, anyway?
In the adjoining cell lived a strange character—a man who was doing sixty
days for eating swill out of Barnum's swill-barrel, or at least that was
the way he put it. He was a badly addled creature, and, at first, very
mild and gentle. The facts of his case were as he had stated them. He had
strayed out to the circus ground, and, being hungry, had made his way to
the barrel that contained the refuse from the table of the circus people.
"And it was good bread," he often assured me; "and the meat was out of
sight." A policeman had seen him and arrested him, and there he was.
Once I passed his cell with a piece of stiff thin wire in my hand. He
asked me for it so earnestly that I passed it through the bars to him.
Promptly, and with no tool but his fingers, he broke it into short lengths
and twisted them into half a dozen very creditable safety pins. He
sharpened the points on the stone floor. Thereafter I did quite a trade in
safety pins. I furnished the raw material and peddled the finished
product, and he did the work. As wages, I paid him extra rations of bread,
and once in a while a chunk of meat or a piece of soup-bone with some
marrow inside.
But his imprisonment told on him, and he grew violent day by day. The
hall-men took delight in teasing him. They filled his weak brain with
stories of a great fortune that had been left him. It was in order to rob
him of it that he had been arrested and sent to jail. Of course, as he
himself knew, there was no law against eating out of a barrel. Therefore
he was wrongly imprisoned. It was a plot to deprive him of his fortune.
The first I knew of it, I heard the hall-men laughing about the string
they had given him. Next he held a serious conference with me, in which he
told me of his millions and the plot to deprive him of them, and in which
he appointed me his detective. I did my best to let him down gently,
speaking vaguely of a mistake, and that it was another man with a similar
name who was the rightful heir. I left him quite cooled down; but I
couldn't keep the hall-men away from him, and they continued to string him
worse than ever. In the end, after a most violent scene, he threw me down,
revoked my private detectiveship, and went on strike. My trade in safety
pins ceased. He refused to make any more safety pins, and he peppered me
with raw material through the bars of his cell when I passed by.
I could never make it up with him. The other hall-men told him that I was
a detective in the employ of the conspirators. And in the meantime the
hall-men drove him mad with their stringing. His fictitious wrongs preyed
upon his mind, and at last he became a dangerous and homicidal lunatic.
The guards refused to listen to his tale of stolen millions, and he
accused them of being in the plot. One day he threw a pannikin of hot tea
over one of them, and then his case was investigated. The warden talked
with him a few minutes through the bars of his cell. Then he was taken
away for examination before the doctors. He never came back, and I often
wonder if he is dead, or if he still gibbers about his millions in some
asylum for the insane.
At last came the day of days, my release. It was the day of release for
the Third Hall-man as well, and the short-timer girl I had won for him was
waiting for him outside the wall. They went away blissfully together. My
pal and I went out together, and together we walked down into Buffalo.
Were we not to be together always? We begged together on the "main-drag"
that day for pennies, and what we received was spent for "shupers" of
beer—I don't know how they are spelled, but they are pronounced the way I
have spelled them, and they cost three cents. I was watching my chance all
the time for a get-away. From some bo on the drag I managed to learn what
time a certain freight pulled out. I calculated my time accordingly. When
the moment came, my pal and I were in a saloon. Two foaming shupers were
before us. I'd have liked to say good-by. He had been good to me. But I
did not dare. I went out through the rear of the saloon and jumped the
fence. It was a swift sneak, and a few minutes later I was on board a
freight and heading south on the Western New York and Pennsylvania
Railroad.
In the course of my tramping I encountered hundreds of hoboes, whom I
hailed or who hailed me, and with whom I waited at water-tanks,
"boiled-up," cooked "mulligans," "battered" the "drag" or "privates," and
beat trains, and who passed and were seen never again. On the other hand,
there were hoboes who passed and repassed with amazing frequency, and
others, still, who passed like ghosts, close at hand, unseen, and never
seen.
It was one of the latter that I chased clear across Canada over three
thousand miles of railroad, and never once did I lay eyes on him. His
"monica" was Skysail Jack. I first ran into it at Montreal. Carved with a
jack-knife was the skysail-yard of a ship. It was perfectly executed.
Under it was "Skysail Jack." Above was "B.W. 9-15-94." This latter
conveyed the information that he had passed through Montreal bound west,
on October 15, 1894. He had one day the start of me. "Sailor Jack" was my
monica at that particular time, and promptly I carved it alongside of his,
along with the date and the information that I, too, was bound west.
I had misfortune in getting over the next hundred miles, and eight days
later I picked up Skysail Jack's trail three hundred miles west of Ottawa.
There it was, carved on a water-tank, and by the date I saw that he
likewise had met with delay. He was only two days ahead of me. I was a
"comet" and "tramp-royal," so was Skysail Jack; and it was up to my pride
and reputation to catch up with him. I "railroaded" day and night, and I
passed him; then turn about he passed me. Sometimes he was a day or so
ahead, and sometimes I was. From hoboes, bound east, I got word of him
occasionally, when he happened to be ahead; and from them I learned that
he had become interested in Sailor Jack and was making inquiries about me.
We'd have made a precious pair, I am sure, if we'd ever got together; but
get together we couldn't. I kept ahead of him clear across Manitoba, but
he led the way across Alberta, and early one bitter gray morning, at the
end of a division just east of Kicking Horse Pass, I learned that he had
been seen the night before between Kicking Horse Pass and Rogers' Pass. It
was rather curious the way the information came to me. I had been riding
all night in a "side-door Pullman" (box-car), and nearly dead with cold
had crawled out at the division to beg for food. A freezing fog was
drifting past, and I "hit" some firemen I found in the round-house. They
fixed me up with the leavings from their lunch-pails, and in addition I
got out of them nearly a quart of heavenly "Java" (coffee). I heated the
latter, and, as I sat down to eat, a freight pulled in from the west. I
saw a side-door open and a road-kid climb out. Through the drifting fog he
limped over to me. He was stiff with cold, his lips blue. I shared my Java
and grub with him, learned about Skysail Jack, and then learned about him.
Behold, he was from my own town, Oakland, California, and he was a member
of the celebrated Boo Gang—a gang with which I had affiliated at rare
intervals. We talked fast and bolted the grub in the half-hour that
followed. Then my freight pulled out, and I was on it, bound west on the
trail of Skysail Jack.
I was delayed between the passes, went two days without food, and walked
eleven miles on the third day before I got any, and yet I succeeded in
passing Skysail Jack along the Fraser River in British Columbia. I was
riding "passengers" then and making time; but he must have been riding
passengers, too, and with more luck or skill than I, for he got into
Mission ahead of me.
Now Mission was a junction, forty miles east of Vancouver. From the
junction one could proceed south through Washington and Oregon over the
Northern Pacific. I wondered which way Skysail Jack would go, for I
thought I was ahead of him. As for myself I was still bound west to
Vancouver. I proceeded to the water-tank to leave that information, and
there, freshly carved, with that day's date upon it, was Skysail Jack's
monica. I hurried on into Vancouver. But he was gone. He had taken ship
immediately and was still flying west on his world-adventure. Truly,
Skysail Jack, you were a tramp-royal, and your mate was the "wind that
tramps the world." I take off my hat to you. You were
"blowed-in-the-glass" all right. A week later I, too, got my ship, and on
board the steamship Umatilla, in the forecastle, was working my way down
the coast to San Francisco. Skysail Jack and Sailor Jack—gee! if we'd
ever got together.
Water-tanks are tramp directories. Not all in idle wantonness do tramps
carve their monicas, dates, and courses. Often and often have I met hoboes
earnestly inquiring if I had seen anywhere such and such a "stiff" or his
monica. And more than once I have been able to give the monica of recent
date, the water-tank, and the direction in which he was then bound. And
promptly the hobo to whom I gave the information lit out after his pal. I
have met hoboes who, in trying to catch a pal, had pursued clear across
the continent and back again, and were still going.
"Monicas" are the nom-de-rails that hoboes assume or accept when thrust
upon them by their fellows. Leary Joe, for instance, was timid, and was so
named by his fellows. No self-respecting hobo would select Stew Bum for
himself. Very few tramps care to remember their pasts during which they
ignobly worked, so monicas based upon trades are very rare, though I
remember having met the following: Moulder Blackey, Painter Red, Chi
Plumber, Boiler-Maker, Sailor Boy, and Printer Bo. "Chi" (pronounced shy),
by the way, is the argot for "Chicago."
A favorite device of hoboes is to base their monicas on the localities
from which they hail, as: New York Tommy, Pacific Slim, Buffalo Smithy,
Canton Tim, Pittsburg Jack, Syracuse Shine, Troy Mickey, K.L. Bill, and
Connecticut Jimmy. Then there was "Slim Jim from Vinegar Hill, who never
worked and never will." A "shine" is always a negro, so called, possibly,
from the high lights on his countenance. Texas Shine or Toledo Shine
convey both race and nativity.
Among those that incorporated their race, I recollect the following:
Frisco Sheeny, New York Irish, Michigan French, English Jack, Cockney Kid,
and Milwaukee Dutch. Others seem to take their monicas in part from the
color-schemes stamped upon them at birth, such as: Chi Whitey, New Jersey
Red, Boston Blackey, Seattle Browney, and Yellow Dick and Yellow
Belly—the last a Creole from Mississippi, who, I suspect, had his monica
thrust upon him.
Texas Royal, Happy Joe, Bust Connors, Burley Bo, Tornado Blackey, and
Touch McCall used more imagination in rechristening themselves. Others,
with less fancy, carry the names of their physical peculiarities, such as:
Vancouver Slim, Detroit Shorty, Ohio Fatty, Long Jack, Big Jim, Little
Joe, New York Blink, Chi Nosey, and Broken-backed Ben.
By themselves come the road-kids, sporting an infinite variety of monicas.
For example, the following, whom here and there I have encountered: Buck
Kid, Blind Kid, Midget Kid, Holy Kid, Bat Kid, Swift Kid, Cookey Kid,
Monkey Kid, Iowa Kid, Corduroy Kid, Orator Kid (who could tell how it
happened), and Lippy Kid (who was insolent, depend upon it).
On the water-tank at San Marcial, New Mexico, a dozen years ago, was the
following hobo bill of fare:—
(1) Main-drag fair.
(2) Bulls not hostile.
(3) Round-house good for kipping.
(4) North-bound trains no good.
(5) Privates no good.
(6) Restaurants good for cooks only.
(7) Railroad House good for night-work only.
Number one conveys the information that begging for money on the main
street is fair; number two, that the police will not bother hoboes; number
three, that one can sleep in the round-house. Number four, however, is
ambiguous. The north-bound trains may be no good to beat, and they may be
no good to beg. Number five means that the residences are not good to
beggars, and number six means that only hoboes that have been cooks can
get grub from the restaurants. Number seven bothers me. I cannot make out
whether the Railroad House is a good place for any hobo to beg at night,
or whether it is good only for hobo-cooks to beg at night, or whether any
hobo, cook or non-cook, can lend a hand at night, helping the cooks of the
Railroad House with their dirty work and getting something to eat in
payment.
But to return to the hoboes that pass in the night. I remember one I met
in California. He was a Swede, but he had lived so long in the United
States that one couldn't guess his nationality. He had to tell it on
himself. In fact, he had come to the United States when no more than a
baby. I ran into him first at the mountain town of Truckee. "Which way,
Bo?" was our greeting, and "Bound east" was the answer each of us gave.
Quite a bunch of "stiffs" tried to ride out the overland that night, and I
lost the Swede in the shuffle. Also, I lost the overland.
I arrived in Reno, Nevada, in a box-car that was promptly side-tracked. It
was a Sunday morning, and after I threw my feet for breakfast, I wandered
over to the Piute camp to watch the Indians gambling. And there stood the
Swede, hugely interested. Of course we got together. He was the only
acquaintance I had in that region, and I was his only acquaintance. We
rushed together like a couple of dissatisfied hermits, and together we
spent the day, threw our feet for dinner, and late in the afternoon tried
to "nail" the same freight. But he was ditched, and I rode her out alone,
to be ditched myself in the desert twenty miles beyond.
Of all desolate places, the one at which I was ditched was the limit. It
was called a flag-station, and it consisted of a shanty dumped
inconsequentially into the sand and sagebrush. A chill wind was blowing,
night was coming on, and the solitary telegraph operator who lived in the
shanty was afraid of me. I knew that neither grub nor bed could I get out
of him. It was because of his manifest fear of me that I did not believe
him when he told me that east-bound trains never stopped there. Besides,
hadn't I been thrown off of an east-bound train right at that very spot
not five minutes before? He assured me that it had stopped under orders,
and that a year might go by before another was stopped under orders. He
advised me that it was only a dozen or fifteen miles on to Wadsworth and
that I'd better hike. I elected to wait, however, and I had the pleasure
of seeing two west-bound freights go by without stopping, and one
east-bound freight. I wondered if the Swede was on the latter. It was up
to me to hit the ties to Wadsworth, and hit them I did, much to the
telegraph operator's relief, for I neglected to burn his shanty and murder
him. Telegraph operators have much to be thankful for. At the end of half
a dozen miles, I had to get off the ties and let the east-bound overland
go by. She was going fast, but I caught sight of a dim form on the first
"blind" that looked like the Swede.
That was the last I saw of him for weary days. I hit the high places
across those hundreds of miles of Nevada desert, riding the overlands at
night, for speed, and in the day-time riding in box-cars and getting my
sleep. It was early in the year, and it was cold in those upland pastures.
Snow lay here and there on the level, all the mountains were shrouded in
white, and at night the most miserable wind imaginable blew off from them.
It was not a land in which to linger. And remember, gentle reader, the
hobo goes through such a land, without shelter, without money, begging his
way and sleeping at night without blankets. This last is something that
can be realized only by experience.
In the early evening I came down to the depot at Ogden. The overland of
the Union Pacific was pulling east, and I was bent on making connections.
Out in the tangle of tracks ahead of the engine I encountered a figure
slouching through the gloom. It was the Swede. We shook hands like
long-lost brothers, and discovered that our hands were gloved. "Where'd ye
glahm 'em?" I asked. "Out of an engine-cab," he answered; "and where did
you?" "They belonged to a fireman," said I; "he was careless."
We caught the blind as the overland pulled out, and mighty cold we found
it. The way led up a narrow gorge between snow-covered mountains, and we
shivered and shook and exchanged confidences about how we had covered the
ground between Reno and Ogden. I had closed my eyes for only an hour or so
the previous night, and the blind was not comfortable enough to suit me
for a snooze. At a stop, I went forward to the engine. We had on a
"double-header" (two engines) to take us over the grade.
The pilot of the head engine, because it "punched the wind," I knew would
be too cold; so I selected the pilot of the second engine, which was
sheltered by the first engine. I stepped on the cowcatcher and found the
pilot occupied. In the darkness I felt out the form of a young boy. He was
sound asleep. By squeezing, there was room for two on the pilot, and I
made the boy budge over and crawled up beside him. It was a "good" night;
the "shacks" (brakemen) didn't bother us, and in no time we were asleep.
Once in a while hot cinders or heavy jolts aroused me, when I snuggled
closer to the boy and dozed off to the coughing of the engines and the
screeching of the wheels.
The overland made Evanston, Wyoming, and went no farther. A wreck ahead
blocked the line. The dead engineer had been brought in, and his body
attested the peril of the way. A tramp, also, had been killed, but his
body had not been brought in. I talked with the boy. He was thirteen years
old. He had run away from his folks in some place in Oregon, and was
heading east to his grandmother. He had a tale of cruel treatment in the
home he had left that rang true; besides, there was no need for him to lie
to me, a nameless hobo on the track.
And that boy was going some, too. He couldn't cover the ground fast
enough. When the division superintendents decided to send the overland
back over the way it had come, then up on a cross "jerk" to the Oregon
Short Line, and back along that road to tap the Union Pacific the other
side of the wreck, that boy climbed upon the pilot and said he was going
to stay with it. This was too much for the Swede and me. It meant
travelling the rest of that frigid night in order to gain no more than a
dozen miles or so. We said we'd wait till the wreck was cleared away, and
in the meantime get a good sleep.
Now it is no snap to strike a strange town, broke, at midnight, in cold
weather, and find a place to sleep. The Swede hadn't a penny. My total
assets consisted of two dimes and a nickel. From some of the town boys we
learned that beer was five cents, and that the saloons kept open all
night. There was our meat. Two glasses of beer would cost ten cents, there
would be a stove and chairs, and we could sleep it out till morning. We
headed for the lights of a saloon, walking briskly, the snow crunching
under our feet, a chill little wind blowing through us.
Alas, I had misunderstood the town boys. Beer was five cents in one saloon
only in the whole burg, and we didn't strike that saloon. But the one we
entered was all right. A blessed stove was roaring white-hot; there were
cosey, cane-bottomed arm-chairs, and a none-too-pleasant-looking barkeeper
who glared suspiciously at us as we came in. A man cannot spend continuous
days and nights in his clothes, beating trains, fighting soot and
cinders, and sleeping anywhere, and maintain a good "front." Our fronts
were decidedly against us; but what did we care? I had the price in my
jeans.
"Two beers," said I nonchalantly to the barkeeper, and while he drew them,
the Swede and I leaned against the bar and yearned secretly for the
arm-chairs by the stove.
The barkeeper set the two foaming glasses before us, and with pride I
deposited the ten cents. Now I was dead game. As soon as I learned my
error in the price I'd have dug up another ten cents. Never mind if it did
leave me only a nickel to my name, a stranger in a strange land. I'd have
paid it all right. But that barkeeper never gave me a chance. As soon as
his eyes spotted the dime I had laid down, he seized the two glasses, one
in each hand, and dumped the beer into the sink behind the bar. At the
same time, glaring at us malevolently, he said:—
"You've got scabs on your nose. You've got scabs on your nose. You've got
scabs on your nose. See!"
I hadn't either, and neither had the Swede. Our noses were all right. The
direct bearing of his words was beyond our comprehension, but the indirect
bearing was clear as print: he didn't like our looks, and beer was
evidently ten cents a glass.
I dug down and laid another dime on the bar, remarking carelessly, "Oh, I
thought this was a five-cent joint."
"Your money's no good here," he answered, shoving the two dimes across the
bar to me.
Sadly I dropped them back into my pocket, sadly we yearned toward the
blessed stove and the arm-chairs, and sadly we went out the door into the
frosty night.
But as we went out the door, the barkeeper, still glaring, called after
us, "You've got scabs on your nose, see!"
I have seen much of the world since then, journeyed among strange lands
and peoples, opened many books, sat in many lecture-halls; but to this
day, though I have pondered long and deep, I have been unable to divine
the meaning in the cryptic utterance of that barkeeper in Evanston,
Wyoming. Our noses were all right.
We slept that night over the boilers in an electric-lighting plant. How we
discovered that "kipping" place I can't remember. We must have just headed
for it, instinctively, as horses head for water or carrier-pigeons head
for the home-cote. But it was a night not pleasant to remember. A dozen
hoboes were ahead of us on top the boilers, and it was too hot for all of
us. To complete our misery, the engineer would not let us stand around
down below. He gave us our choice of the boilers or the outside snow.
"You said you wanted to sleep, and so, damn you, sleep," said he to me,
when, frantic and beaten out by the heat, I came down into the fire-room.
"Water," I gasped, wiping the sweat from my eyes, "water."
He pointed out of doors and assured me that down there somewhere in the
blackness I'd find the river. I started for the river, got lost in the
dark, fell into two or three drifts, gave it up, and returned half-frozen
to the top of the boilers. When I had thawed out, I was thirstier than
ever. Around me the hoboes were moaning, groaning, sobbing, sighing,
gasping, panting, rolling and tossing and floundering heavily in their
torment. We were so many lost souls toasting on a griddle in hell, and the
engineer, Satan Incarnate, gave us the sole alternative of freezing in the
outer cold. The Swede sat up and anathematized passionately the wanderlust
in man that sent him tramping and suffering hardships such as that.
"When I get back to Chicago," he perorated, "I'm going to get a job and
stick to it till hell freezes over. Then I'll go tramping again."
And, such is the irony of fate, next day, when the wreck ahead was
cleared, the Swede and I pulled out of Evanston in the ice-boxes of an
"orange special," a fast freight laden with fruit from sunny California.
Of course, the ice-boxes were empty on account of the cold weather, but
that didn't make them any warmer for us. We entered them through hatchways
in the top of the car; the boxes were constructed of galvanized iron, and
in that biting weather were not pleasant to the touch. We lay there,
shivered and shook, and with chattering teeth held a council wherein we
decided that we'd stay by the ice-boxes day and night till we got out of
the inhospitable plateau region and down into the Mississippi Valley.
But we must eat, and we decided that at the next division we would throw
our feet for grub and make a rush back to our ice-boxes. We arrived in the
town of Green River late in the afternoon, but too early for supper.
Before meal-time is the worst time for "battering" back-doors; but we put
on our nerve, swung off the side-ladders as the freight pulled into the
yards, and made a run for the houses. We were quickly separated; but we
had agreed to meet in the ice-boxes. I had bad luck at first; but in the
end, with a couple of "hand-outs" poked into my shirt, I chased for the
train. It was pulling out and going fast. The particular refrigerator-car
in which we were to meet had already gone by, and half a dozen cars down
the train from it I swung on to the side-ladders, went up on top
hurriedly, and dropped down into an ice-box.
But a shack had seen me from the caboose, and at the next stop a few miles
farther on, Rock Springs, the shack stuck his head into my box and said:
"Hit the grit, you son of a toad! Hit the grit!" Also he grabbed me by the
heels and dragged me out. I hit the grit all right, and the orange special
and the Swede rolled on without me.
Snow was beginning to fall. A cold night was coming on. After dark I
hunted around in the railroad yards until I found an empty refrigerator
car. In I climbed—not into the ice-boxes, but into the car itself. I
swung the heavy doors shut, and their edges, covered with strips of
rubber, sealed the car air-tight. The walls were thick. There was no way
for the outside cold to get in. But the inside was just as cold as the
outside. How to raise the temperature was the problem. But trust a
"profesh" for that. Out of my pockets I dug up three or four newspapers.
These I burned, one at a time, on the floor of the car. The smoke rose to
the top. Not a bit of the heat could escape, and, comfortable and warm, I
passed a beautiful night. I didn't wake up once.
In the morning it was still snowing. While throwing my feet for breakfast,
I missed an east-bound freight. Later in the day I nailed two other
freights and was ditched from both of them. All afternoon no east-bound
trains went by. The snow was falling thicker than ever, but at twilight I
rode out on the first blind of the overland. As I swung aboard the blind
from one side, somebody swung aboard from the other. It was the boy who
had run away from Oregon.
Now the first blind of a fast train in a driving snow-storm is no summer
picnic. The wind goes right through one, strikes the front of the car, and
comes back again. At the first stop, darkness having come on, I went
forward and interviewed the fireman. I offered to "shove" coal to the end
of his run, which was Rawlins, and my offer was accepted. My work was out
on the tender, in the snow, breaking the lumps of coal with a sledge and
shovelling it forward to him in the cab. But as I did not have to work all
the time, I could come into the cab and warm up now and again.
"Say," I said to the fireman, at my first breathing spell, "there's a
little kid back there on the first blind. He's pretty cold."
The cabs on the Union Pacific engines are quite spacious, and we fitted
the kid into a warm nook in front of the high seat of the fireman, where
the kid promptly fell asleep. We arrived at Rawlins at midnight. The snow
was thicker than ever. Here the engine was to go into the round-house,
being replaced by a fresh engine. As the train came to a stop, I dropped
off the engine steps plump into the arms of a large man in a large
overcoat. He began asking me questions, and I promptly demanded who he
was. Just as promptly he informed me that he was the sheriff. I drew in my
horns and listened and answered.
He began describing the kid who was still asleep in the cab. I did some
quick thinking. Evidently the family was on the trail of the kid, and the
sheriff had received telegraphed instructions from Oregon. Yes, I had seen
the kid. I had met him first in Ogden. The date tallied with the sheriff's
information. But the kid was still behind somewhere, I explained, for he
had been ditched from that very overland that night when it pulled out of
Rock Springs. And all the time I was praying that the kid wouldn't wake
up, come down out of the cab, and put the "kibosh" on me.
The sheriff left me in order to interview the shacks, but before he left
he said:—
"Bo, this town is no place for you. Understand? You ride this train out,
and make no mistake about it. If I catch you after it's gone ..."
I assured him that it was not through desire that I was in his town; that
the only reason I was there was that the train had stopped there; and that
he wouldn't see me for smoke the way I'd get out of his darn town.
While he went to interview the shacks, I jumped back into the cab. The kid
was awake and rubbing his eyes. I told him the news and advised him to
ride the engine into the round-house. To cut the story short, the kid made
the same overland out, riding the pilot, with instructions to make an
appeal to the fireman at the first stop for permission to ride in the
engine. As for myself, I got ditched. The new fireman was young and not
yet lax enough to break the rules of the Company against having tramps in
the engine; so he turned down my offer to shove coal. I hope the kid
succeeded with him, for all night on the pilot in that blizzard would have
meant death.
Strange to say, I do not at this late day remember a detail of how I was
ditched at Rawlins. I remember watching the train as it was immediately
swallowed up in the snow-storm, and of heading for a saloon to warm up.
Here was light and warmth. Everything was in full blast and wide open.
Faro, roulette, craps, and poker tables were running, and some mad
cow-punchers were making the night merry. I had just succeeded in
fraternizing with them and was downing my first drink at their expense,
when a heavy hand descended on my shoulder. I looked around and sighed. It
was the sheriff.
Without a word he led me out into the snow.
"There's an orange special down there in the yards," said he.
"It's a damn cold night," said I.
"It pulls out in ten minutes," said he.
That was all. There was no discussion. And when that orange special pulled
out, I was in the ice-boxes. I thought my feet would freeze before
morning, and the last twenty miles into Laramie I stood upright in the
hatchway and danced up and down. The snow was too thick for the shacks to
see me, and I didn't care if they did.
My quarter of a dollar bought me a hot breakfast at Laramie, and
immediately afterward I was on board the blind baggage of an overland that
was climbing to the pass through the backbone of the Rockies. One does not
ride blind baggages in the daytime; but in this blizzard at the top of
the Rocky Mountains I doubted if the shacks would have the heart to put me
off. And they didn't. They made a practice of coming forward at every stop
to see if I was frozen yet.
At Ames' Monument, at the summit of the Rockies,—I forget the
altitude,—the shack came forward for the last time.
"Say, Bo," he said, "you see that freight side-tracked over there to let
us go by?"
I saw. It was on the next track, six feet away. A few feet more in that
storm and I could not have seen it.
"Well, the 'after-push' of Kelly's Army is in one of them cars. They've
got two feet of straw under them, and there's so many of them that they
keep the car warm."
His advice was good, and I followed it, prepared, however, if it was a
"con game" the shack had given me, to take the blind as the overland
pulled out. But it was straight goods. I found the car—a big refrigerator
car with the leeward door wide open for ventilation. Up I climbed and in.
I stepped on a man's leg, next on some other man's arm. The light was dim,
and all I could make out was arms and legs and bodies inextricably
confused. Never was there such a tangle of humanity. They were all lying
in the straw, and over, and under, and around one another. Eighty-four
husky hoboes take up a lot of room when they are stretched out. The men I
stepped on were resentful. Their bodies heaved under me like the waves of
the sea, and imparted an involuntary forward movement to me. I could not
find any straw to step upon, so I stepped upon more men. The resentment
increased, so did my forward movement. I lost my footing and sat down with
sharp abruptness. Unfortunately, it was on a man's head. The next moment
he had risen on his hands and knees in wrath, and I was flying through the
air. What goes up must come down, and I came down on another man's head.
What happened after that is very vague in my memory. It was like going
through a threshing-machine. I was bandied about from one end of the car
to the other. Those eighty-four hoboes winnowed me out till what little
was left of me, by some miracle, found a bit of straw to rest upon. I was
initiated, and into a jolly crowd. All the rest of that day we rode
through the blizzard, and to while the time away it was decided that each
man was to tell a story. It was stipulated that each story must be a good
one, and, furthermore, that it must be a story no one had ever heard
before. The penalty for failure was the threshing-machine. Nobody failed.
And I want to say right here that never in my life have I sat at so
marvellous a story-telling debauch. Here were eighty-four men from all the
world—I made eighty-five; and each man told a masterpiece. It had to be,
for it was either masterpiece or threshing-machine.
Late in the afternoon we arrived in Cheyenne. The blizzard was at its
height, and though the last meal of all of us had been breakfast, no man
cared to throw his feet for supper. All night we rolled on through the
storm, and next day found us down on the sweet plains of Nebraska and
still rolling. We were out of the storm and the mountains. The blessed sun
was shining over a smiling land, and we had eaten nothing for twenty-four
hours. We found out that the freight would arrive about noon at a town, if
I remember right, that was called Grand Island.
We took up a collection and sent a telegram to the authorities of that
town. The text of the message was that eighty-five healthy, hungry hoboes
would arrive about noon and that it would be a good idea to have dinner
ready for them. The authorities of Grand Island had two courses open to
them. They could feed us, or they could throw us in jail. In the latter
event they'd have to feed us anyway, and they decided wisely that one meal
would be the cheaper way.
When the freight rolled into Grand Island at noon, we were sitting on the
tops of the cars and dangling our legs in the sunshine. All the police in
the burg were on the reception committee. They marched us in squads to the
various hotels and restaurants, where dinners were spread for us. We had
been thirty-six hours without food, and we didn't have to be taught what
to do. After that we were marched back to the railroad station. The police
had thoughtfully compelled the freight to wait for us. She pulled out
slowly, and the eighty-five of us, strung out along the track, swarmed up
the side-ladders. We "captured" the train.
We had no supper that evening—at least the "push" didn't, but I did. Just
at supper time, as the freight was pulling out of a small town, a man
climbed into the car where I was playing pedro with three other stiffs.
The man's shirt was bulging suspiciously. In his hand he carried a
battered quart-measure from which arose steam. I smelled "Java." I turned
my cards over to one of the stiffs who was looking on, and excused myself.
Then, in the other end of the car, pursued by envious glances, I sat down
with the man who had climbed aboard and shared his "Java" and the
hand-outs that had bulged his shirt. It was the Swede.
At about ten o'clock in the evening, we arrived at Omaha.
"Let's shake the push," said the Swede to me.
"Sure," said I.
As the freight pulled into Omaha, we made ready to do so. But the people
of Omaha were also ready. The Swede and I hung upon the side-ladders,
ready to drop off. But the freight did not stop. Furthermore, long rows of
policemen, their brass buttons and stars glittering in the electric
lights, were lined up on each side of the track. The Swede and I knew what
would happen to us if we ever dropped off into their arms. We stuck by the
side-ladders, and the train rolled on across the Missouri River to Council
Bluffs.
"General" Kelly, with an army of two thousand hoboes, lay in camp at
Chautauqua Park, several miles away. The after-push we were with was
General Kelly's rear-guard, and, detraining at Council Bluffs, it started
to march to camp. The night had turned cold, and heavy wind-squalls,
accompanied by rain, were chilling and wetting us. Many police were
guarding us and herding us to the camp. The Swede and I watched our chance
and made a successful get-away.
The rain began coming down in torrents, and in the darkness, unable to see
our hands in front of our faces, like a pair of blind men we fumbled about
for shelter. Our instinct served us, for in no time we stumbled upon a
saloon—not a saloon that was open and doing business, not merely a saloon
that was closed for the night, and not even a saloon with a permanent
address, but a saloon propped up on big timbers, with rollers underneath,
that was being moved from somewhere to somewhere. The doors were locked. A
squall of wind and rain drove down upon us. We did not hesitate. Smash
went the door, and in we went.
I have made some tough camps in my time, "carried the banner" in infernal
metropolises, bedded in pools of water, slept in the snow under two
blankets when the spirit thermometer registered seventy-four degrees below
zero (which is a mere trifle of one hundred and six degrees of frost); but
I want to say right here that never did I make a tougher camp, pass a more
miserable night, than that night I passed with the Swede in the itinerant
saloon at Council Bluffs. In the first place, the building, perched up as
it was in the air, had exposed a multitude of openings in the floor
through which the wind whistled. In the second place, the bar was empty;
there was no bottled fire-water with which we could warm ourselves and
forget our misery. We had no blankets, and in our wet clothes, wet to the
skin, we tried to sleep. I rolled under the bar, and the Swede rolled
under the table. The holes and crevices in the floor made it impossible,
and at the end of half an hour I crawled up on top the bar. A little later
the Swede crawled up on top his table.
And there we shivered and prayed for daylight. I know, for one, that I
shivered until I could shiver no more, till the shivering muscles
exhausted themselves and merely ached horribly. The Swede moaned and
groaned, and every little while, through chattering teeth, he muttered,
"Never again; never again." He muttered this phrase repeatedly,
ceaselessly, a thousand times; and when he dozed, he went on muttering it
in his sleep.
At the first gray of dawn we left our house of pain, and outside, found
ourselves in a mist, dense and chill. We stumbled on till we came to the
railroad track. I was going back to Omaha to throw my feet for breakfast;
my companion was going on to Chicago. The moment for parting had come. Our
palsied hands went out to each other. We were both shivering. When we
tried to speak, our teeth chattered us back into silence. We stood alone,
shut off from the world; all that we could see was a short length of
railroad track, both ends of which were lost in the driving mist. We
stared dumbly at each other, our clasped hands shaking sympathetically.
The Swede's face was blue with the cold, and I know mine must have been.
"Never again what?" I managed to articulate.
Speech strove for utterance in the Swede's throat; then faint and
distant, in a thin whisper from the very bottom of his frozen soul, came
the words:—
"Never again a hobo."
He paused, and, as he went on again, his voice gathered strength and
huskiness as it affirmed his will.
"Never again a hobo. I'm going to get a job. You'd better do the same.
Nights like this make rheumatism."
He wrung my hand.
"Good-by, Bo," said he.
"Good-by, Bo," said I.
The next we were swallowed up from each other by the mist. It was our
final passing. But here's to you, Mr. Swede, wherever you are. I hope you
got that job.
Every once in a while, in newspapers, magazines, and biographical
dictionaries, I run upon sketches of my life, wherein, delicately phrased,
I learn that it was in order to study sociology that I became a tramp.
This is very nice and thoughtful of the biographers, but it is inaccurate.
I became a tramp—well, because of the life that was in me, of the
wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest. Sociology was merely
incidental; it came afterward, in the same manner that a wet skin follows
a ducking. I went on "The Road" because I couldn't keep away from it;
because I hadn't the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was
so made that I couldn't work all my life on "one same shift";
because—well, just because it was easier to than not to.
It happened in my own town, in Oakland, when I was sixteen. At that time I
had attained a dizzy reputation in my chosen circle of adventurers, by
whom I was known as the Prince of the Oyster Pirates. It is true, those
immediately outside my circle, such as honest bay-sailors, longshoremen,
yachtsmen, and the legal owners of the oysters, called me "tough,"
"hoodlum," "smoudge," "thief," "robber," and various other not nice
things—all of which was complimentary and but served to increase the
dizziness of the high place in which I sat. At that time I had not read
"Paradise Lost," and later, when I read Milton's "Better to reign in hell
than serve in heaven," I was fully convinced that great minds run in the
same channels.
It was at this time that the fortuitous concatenation of events sent me
upon my first adventure on The Road. It happened that there was nothing
doing in oysters just then; that at Benicia, forty miles away, I had some
blankets I wanted to get; and that at Port Costa, several miles from
Benicia, a stolen boat lay at anchor in charge of the constable. Now this
boat was owned by a friend of mine, by name Dinny McCrea. It had been
stolen and left at Port Costa by Whiskey Bob, another friend of mine.
(Poor Whiskey Bob! Only last winter his body was picked up on the beach
shot full of holes by nobody knows whom.) I had come down from "up river"
some time before, and reported to Dinny McCrea the whereabouts of his
boat; and Dinny McCrea had promptly offered ten dollars to me if I should
bring it down to Oakland to him.
Time was heavy on my hands. I sat on the dock and talked it over with
Nickey the Greek, another idle oyster pirate. "Let's go," said I, and
Nickey was willing. He was "broke." I possessed fifty cents and a small
skiff. The former I invested and loaded into the latter in the form of
crackers, canned corned beef, and a ten-cent bottle of French mustard. (We
were keen on French mustard in those days.) Then, late in the afternoon,
we hoisted our small spritsail and started. We sailed all night, and next
morning, on the first of a glorious flood-tide, a fair wind behind us, we
came booming up the Carquinez Straits to Port Costa. There lay the stolen
boat, not twenty-five feet from the wharf. We ran alongside and doused our
little spritsail. I sent Nickey forward to lift the anchor, while I began
casting off the gaskets.
A man ran out on the wharf and hailed us. It was the constable. It
suddenly came to me that I had neglected to get a written authorization
from Dinny McCrea to take possession of his boat. Also, I knew that
constable wanted to charge at least twenty-five dollars in fees for
capturing the boat from Whiskey Bob and subsequently taking care of it.
And my last fifty cents had been blown in for corned beef and French
mustard, and the reward was only ten dollars anyway. I shot a glance
forward to Nickey. He had the anchor up-and-down and was straining at it.
"Break her out," I whispered to him, and turned and shouted back to the
constable. The result was that he and I were talking at the same time, our
spoken thoughts colliding in mid-air and making gibberish.
The constable grew more imperative, and perforce I had to listen. Nickey
was heaving on the anchor till I thought he'd burst a blood-vessel. When
the constable got done with his threats and warnings, I asked him who he
was. The time he lost in telling me enabled Nickey to break out the
anchor. I was doing some quick calculating. At the feet of the constable a
ladder ran down the dock to the water, and to the ladder was moored a
skiff. The oars were in it. But it was padlocked. I gambled everything on
that padlock. I felt the breeze on my cheek, saw the surge of the tide,
looked at the remaining gaskets that confined the sail, ran my eyes up the
halyards to the blocks and knew that all was clear, and then threw off all
dissimulation.
"In with her!" I shouted to Nickey, and sprang to the gaskets, casting
them loose and thanking my stars that Whiskey Bob had tied them in
square-knots instead of "grannies."
The constable had slid down the ladder and was fumbling with a key at the
padlock. The anchor came aboard and the last gasket was loosed at the same
instant that the constable freed the skiff and jumped to the oars.
"Peak-halyards!" I commanded my crew, at the same time swinging on to the
throat-halyards. Up came the sail on the run. I belayed and ran aft to the
tiller.
"Stretch her!" I shouted to Nickey at the peak. The constable was just
reaching for our stern. A puff of wind caught us, and we shot away. It was
great. If I'd had a black flag, I know I'd have run it up in triumph. The
constable stood up in the skiff, and paled the glory of the day with the
vividness of his language. Also, he wailed for a gun. You see, that was
another gamble we had taken.
Anyway, we weren't stealing the boat. It wasn't the constable's. We were
merely stealing his fees, which was his particular form of graft. And we
weren't stealing the fees for ourselves, either; we were stealing them for
my friend, Dinny McCrea.
Benicia was made in a few minutes, and a few minutes later my blankets
were aboard. I shifted the boat down to the far end of Steamboat Wharf,
from which point of vantage we could see anybody coming after us. There
was no telling. Maybe the Port Costa constable would telephone to the
Benicia constable. Nickey and I held a council of war. We lay on deck in
the warm sun, the fresh breeze on our cheeks, the flood-tide rippling and
swirling past. It was impossible to start back to Oakland till afternoon,
when the ebb would begin to run. But we figured that the constable would
have an eye out on the Carquinez Straits when the ebb started, and that
nothing remained for us but to wait for the following ebb, at two o'clock
next morning, when we could slip by Cerberus in the darkness.
So we lay on deck, smoked cigarettes, and were glad that we were alive. I
spat over the side and gauged the speed of the current.
"With this wind, we could run this flood clear to Rio Vista," I said.
"And it's fruit-time on the river," said Nickey.
"And low water on the river," said I. "It's the best time of the year to
make Sacramento."
We sat up and looked at each other. The glorious west wind was pouring
over us like wine. We both spat over the side and gauged the current. Now
I contend that it was all the fault of that flood-tide and fair wind. They
appealed to our sailor instinct. If it had not been for them, the whole
chain of events that was to put me upon The Road would have broken down.
We said no word, but cast off our moorings and hoisted sail. Our
adventures up the Sacramento River are no part of this narrative. We
subsequently made the city of Sacramento and tied up at a wharf. The water
was fine, and we spent most of our time in swimming. On the sand-bar above
the railroad bridge we fell in with a bunch of boys likewise in swimming.
Between swims we lay on the bank and talked. They talked differently from
the fellows I had been used to herding with. It was a new vernacular. They
were road-kids, and with every word they uttered the lure of The Road laid
hold of me more imperiously.
"When I was down in Alabama," one kid would begin; or, another, "Coming up
on the C. & A. from K.C."; whereat, a third kid, "On the C. & A. there
ain't no steps to the 'blinds.'" And I would lie silently in the sand and
listen. "It was at a little town in Ohio on the Lake Shore and Michigan
Southern," a kid would start; and another, "Ever ride the Cannonball on
the Wabash?"; and yet another, "Nope, but I've been on the White Mail out
of Chicago." "Talk about railroadin'—wait till you hit the Pennsylvania,
four tracks, no water tanks, take water on the fly, that's goin' some."
"The Northern Pacific's a bad road now." "Salinas is on the 'hog,' the
'bulls' is 'horstile.'" "I got 'pinched' at El Paso, along with Moke Kid."
"Talkin' of 'poke-outs,' wait till you hit the French country out of
Montreal—not a word of English—you say, 'Mongee, Madame, mongee, no
spika da French,' an' rub your stomach an' look hungry, an' she gives you
a slice of sow-belly an' a chunk of dry 'punk.'"
And I continued to lie in the sand and listen. These wanderers made my
oyster-piracy look like thirty cents. A new world was calling to me in
every word that was spoken—a world of rods and gunnels, blind baggages
and "side-door Pullmans," "bulls" and "shacks," "floppings" and
"chewin's," "pinches" and "get-aways," "strong arms" and "bindle-stiffs,"
"punks" and "profesh." And it all spelled Adventure. Very well; I would
tackle this new world. I "lined" myself up alongside those road-kids. I
was just as strong as any of them, just as quick, just as nervy, and my
brain was just as good.
After the swim, as evening came on, they dressed and went up town. I went
along. The kids began "battering" the "main-stem" for "light pieces," or,
in other words, begging for money on the main street. I had never begged
in my life, and this was the hardest thing for me to stomach when I first
went on The Road. I had absurd notions about begging. My philosophy, up to
that time, was that it was finer to steal than to beg; and that robbery
was finer still because the risk and the penalty were proportionately
greater. As an oyster pirate I had already earned convictions at the hands
of justice, which, if I had tried to serve them, would have required a
thousand years in state's prison. To rob was manly; to beg was sordid and
despicable. But I developed in the days to come all right, all right, till
I came to look upon begging as a joyous prank, a game of wits, a
nerve-exerciser.
That first night, however, I couldn't rise to it; and the result was that
when the kids were ready to go to a restaurant and eat, I wasn't. I was
broke. Meeny Kid, I think it was, gave me the price, and we all ate
together. But while I ate, I meditated. The receiver, it was said, was as
bad as the thief; Meeny Kid had done the begging, and I was profiting by
it. I decided that the receiver was a whole lot worse than the thief, and
that it shouldn't happen again. And it didn't. I turned out next day and
threw my feet as well as the next one.
Nickey the Greek's ambition didn't run to The Road. He was not a success
at throwing his feet, and he stowed away one night on a barge and went
down river to San Francisco. I met him, only a week ago, at a pugilistic
carnival. He has progressed. He sat in a place of honor at the ring-side.
He is now a manager of prize-fighters and proud of it. In fact, in a small
way, in local sportdom, he is quite a shining light.
"No kid is a road-kid until he has gone over 'the hill'"—such was the law
of The Road I heard expounded in Sacramento. All right, I'd go over the
hill and matriculate. "The hill," by the way, was the Sierra Nevadas. The
whole gang was going over the hill on a jaunt, and of course I'd go along.
It was French Kid's first adventure on The Road. He had just run away from
his people in San Francisco. It was up to him and me to deliver the goods.
In passing, I may remark that my old title of "Prince" had vanished. I had
received my "monica." I was now "Sailor Kid," later to be known as
"'Frisco Kid," when I had put the Rockies between me and my native state.
At 10.20 P.M. the Central Pacific overland pulled out of the depot at
Sacramento for the East—that particular item of time-table is indelibly
engraved on my memory. There were about a dozen in our gang, and we strung
out in the darkness ahead of the train ready to take her out. All the
local road-kids that we knew came down to see us off—also, to "ditch" us
if they could. That was their idea of a joke, and there were only about
forty of them to carry it out. Their ring-leader was a crackerjack
road-kid named Bob. Sacramento was his home town, but he'd hit The Road
pretty well everywhere over the whole country. He took French Kid and me
aside and gave us advice something like this: "We're goin' to try an'
ditch your bunch, see? Youse two are weak. The rest of the push can take
care of itself. So, as soon as youse two nail a blind, deck her. An' stay
on the decks till youse pass Roseville Junction, at which burg the
constables are horstile, sloughin' in everybody on sight."
The engine whistled and the overland pulled out. There were three blinds
on her—room for all of us. The dozen of us who were trying to make her
out would have preferred to slip aboard quietly; but our forty friends
crowded on with the most amazing and shameless publicity and
advertisement. Following Bob's advice, I immediately "decked her," that
is, climbed up on top of the roof of one of the mail-cars. There I lay
down, my heart jumping a few extra beats, and listened to the fun. The
whole train crew was forward, and the ditching went on fast and furious.
After the train had run half a mile, it stopped, and the crew came forward
again and ditched the survivors. I, alone, had made the train out.
Back at the depot, about him two or three of the push that had witnessed
the accident, lay French Kid with both legs off. French Kid had slipped or
stumbled—that was all, and the wheels had done the rest. Such was my
initiation to The Road. It was two years afterward when I next saw French
Kid and examined his "stumps." This was an act of courtesy. "Cripples"
always like to have their stumps examined. One of the entertaining sights
on The Road is to witness the meeting of two cripples. Their common
disability is a fruitful source of conversation; and they tell how it
happened, describe what they know of the amputation, pass critical
judgment on their own and each other's surgeons, and wind up by
withdrawing to one side, taking off bandages and wrappings, and comparing
stumps.
But it was not until several days later, over in Nevada, when the push
caught up with me, that I learned of French Kid's accident. The push
itself arrived in bad condition. It had gone through a train-wreck in the
snow-sheds; Happy Joe was on crutches with two mashed legs, and the rest
were nursing skins and bruises.
In the meantime, I lay on the roof of the mail-car, trying to remember
whether Roseville Junction, against which burg Bob had warned me, was the
first stop or the second stop. To make sure, I delayed descending to the
platform of the blind until after the second stop. And then I didn't
descend. I was new to the game, and I felt safer where I was. But I never
told the push that I held down the decks the whole night, clear across the
Sierras, through snow-sheds and tunnels, and down to Truckee on the other
side, where I arrived at seven in the morning. Such a thing was
disgraceful, and I'd have been a common laughing-stock. This is the first
time I have confessed the truth about that first ride over the hill. As
for the push, it decided that I was all right, and when I came back over
the hill to Sacramento, I was a full-fledged road-kid.
Yet I had much to learn. Bob was my mentor, and he was all right. I
remember one evening (it was fair-time in Sacramento, and we were knocking
about and having a good time) when I lost my hat in a fight. There was I
bare-headed in the street, and it was Bob to the rescue. He took me to one
side from the push and told me what to do. I was a bit timid of his
advice. I had just come out of jail, where I had been three days, and I
knew that if the police "pinched" me again, I'd get good and "soaked." On
the other hand, I couldn't show the white feather. I'd been over the hill,
I was running full-fledged with the push, and it was up to me to deliver
the goods. So I accepted Bob's advice, and he came along with me to see
that I did it up brown.
We took our position on K Street, on the corner, I think, of Fifth. It was
early in the evening and the street was crowded. Bob studied the head-gear
of every Chinaman that passed. I used to wonder how the road-kids all
managed to wear "five-dollar Stetson stiff-rims," and now I knew. They got
them, the way I was going to get mine, from the Chinese. I was
nervous—there were so many people about; but Bob was cool as an iceberg.
Several times, when I started forward toward a Chinaman, all nerved and
keyed up, Bob dragged me back. He wanted me to get a good hat, and one
that fitted. Now a hat came by that was the right size but not new; and,
after a dozen impossible hats, along would come one that was new but not
the right size. And when one did come by that was new and the right size,
the rim was too large or not large enough. My, Bob was finicky. I was so
wrought up that I'd have snatched any kind of a head-covering.
At last came the hat, the one hat in Sacramento for me. I knew it was a
winner as soon as I looked at it. I glanced at Bob. He sent a sweeping
look-about for police, then nodded his head. I lifted the hat from the
Chinaman's head and pulled it down on my own. It was a perfect fit. Then I
started. I heard Bob crying out, and I caught a glimpse of him blocking
the irate Mongolian and tripping him up. I ran on. I turned up the next
corner, and around the next. This street was not so crowded as K, and I
walked along in quietude, catching my breath and congratulating myself
upon my hat and my get-away.
And then, suddenly, around the corner at my back, came the bare-headed
Chinaman. With him were a couple more Chinamen, and at their heels were
half a dozen men and boys. I sprinted to the next corner, crossed the
street, and rounded the following corner. I decided that I had surely
played him out, and I dropped into a walk again. But around the corner at
my heels came that persistent Mongolian. It was the old story of the hare
and the tortoise. He could not run so fast as I, but he stayed with it,
plodding along at a shambling and deceptive trot, and wasting much good
breath in noisy imprecations. He called all Sacramento to witness the
dishonor that had been done him, and a goodly portion of Sacramento heard
and flocked at his heels. And I ran on like the hare, and ever that
persistent Mongolian, with the increasing rabble, overhauled me. But
finally, when a policeman had joined his following, I let out all my
links. I twisted and turned, and I swear I ran at least twenty blocks on
the straight away. And I never saw that Chinaman again. The hat was a
dandy, a brand-new Stetson, just out of the shop, and it was the envy of
the whole push. Furthermore, it was the symbol that I had delivered the
goods. I wore it for over a year.
Road-kids are nice little chaps—when you get them alone and they are
telling you "how it happened"; but take my word for it, watch out for them
when they run in pack. Then they are wolves, and like wolves they are
capable of dragging down the strongest man. At such times they are not
cowardly. They will fling themselves upon a man and hold on with every
ounce of strength in their wiry bodies, till he is thrown and helpless.
More than once have I seen them do it, and I know whereof I speak. Their
motive is usually robbery. And watch out for the "strong arm." Every kid
in the push I travelled with was expert at it. Even French Kid mastered it
before he lost his legs.
I have strong upon me now a vision of what I once saw in "The Willows."
The Willows was a clump of trees in a waste piece of land near the railway
depot and not more than five minutes walk from the heart of Sacramento.
It is night-time and the scene is illumined by the thin light of stars. I
see a husky laborer in the midst of a pack of road-kids. He is infuriated
and cursing them, not a bit afraid, confident of his own strength. He
weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds, and his muscles are hard; but
he doesn't know what he is up against. The kids are snarling. It is not
pretty. They make a rush from all sides, and he lashes out and whirls.
Barber Kid is standing beside me. As the man whirls, Barber Kid leaps
forward and does the trick. Into the man's back goes his knee; around the
man's neck, from behind, passes his right hand, the bone of the wrist
pressing against the jugular vein. Barber Kid throws his whole weight
backward. It is a powerful leverage. Besides, the man's wind has been shut
off. It is the strong arm.
The man resists, but he is already practically helpless. The road-kids are
upon him from every side, clinging to arms and legs and body, and like a
wolf at the throat of a moose Barber Kid hangs on and drags backward. Over
the man goes, and down under the heap. Barber Kid changes the position of
his own body, but never lets go. While some of the kids are "going
through" the victim, others are holding his legs so that he cannot kick
and thresh about. They improve the opportunity by taking off the man's
shoes. As for him, he has given in. He is beaten. Also, what of the strong
arm at his throat, he is short of wind. He is making ugly choking noises,
and the kids hurry. They really don't want to kill him. All is done. At a
word all holds are released at once, and the kids scatter, one of them
lugging the shoes—he knows where he can get half a dollar for them. The
man sits up and looks about him, dazed and helpless. Even if he wanted to,
barefooted pursuit in the darkness would be hopeless. I linger a moment
and watch him. He is feeling at his throat, making dry, hawking noises,
and jerking his head in a quaint way as though to assure himself that the
neck is not dislocated. Then I slip away to join the push, and see that
man no more—though I shall always see him, sitting there in the
starlight, somewhat dazed, a bit frightened, greatly dishevelled, and
making quaint jerking movements of head and neck.
Drunken men are the especial prey of the road-kids. Robbing a drunken man
they call "rolling a stiff"; and wherever they are, they are on the
constant lookout for drunks. The drunk is their particular meat, as the
fly is the particular meat of the spider. The rolling of a stiff is
ofttimes an amusing sight, especially when the stiff is helpless and when
interference is unlikely. At the first swoop the stiff's money and
jewellery go. Then the kids sit around their victim in a sort of pow-wow.
A kid generates a fancy for the stiff's necktie. Off it comes. Another kid
is after underclothes. Off they come, and a knife quickly abbreviates arms
and legs. Friendly hoboes may be called in to take the coat and trousers,
which are too large for the kids. And in the end they depart, leaving
beside the stiff the heap of their discarded rags.
Another vision comes to me. It is a dark night. My push is coming along
the sidewalk in the suburbs. Ahead of us, under an electric light, a man
crosses the street diagonally. There is something tentative and desultory
in his walk. The kids scent the game on the instant. The man is drunk. He
blunders across the opposite sidewalk and is lost in the darkness as he
takes a short-cut through a vacant lot. No hunting cry is raised, but the
pack flings itself forward in quick pursuit. In the middle of the vacant
lot it comes upon him. But what is this?—snarling and strange forms,
small and dim and menacing, are between the pack and its prey. It is
another pack of road-kids, and in the hostile pause we learn that it is
their meat, that they have been trailing it a dozen blocks and more and
that we are butting in. But it is the world primeval. These wolves are
baby wolves. (As a matter of fact, I don't think one of them was over
twelve or thirteen years of age. I met some of them afterward, and learned
that they had just arrived that day over the hill, and that they hailed
from Denver and Salt Lake City.) Our pack flings forward. The baby wolves
squeal and screech and fight like little demons. All about the drunken man
rages the struggle for the possession of him. Down he goes in the thick of
it, and the combat rages over his body after the fashion of the Greeks and
Trojans over the body and armor of a fallen hero. Amid cries and tears and
wailings the baby wolves are dispossessed, and my pack rolls the stiff.
But always I remember the poor stiff and his befuddled amazement at the
abrupt eruption of battle in the vacant lot. I see him now, dim in the
darkness, titubating in stupid wonder, good-naturedly essaying the role of
peacemaker in that multitudinous scrap the significance of which he did
not understand, and the really hurt expression on his face when he,
unoffending he, was clutched at by many hands and dragged down in the
thick of the press.
"Bindle-stiffs" are favorite prey of the road-kids. A bindle-stiff is a
working tramp. He takes his name from the roll of blankets he carries,
which is known as a "bindle." Because he does work, a bindle-stiff is
expected usually to have some small change about him, and it is after that
small change that the road-kids go. The best hunting-ground for
bindle-stiffs is in the sheds, barns, lumber-yards, railroad-yards, etc.,
on the edges of a city, and the time for hunting is the night, when the
bindle-stiff seeks these places to roll up in his blankets and sleep.
"Gay-cats" also come to grief at the hands of the road-kid. In more
familiar parlance, gay-cats are short-horns, chechaquos, new chums, or
tenderfeet. A gay-cat is a newcomer on The Road who is man-grown, or, at
least, youth-grown. A boy on The Road, on the other hand, no matter how
green he is, is never a gay-cat; he is a road-kid or a "punk," and if he
travels with a "profesh," he is known possessively as a "prushun." I was
never a prushun, for I did not take kindly to possession. I was first a
road-kid and then a profesh. Because I started in young, I practically
skipped my gay-cat apprenticeship. For a short period, during the time I
was exchanging my 'Frisco Kid monica for that of Sailor Jack, I labored
under the suspicion of being a gay-cat. But closer acquaintance on the
part of those that suspected me quickly disabused their minds, and in a
short time I acquired the unmistakable airs and ear-marks of the
blowed-in-the-glass profesh. And be it known, here and now, that the
profesh are the aristocracy of The Road. They are the lords and masters,
the aggressive men, the primordial noblemen, the blond beasts so beloved
of Nietzsche.
When I came back over the hill from Nevada, I found that some river pirate
had stolen Dinny McCrea's boat. (A funny thing at this day is that I
cannot remember what became of the skiff in which Nickey the Greek and I
sailed from Oakland to Port Costa. I know that the constable didn't get
it, and I know that it didn't go with us up the Sacramento River, and that
is all I do know.) With the loss of Dinny McCrea's boat, I was pledged to
The Road; and when I grew tired of Sacramento, I said good-by to the push
(which, in its friendly way, tried to ditch me from a freight as I left
town) and started on a passear down the valley of the San Joaquin. The
Road had gripped me and would not let me go; and later, when I had voyaged
to sea and done one thing and another, I returned to The Road to make
longer flights, to be a "comet" and a profesh, and to plump into the bath
of sociology that wet me to the skin.
A "stiff" is a tramp. It was once my fortune to travel a few weeks with a
"push" that numbered two thousand. This was known as "Kelly's Army."
Across the wild and woolly West, clear from California, General Kelly and
his heroes had captured trains; but they fell down when they crossed the
Missouri and went up against the effete East. The East hadn't the
slightest intention of giving free transportation to two thousand hoboes.
Kelly's Army lay helplessly for some time at Council Bluffs. The day I
joined it, made desperate by delay, it marched out to capture a train.
It was quite an imposing sight. General Kelly sat a magnificent black
charger, and with waving banners, to the martial music of fife and drum
corps, company by company, in two divisions, his two thousand stiffs
countermarched before him and hit the wagon-road to the little burg of
Weston, seven miles away. Being the latest recruit, I was in the last
company, of the last regiment, of the Second Division, and, furthermore,
in the last rank of the rear-guard. The army went into camp at Weston
beside the railroad track—beside the tracks, rather, for two roads went
through: the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, and the Rock Island.
Our intention was to take the first train out, but the railroad officials
"coppered" our play—and won. There was no first train. They tied up the
two lines and stopped running trains. In the meantime, while we lay by the
dead tracks, the good people of Omaha and Council Bluffs were bestirring
themselves. Preparations were making to form a mob, capture a train in
Council Bluffs, run it down to us, and make us a present of it. The
railroad officials coppered that play, too. They didn't wait for the mob.
Early in the morning of the second day, an engine, with a single private
car attached, arrived at the station and side-tracked. At this sign that
life had renewed in the dead roads, the whole army lined up beside the
track.
But never did life renew so monstrously on a dead railroad as it did on
those two roads. From the west came the whistle of a locomotive. It was
coming in our direction, bound east. We were bound east. A stir of
preparation ran down our ranks. The whistle tooted fast and furiously, and
the train thundered at top speed. The hobo didn't live that could have
boarded it. Another locomotive whistled, and another train came through at
top speed, and another, and another, train after train, train after train,
till toward the last the trains were composed of passenger coaches,
box-cars, flat-cars, dead engines, cabooses, mail-cars, wrecking
appliances, and all the riff-raff of worn-out and abandoned rolling-stock
that collects in the yards of great railways. When the yards at Council
Bluffs had been completely cleaned, the private car and engine went east,
and the tracks died for keeps.
That day went by, and the next, and nothing moved, and in the meantime,
pelted by sleet, and rain, and hail, the two thousand hoboes lay beside
the track. But that night the good people of Council Bluffs went the
railroad officials one better. A mob formed in Council Bluffs, crossed the
river to Omaha, and there joined with another mob in a raid on the Union
Pacific yards. First they captured an engine, next they knocked a train
together, and then the united mobs piled aboard, crossed the Missouri, and
ran down the Rock Island right of way to turn the train over to us. The
railway officials tried to copper this play, but fell down, to the mortal
terror of the section boss and one member of the section gang at Weston.
This pair, under secret telegraphic orders, tried to wreck our train-load
of sympathizers by tearing up the track. It happened that we were
suspicious and had our patrols out. Caught red-handed at train-wrecking,
and surrounded by twenty hundred infuriated hoboes, that section-gang boss
and assistant prepared to meet death. I don't remember what saved them,
unless it was the arrival of the train.
It was our turn to fall down, and we did, hard. In their haste, the two
mobs had neglected to make up a sufficiently long train. There wasn't room
for two thousand hoboes to ride. So the mobs and the hoboes had a
talkfest, fraternized, sang songs, and parted, the mobs going back on
their captured train to Omaha, the hoboes pulling out next morning on a
hundred-and-forty-mile march to Des Moines. It was not until Kelly's Army
crossed the Missouri that it began to walk, and after that it never rode
again. It cost the railroads slathers of money, but they were acting on
principle, and they won.
Underwood, Leola, Menden, Avoca, Walnut, Marno, Atlantic, Wyoto, Anita,
Adair, Adam, Casey, Stuart, Dexter, Carlham, De Soto, Van Meter,
Booneville, Commerce, Valley Junction—how the names of the towns come
back to me as I con the map and trace our route through the fat Iowa
country! And the hospitable Iowa farmer-folk! They turned out with their
wagons and carried our baggage; gave us hot lunches at noon by the
wayside; mayors of comfortable little towns made speeches of welcome and
hastened us on our way; deputations of little girls and maidens came out
to meet us, and the good citizens turned out by hundreds, locked arms, and
marched with us down their main streets. It was circus day when we came to
town, and every day was circus day, for there were many towns.
In the evenings our camps were invaded by whole populations. Every company
had its campfire, and around each fire something was doing. The cooks in
my company, Company L, were song-and-dance artists and contributed most of
our entertainment. In another part of the encampment the glee club would
be singing—one of its star voices was the "Dentist," drawn from Company
L, and we were mighty proud of him. Also, he pulled teeth for the whole
army, and, since the extractions usually occurred at meal-time, our
digestions were stimulated by variety of incident. The Dentist had no
anæsthetics, but two or three of us were always on tap to volunteer to
hold down the patient. In addition to the stunts of the companies and the
glee club, church services were usually held, local preachers officiating,
and always there was a great making of political speeches. All these
things ran neck and neck; it was a full-blown Midway. A lot of talent can
be dug out of two thousand hoboes. I remember we had a picked baseball
nine, and on Sundays we made a practice of putting it all over the local
nines. Sometimes we did it twice on Sundays.
Last year, while on a lecturing trip, I rode into Des Moines in a
Pullman—I don't mean a "side-door Pullman," but the real thing. On the
outskirts of the city I saw the old stove-works, and my heart leaped. It
was there, at the stove-works, a dozen years before, that the Army lay
down and swore a mighty oath that its feet were sore and that it would
walk no more. We took possession of the stove-works and told Des Moines
that we had come to stay—that we'd walked in, but we'd be blessed if we'd
walk out. Des Moines was hospitable, but this was too much of a good
thing. Do a little mental arithmetic, gentle reader. Two thousand hoboes,
eating three square meals, make six thousand meals per day, forty-two
thousand meals per week, or one hundred and sixty-eight thousand meals per
shortest month in the calendar. That's going some. We had no money. It was
up to Des Moines.
Des Moines was desperate. We lay in camp, made political speeches, held
sacred concerts, pulled teeth, played baseball and seven-up, and ate our
six thousand meals per day, and Des Moines paid for it. Des Moines pleaded
with the railroads, but they were obdurate; they had said we shouldn't
ride, and that settled it. To permit us to ride would be to establish a
precedent, and there weren't going to be any precedents. And still we went
on eating. That was the terrifying factor in the situation. We were bound
for Washington, and Des Moines would have had to float municipal bonds to
pay all our railroad fares, even at special rates, and if we remained much
longer, she'd have to float bonds anyway to feed us.
Then some local genius solved the problem. We wouldn't walk. Very good. We
should ride. From Des Moines to Keokuk on the Mississippi flowed the Des
Moines River. This particular stretch of river was three hundred miles
long. We could ride on it, said the local genius; and, once equipped with
floating stock, we could ride on down the Mississippi to the Ohio, and
thence up the Ohio, winding up with a short portage over the mountains to
Washington.
Des Moines took up a subscription. Public-spirited citizens contributed
several thousand dollars. Lumber, rope, nails, and cotton for calking were
bought in large quantities, and on the banks of the Des Moines was
inaugurated a tremendous era of shipbuilding. Now the Des Moines is a
picayune stream, unduly dignified by the appellation of "river." In our
spacious western land it would be called a "creek." The oldest inhabitants
shook their heads and said we couldn't make it, that there wasn't enough
water to float us. Des Moines didn't care, so long as it got rid of us,
and we were such well-fed optimists that we didn't care either.
On Wednesday, May 9, 1894, we got under way and started on our colossal
picnic. Des Moines had got off pretty easily, and she certainly owes a
statue in bronze to the local genius who got her out of her difficulty.
True, Des Moines had to pay for our boats; we had eaten sixty-six thousand
meals at the stove-works; and we took twelve thousand additional meals
along with us in our commissary—as a precaution against famine in the
wilds; but then, think what it would have meant if we had remained at Des
Moines eleven months instead of eleven days. Also, when we departed, we
promised Des Moines we'd come back if the river failed to float us.
It was all very well having twelve thousand meals in the commissary, and
no doubt the commissary "ducks" enjoyed them; for the commissary promptly
got lost, and my boat, for one, never saw it again. The company formation
was hopelessly broken up during the river-trip. In any camp of men there
will always be found a certain percentage of shirks, of helpless, of just
ordinary, and of hustlers. There were ten men in my boat, and they were
the cream of Company L. Every man was a hustler. For two reasons I was
included in the ten. First, I was as good a hustler as ever "threw his
feet," and next, I was "Sailor Jack." I understood boats and boating. The
ten of us forgot the remaining forty men of Company L, and by the time we
had missed one meal we promptly forgot the commissary. We were
independent. We went down the river "on our own," hustling our "chewin's,"
beating every boat in the fleet, and, alas that I must say it, sometimes
taking possession of the stores the farmer-folk had collected for the
Army.
For a good part of the three hundred miles we were from half a day to a
day or so in advance of the Army. We had managed to get hold of several
American flags. When we approached a small town, or when we saw a group of
farmers gathered on the bank, we ran up our flags, called ourselves the
"advance boat," and demanded to know what provisions had been collected
for the Army. We represented the Army, of course, and the provisions were
turned over to us. But there wasn't anything small about us. We never
took more than we could get away with. But we did take the cream of
everything. For instance, if some philanthropic farmer had donated several
dollars' worth of tobacco, we took it. So, also, we took butter and sugar,
coffee and canned goods; but when the stores consisted of sacks of beans
and flour, or two or three slaughtered steers, we resolutely refrained and
went our way, leaving orders to turn such provisions over to the
commissary boats whose business was to follow behind us.
My, but the ten of us did live on the fat of the land! For a long time
General Kelly vainly tried to head us off. He sent two rowers, in a light,
round-bottomed boat, to overtake us and put a stop to our piratical
careers. They overtook us all right, but they were two and we were ten.
They were empowered by General Kelly to make us prisoners, and they told
us so. When we expressed disinclination to become prisoners, they hurried
ahead to the next town to invoke the aid of the authorities. We went
ashore immediately and cooked an early supper; and under the cloak of
darkness we ran by the town and its authorities.
I kept a diary on part of the trip, and as I read it over now I note one
persistently recurring phrase, namely, "Living fine." We did live fine. We
even disdained to use coffee boiled in water. We made our coffee out of
milk, calling the wonderful beverage, if I remember rightly, "pale
Vienna."
While we were ahead, skimming the cream, and while the commissary was lost
far behind, the main Army, coming along in the middle, starved. This was
hard on the Army, I'll allow; but then, the ten of us were individualists.
We had initiative and enterprise. We ardently believed that the grub was
to the man who got there first, the pale Vienna to the strong. On one
stretch the Army went forty-eight hours without grub; and then it arrived
at a small village of some three hundred inhabitants, the name of which I
do not remember, though I think it was Red Rock. This town, following the
practice of all towns through which the Army passed, had appointed a
committee of safety. Counting five to a family, Red Rock consisted of
sixty households. Her committee of safety was scared stiff by the eruption
of two thousand hungry hoboes who lined their boats two and three deep
along the river bank. General Kelly was a fair man. He had no intention
of working a hardship on the village. He did not expect sixty households
to furnish two thousand meals. Besides, the Army had its treasure-chest.
But the committee of safety lost its head. "No encouragement to the
invader" was its programme, and when General Kelly wanted to buy food, the
committee turned him down. It had nothing to sell; General Kelly's money
was "no good" in their burg. And then General Kelly went into action. The
bugles blew. The Army left the boats and on top of the bank formed in
battle array. The committee was there to see. General Kelly's speech was
brief.
"Boys," he said, "when did you eat last?"
"Day before yesterday," they shouted.
"Are you hungry?"
A mighty affirmation from two thousand throats shook the atmosphere. Then
General Kelly turned to the committee of safety:—
"You see, gentlemen, the situation. My men have eaten nothing in
forty-eight hours. If I turn them loose upon your town, I'll not be
responsible for what happens. They are desperate. I offered to buy food
for them, but you refused to sell. I now withdraw my offer. Instead, I
shall demand. I give you five minutes to decide. Either kill me six steers
and give me four thousand rations, or I turn the men loose. Five minutes,
gentlemen."
The terrified committee of safety looked at the two thousand hungry hoboes
and collapsed. It didn't wait the five minutes. It wasn't going to take
any chances. The killing of the steers and the collecting of the
requisition began forthwith, and the Army dined.
And still the ten graceless individualists soared along ahead and gathered
in everything in sight. But General Kelly fixed us. He sent horsemen down
each bank, warning farmers and townspeople against us. They did their work
thoroughly, all right. The erstwhile hospitable farmers met us with the
icy mit. Also, they summoned the constables when we tied up to the bank,
and loosed the dogs. I know. Two of the latter caught me with a
barbed-wire fence between me and the river. I was carrying two buckets of
milk for the pale Vienna. I didn't damage the fence any; but we drank
plebian coffee boiled with vulgar water, and it was up to me to throw my
feet for another pair of trousers. I wonder, gentle reader, if you ever
essayed hastily to climb a barbed-wire fence with a bucket of milk in each
hand. Ever since that day I have had a prejudice against barbed wire, and
I have gathered statistics on the subject.
Unable to make an honest living so long as General Kelly kept his two
horsemen ahead of us, we returned to the Army and raised a revolution. It
was a small affair, but it devastated Company L of the Second Division.
The captain of Company L refused to recognize us; said we were deserters,
and traitors, and scalawags; and when he drew rations for Company L from
the commissary, he wouldn't give us any. That captain didn't appreciate
us, or he wouldn't have refused us grub. Promptly we intrigued with the
first lieutenant. He joined us with the ten men in his boat, and in return
we elected him captain of Company M. The captain of Company L raised a
roar. Down upon us came General Kelly, Colonel Speed, and Colonel Baker.
The twenty of us stood firm, and our revolution was ratified.
But we never bothered with the commissary. Our hustlers drew better
rations from the farmers. Our new captain, however, doubted us. He never
knew when he'd see the ten of us again, once we got under way in the
morning, so he called in a blacksmith to clinch his captaincy. In the
stern of our boat, one on each side, were driven two heavy eye-bolts of
iron. Correspondingly, on the bow of his boat, were fastened two huge iron
hooks. The boats were brought together, end on, the hooks dropped into the
eye-bolts, and there we were, hard and fast. We couldn't lose that
captain. But we were irrepressible. Out of our very manacles we wrought an
invincible device that enabled us to put it all over every other boat in
the fleet.
Like all great inventions, this one of ours was accidental. We discovered
it the first time we ran on a snag in a bit of a rapid. The head-boat hung
up and anchored, and the tail-boat swung around in the current, pivoting
the head-boat on the snag. I was at the stern of the tail-boat, steering.
In vain we tried to shove off. Then I ordered the men from the head-boat
into the tail-boat. Immediately the head-boat floated clear, and its men
returned into it. After that, snags, reefs, shoals, and bars had no
terrors for us. The instant the head-boat struck, the men in it leaped
into the tail-boat. Of course, the head-boat floated over the obstruction
and the tail-boat then struck. Like automatons, the twenty men now in the
tail-boat leaped into the head-boat, and the tail-boat floated past.
The boats used by the Army were all alike, made by the mile and sawed off.
They were flat-boats, and their lines were rectangles. Each boat was six
feet wide, ten feet long, and a foot and a half deep. Thus, when our two
boats were hooked together, I sat at the stern steering a craft twenty
feet long, containing twenty husky hoboes who "spelled" each other at the
oars and paddles, and loaded with blankets, cooking outfit, and our own
private commissary.
Still we caused General Kelly trouble. He had called in his horsemen, and
substituted three police-boats that travelled in the van and allowed no
boats to pass them. The craft containing Company M crowded the
police-boats hard. We could have passed them easily, but it was against
the rules. So we kept a respectful distance astern and waited. Ahead we
knew was virgin farming country, unbegged and generous; but we waited.
White water was all we needed, and when we rounded a bend and a rapid
showed up we knew what would happen. Smash! Police-boat number one goes on
a boulder and hangs up. Bang! Police-boat number two follows suit. Whop!
Police-boat number three encounters the common fate of all. Of course our
boat does the same things; but one, two, the men are out of the head-boat
and into the tail-boat; one, two, they are out of the tail-boat and into
the head-boat; and one, two, the men who belong in the tail-boat are back
in it and we are dashing on. "Stop! you blankety-blank-blanks!" shriek the
police-boats. "How can we?—blank the blankety-blank river, anyway!" we
wail plaintively as we surge past, caught in that remorseless current that
sweeps us on out of sight and into the hospitable farmer-country that
replenishes our private commissary with the cream of its contributions.
Again we drink pale Vienna and realize that the grub is to the man who
gets there.
Poor General Kelly! He devised another scheme. The whole fleet started
ahead of us. Company M of the Second Division started in its proper place
in the line, which was last. And it took us only one day to put the
"kibosh" on that particular scheme. Twenty-five miles of bad water lay
before us—all rapids, shoals, bars, and boulders. It was over that
stretch of water that the oldest inhabitants of Des Moines had shaken
their heads. Nearly two hundred boats entered the bad water ahead of us,
and they piled up in the most astounding manner. We went through that
stranded fleet like hemlock through the fire. There was no avoiding the
boulders, bars, and snags except by getting out on the bank. We didn't
avoid them. We went right over them, one, two, one, two, head-boat,
tail-boat, head-boat, tail-boat, all hands back and forth and back again.
We camped that night alone, and loafed in camp all of next day while the
Army patched and repaired its wrecked boats and straggled up to us.
There was no stopping our cussedness. We rigged up a mast, piled on the
canvas (blankets), and travelled short hours while the Army worked
over-time to keep us in sight. Then General Kelly had recourse to
diplomacy. No boat could touch us in the straight-away. Without
discussion, we were the hottest bunch that ever came down the Des Moines.
The ban of the police-boats was lifted. Colonel Speed was put aboard, and
with this distinguished officer we had the honor of arriving first at
Keokuk on the Mississippi. And right here I want to say to General Kelly
and Colonel Speed that here's my hand. You were heroes, both of you, and
you were men. And I'm sorry for at least ten per cent of the trouble that
was given you by the head-boat of Company M.
At Keokuk the whole fleet was lashed together in a huge raft, and, after
being wind-bound a day, a steamboat took us in tow down the Mississippi to
Quincy, Illinois, where we camped across the river on Goose Island. Here
the raft idea was abandoned, the boats being joined together in groups of
four and decked over. Somebody told me that Quincy was the richest town of
its size in the United States. When I heard this, I was immediately
overcome by an irresistible impulse to throw my feet. No
"blowed-in-the-glass profesh" could possibly pass up such a promising
burg. I crossed the river to Quincy in a small dug-out; but I came back
in a large riverboat, down to the gunwales with the results of my thrown
feet. Of course I kept all the money I had collected, though I paid the
boat-hire; also I took my pick of the underwear, socks, cast-off clothes,
shirts, "kicks," and "sky-pieces"; and when Company M had taken all it
wanted there was still a respectable heap that was turned over to Company
L. Alas, I was young and prodigal in those days! I told a thousand
"stories" to the good people of Quincy, and every story was "good"; but
since I have come to write for the magazines I have often regretted the
wealth of story, the fecundity of fiction, I lavished that day in Quincy,
Illinois.
It was at Hannibal, Missouri, that the ten invincibles went to pieces. It
was not planned. We just naturally flew apart. The Boiler-Maker and I
deserted secretly. On the same day Scotty and Davy made a swift sneak for
the Illinois shore; also McAvoy and Fish achieved their get-away. This
accounts for six of the ten; what became of the remaining four I do not
know. As a sample of life on The Road, I make the following quotation from
my diary of the several days following my desertion.
"Friday, May 25th. Boiler-Maker and I left the camp on the island. We went
ashore on the Illinois side in a skiff and walked six miles on the C.B. &
Q. to Fell Creek. We had gone six miles out of our way, but we got on a
hand-car and rode six miles to Hull's, on the Wabash. While there, we met
McAvoy, Fish, Scotty, and Davy, who had also pulled out from the Army.
"Saturday, May 26th. At 2.11 A.M. we caught the Cannonball as she slowed
up at the crossing. Scotty and Davy were ditched. The four of us were
ditched at the Bluffs, forty miles farther on. In the afternoon Fish and
McAvoy caught a freight while Boiler-Maker and I were away getting
something to eat.
"Sunday, May 27th. At 3.21 A.M. we caught the Cannonball and found Scotty
and Davy on the blind. We were all ditched at daylight at Jacksonville.
The C. & A. runs through here, and we're going to take that. Boiler-Maker
went off, but didn't return. Guess he caught a freight.
"Monday, May 28th. Boiler-Maker didn't show up. Scotty and Davy went off
to sleep somewhere, and didn't get back in time to catch the K.C.
passenger at 3.30 A.M. I caught her and rode her till after sunrise to
Masson City, 25,000 inhabitants. Caught a cattle train and rode all night.
"Tuesday, May 29th. Arrived in Chicago at 7 A.M...."
And years afterward, in China, I had the grief of learning that the device
we employed to navigate the rapids of the Des Moines—the one-two-one-two,
head-boat-tail-boat proposition—was not originated by us. I learned that
the Chinese river-boatmen had for thousands of years used a similar device
to negotiate "bad water." It is a good stunt all right, even if we don't
get the credit. It answers Dr. Jordan's test of truth: "Will it work? Will
you trust your life to it?"
If the tramp were suddenly to pass away from the United States, widespread
misery for many families would follow. The tramp enables thousands of men
to earn honest livings, educate their children, and bring them up
God-fearing and industrious. I know. At one time my father was a constable
and hunted tramps for a living. The community paid him so much per head
for all the tramps he could catch, and also, I believe, he got mileage
fees. Ways and means was always a pressing problem in our household, and
the amount of meat on the table, the new pair of shoes, the day's outing,
or the text-book for school, were dependent upon my father's luck in the
chase. Well I remember the suppressed eagerness and the suspense with
which I waited to learn each morning what the results of his past night's
toil had been—how many tramps he had gathered in and what the chances
were for convicting them. And so it was, when later, as a tramp, I
succeeded in eluding some predatory constable, I could not but feel sorry
for the little boys and girls at home in that constable's house; it seemed
to me in a way that I was defrauding those little boys and girls of some
of the good things of life.
But it's all in the game. The hobo defies society, and society's
watch-dogs make a living out of him. Some hoboes like to be caught by the
watch-dogs—especially in winter-time. Of course, such hoboes select
communities where the jails are "good," wherein no work is performed and
the food is substantial. Also, there have been, and most probably still
are, constables who divide their fees with the hoboes they arrest. Such a
constable does not have to hunt. He whistles, and the game comes right up
to his hand. It is surprising, the money that is made out of stone-broke
tramps. All through the South—at least when I was hoboing—are convict
camps and plantations, where the time of convicted hoboes is bought by the
farmers, and where the hoboes simply have to work. Then there are places
like the quarries at Rutland, Vermont, where the hobo is exploited, the
unearned energy in his body, which he has accumulated by "battering on
the drag" or "slamming gates," being extracted for the benefit of that
particular community.
Now I don't know anything about the quarries at Rutland, Vermont. I'm very
glad that I don't, when I remember how near I was to getting into them.
Tramps pass the word along, and I first heard of those quarries when I was
in Indiana. But when I got into New England, I heard of them continually,
and always with danger-signals flying. "They want men in the quarries,"
the passing hoboes said; "and they never give a 'stiff' less than ninety
days." By the time I got into New Hampshire I was pretty well keyed up
over those quarries, and I fought shy of railroad cops, "bulls," and
constables as I never had before.
One evening I went down to the railroad yards at Concord and found a
freight train made up and ready to start. I located an empty box-car, slid
open the side-door, and climbed in. It was my hope to win across to White
River by morning; that would bring me into Vermont and not more than a
thousand miles from Rutland. But after that, as I worked north, the
distance between me and the point of danger would begin to increase. In
the car I found a "gay-cat," who displayed unusual trepidation at my
entrance. He took me for a "shack" (brakeman), and when he learned I was
only a stiff, he began talking about the quarries at Rutland as the cause
of the fright I had given him. He was a young country fellow, and had
beaten his way only over local stretches of road.
The freight got under way, and we lay down in one end of the box-car and
went to sleep. Two or three hours afterward, at a stop, I was awakened by
the noise of the right-hand door being softly slid open. The gay-cat slept
on. I made no movement, though I veiled my eyes with my lashes to a little
slit through which I could see out. A lantern was thrust in through the
doorway, followed by the head of a shack. He discovered us, and looked at
us for a moment. I was prepared for a violent expression on his part, or
the customary "Hit the grit, you son of a toad!" Instead of this he
cautiously withdrew the lantern and very, very softly slid the door to.
This struck me as eminently unusual and suspicious. I listened, and softly
I heard the hasp drop into place. The door was latched on the outside. We
could not open it from the inside. One way of sudden exit from that car
was blocked. It would never do. I waited a few seconds, then crept to the
left-hand door and tried it. It was not yet latched. I opened it, dropped
to the ground, and closed it behind me. Then I passed across the bumpers
to the other side of the train. I opened the door the shack had latched,
climbed in, and closed it behind me. Both exits were available again. The
gay-cat was still asleep.
The train got under way. It came to the next stop. I heard footsteps in
the gravel. Then the left-hand door was thrown open noisily. The gay-cat
awoke, I made believe to awake; and we sat up and stared at the shack and
his lantern. He didn't waste any time getting down to business.
"I want three dollars," he said.
We got on our feet and came nearer to him to confer. We expressed an
absolute and devoted willingness to give him three dollars, but explained
our wretched luck that compelled our desire to remain unsatisfied. The
shack was incredulous. He dickered with us. He would compromise for two
dollars. We regretted our condition of poverty. He said uncomplimentary
things, called us sons of toads, and damned us from hell to breakfast.
Then he threatened. He explained that if we didn't dig up, he'd lock us in
and carry us on to White River and turn us over to the authorities. He
also explained all about the quarries at Rutland.
Now that shack thought he had us dead to rights. Was not he guarding the
one door, and had he not himself latched the opposite door but a few
minutes before? When he began talking about quarries, the frightened
gay-cat started to sidle across to the other door. The shack laughed loud
and long. "Don't be in a hurry," he said; "I locked that door on the
outside at the last stop." So implicitly did he believe the door to be
locked that his words carried conviction. The gay-cat believed and was in
despair.
The shack delivered his ultimatum. Either we should dig up two dollars, or
he would lock us in and turn us over to the constable at White River—and
that meant ninety days and the quarries. Now, gentle reader, just suppose
that the other door had been locked. Behold the precariousness of human
life. For lack of a dollar, I'd have gone to the quarries and served three
months as a convict slave. So would the gay-cat. Count me out, for I was
hopeless; but consider the gay-cat. He might have come out, after those
ninety days, pledged to a life of crime. And later he might have broken
your skull, even your skull, with a blackjack in an endeavor to take
possession of the money on your person—and if not your skull, then some
other poor and unoffending creature's skull.
But the door was unlocked, and I alone knew it. The gay-cat and I begged
for mercy. I joined in the pleading and wailing out of sheer cussedness, I
suppose. But I did my best. I told a "story" that would have melted the
heart of any mug; but it didn't melt the heart of that sordid
money-grasper of a shack. When he became convinced that we didn't have any
money, he slid the door shut and latched it, then lingered a moment on the
chance that we had fooled him and that we would now offer him the two
dollars.
Then it was that I let out a few links. I called him a son of a toad. I
called him all the other things he had called me. And then I called him a
few additional things. I came from the West, where men knew how to swear,
and I wasn't going to let any mangy shack on a measly New England "jerk"
put it over me in vividness and vigor of language. At first the shack
tried to laugh it down. Then he made the mistake of attempting to reply. I
let out a few more links, and I cut him to the raw and therein rubbed
winged and flaming epithets. Nor was my fine frenzy all whim and literary;
I was indignant at this vile creature, who, in default of a dollar, would
consign me to three months of slavery. Furthermore, I had a sneaking idea
that he got a "drag" out of the constable fees.
But I fixed him. I lacerated his feelings and pride several dollars'
worth. He tried to scare me by threatening to come in after me and kick
the stuffing out of me. In return, I promised to kick him in the face
while he was climbing in. The advantage of position was with me, and he
saw it. So he kept the door shut and called for help from the rest of the
train-crew. I could hear them answering and crunching through the gravel
to him. And all the time the other door was unlatched, and they didn't
know it; and in the meantime the gay-cat was ready to die with fear.
Oh, I was a hero—with my line of retreat straight behind me. I slanged
the shack and his mates till they threw the door open and I could see
their infuriated faces in the shine of the lanterns. It was all very
simple to them. They had us cornered in the car, and they were going to
come in and man-handle us. They started. I didn't kick anybody in the
face. I jerked the opposite door open, and the gay-cat and I went out. The
train-crew took after us.
We went over—if I remember correctly—a stone fence. But I have no doubts
of recollection about where we found ourselves. In the darkness I promptly
fell over a grave-stone. The gay-cat sprawled over another. And then we
got the chase of our lives through that graveyard. The ghosts must have
thought we were going some. So did the train-crew, for when we emerged
from the graveyard and plunged across a road into a dark wood, the shacks
gave up the pursuit and went back to their train. A little later that
night the gay-cat and I found ourselves at the well of a farmhouse. We
were after a drink of water, but we noticed a small rope that ran down one
side of the well. We hauled it up and found on the end of it a gallon-can
of cream. And that is as near as I got to the quarries of Rutland,
Vermont.
When hoboes pass the word along, concerning a town, that "the bulls is
horstile," avoid that town, or, if you must, go through softly. There are
some towns that one must always go through softly. Such a town was
Cheyenne, on the Union Pacific. It had a national reputation for being
"horstile,"—and it was all due to the efforts of one Jeff Carr (if I
remember his name aright). Jeff Carr could size up the "front" of a hobo
on the instant. He never entered into discussion. In the one moment he
sized up the hobo, and in the next he struck out with both fists, a club,
or anything else he had handy. After he had man-handled the hobo, he
started him out of town with a promise of worse if he ever saw him again.
Jeff Carr knew the game. North, south, east, and west to the uttermost
confines of the United States (Canada and Mexico included), the
man-handled hoboes carried the word that Cheyenne was "horstile."
Fortunately, I never encountered Jeff Carr. I passed through Cheyenne in a
blizzard. There were eighty-four hoboes with me at the time. The strength
of numbers made us pretty nonchalant on most things, but not on Jeff
Carr. The connotation of "Jeff Carr" stunned our imagination, numbed our
virility, and the whole gang was mortally scared of meeting him.
It rarely pays to stop and enter into explanations with bulls when they
look "horstile." A swift get-away is the thing to do. It took me some time
to learn this; but the finishing touch was put upon me by a bull in New
York City. Ever since that time it has been an automatic process with me
to make a run for it when I see a bull reaching for me. This automatic
process has become a mainspring of conduct in me, wound up and ready for
instant release. I shall never get over it. Should I be eighty years old,
hobbling along the street on crutches, and should a policeman suddenly
reach out for me, I know I'd drop the crutches and run like a deer.
The finishing touch to my education in bulls was received on a hot summer
afternoon in New York City. It was during a week of scorching weather. I
had got into the habit of throwing my feet in the morning, and of spending
the afternoon in the little park that is hard by Newspaper Row and the
City Hall. It was near there that I could buy from pushcart men current
books (that had been injured in the making or binding) for a few cents
each. Then, right in the park itself, were little booths where one could
buy glorious, ice-cold, sterilized milk and buttermilk at a penny a glass.
Every afternoon I sat on a bench and read, and went on a milk debauch. I
got away with from five to ten glasses each afternoon. It was dreadfully
hot weather.
So here I was, a meek and studious milk-drinking hobo, and behold what I
got for it. One afternoon I arrived at the park, a fresh book-purchase
under my arm and a tremendous buttermilk thirst under my shirt. In the
middle of the street, in front of the City Hall, I noticed, as I came
along heading for the buttermilk booth, that a crowd had formed. It was
right where I was crossing the street, so I stopped to see the cause of
the collection of curious men. At first I could see nothing. Then, from
the sounds I heard and from a glimpse I caught, I knew that it was a bunch
of gamins playing pee-wee. Now pee-wee is not permitted in the streets of
New York. I didn't know that, but I learned pretty lively. I had paused
possibly thirty seconds, in which time I had learned the cause of the
crowd, when I heard a gamin yell "Bull!" The gamins knew their business.
They ran. I didn't.
The crowd broke up immediately and started for the sidewalk on both sides
of the street. I started for the sidewalk on the park-side. There must
have been fifty men, who had been in the original crowd, who were heading
in the same direction. We were loosely strung out. I noticed the bull, a
strapping policeman in a gray suit. He was coming along the middle of the
street, without haste, merely sauntering. I noticed casually that he
changed his course, and was heading obliquely for the same sidewalk that I
was heading for directly. He sauntered along, threading the strung-out
crowd, and I noticed that his course and mine would cross each other. I
was so innocent of wrong-doing that, in spite of my education in bulls and
their ways, I apprehended nothing. I never dreamed that bull was after me.
Out of my respect for the law I was actually all ready to pause the next
moment and let him cross in front of me. The pause came all right, but it
was not of my volition; also it was a backward pause. Without warning,
that bull had suddenly launched out at me on the chest with both hands. At
the same moment, verbally, he cast the bar sinister on my genealogy.
All my free American blood boiled. All my liberty-loving ancestors
clamored in me. "What do you mean?" I demanded. You see, I wanted an
explanation. And I got it. Bang! His club came down on top of my head, and
I was reeling backward like a drunken man, the curious faces of the
onlookers billowing up and down like the waves of the sea, my precious
book falling from under my arm into the dirt, the bull advancing with the
club ready for another blow. And in that dizzy moment I had a vision. I
saw that club descending many times upon my head; I saw myself, bloody and
battered and hard-looking, in a police-court; I heard a charge of
disorderly conduct, profane language, resisting an officer, and a few
other things, read by a clerk; and I saw myself across in Blackwell's
Island. Oh, I knew the game. I lost all interest in explanations. I didn't
stop to pick up my precious, unread book. I turned and ran. I was pretty
sick, but I ran. And run I shall, to my dying day, whenever a bull begins
to explain with a club.
Why, years after my tramping days, when I was a student in the University
of California, one night I went to the circus. After the show and the
concert I lingered on to watch the working of the transportation machinery
of a great circus. The circus was leaving that night. By a bonfire I came
upon a bunch of small boys. There were about twenty of them, and as they
talked with one another I learned that they were going to run away with
the circus. Now the circus-men didn't want to be bothered with this mess
of urchins, and a telephone to police headquarters had "coppered" the
play. A squad of ten policemen had been despatched to the scene to arrest
the small boys for violating the nine o'clock curfew ordinance. The
policemen surrounded the bonfire, and crept up close to it in the
darkness. At the signal, they made a rush, each policeman grabbing at the
youngsters as he would grab into a basket of squirming eels.
Now I didn't know anything about the coming of the police; and when I saw
the sudden eruption of brass-buttoned, helmeted bulls, each of them
reaching with both hands, all the forces and stability of my being were
overthrown. Remained only the automatic process to run. And I ran. I
didn't know I was running. I didn't know anything. It was, as I have said,
automatic. There was no reason for me to run. I was not a hobo. I was a
citizen of that community. It was my home town. I was guilty of no
wrong-doing. I was a college man. I had even got my name in the papers,
and I wore good clothes that had never been slept in. And yet I
ran—blindly, madly, like a startled deer, for over a block. And when I
came to myself, I noted that I was still running. It required a positive
effort of will to stop those legs of mine.
No, I'll never get over it. I can't help it. When a bull reaches, I run.
Besides, I have an unhappy faculty for getting into jail. I have been in
jail more times since I was a hobo than when I was one. I start out on a
Sunday morning with a young lady on a bicycle ride. Before we can get
outside the city limits we are arrested for passing a pedestrian on the
sidewalk. I resolve to be more careful. The next time I am on a bicycle
it is night-time and my acetylene-gas-lamp is misbehaving. I cherish the
sickly flame carefully, because of the ordinance. I am in a hurry, but I
ride at a snail's pace so as not to jar out the flickering flame. I reach
the city limits; I am beyond the jurisdiction of the ordinance; and I
proceed to scorch to make up for lost time. And half a mile farther on I
am "pinched" by a bull, and the next morning I forfeit my bail in the
police court. The city had treacherously extended its limits into a mile
of the country, and I didn't know, that was all. I remember my inalienable
right of free speech and peaceable assemblage, and I get up on a soap-box
to trot out the particular economic bees that buzz in my bonnet, and a
bull takes me off that box and leads me to the city prison, and after that
I get out on bail. It's no use. In Korea I used to be arrested about every
other day. It was the same thing in Manchuria. The last time I was in
Japan I broke into jail under the pretext of being a Russian spy. It
wasn't my pretext, but it got me into jail just the same. There is no hope
for me. I am fated to do the Prisoner-of-Chillon stunt yet. This is
prophecy.
I once hypnotized a bull on Boston Common. It was past midnight and he had
me dead to rights; but before I got done with him he had ponied up a
silver quarter and given me the address of an all-night restaurant. Then
there was a bull in Bristol, New Jersey, who caught me and let me go, and
heaven knows he had provocation enough to put me in jail. I hit him the
hardest I'll wager he was ever hit in his life. It happened this way.
About midnight I nailed a freight out of Philadelphia. The shacks ditched
me. She was pulling out slowly through the maze of tracks and switches of
the freight-yards. I nailed her again, and again I was ditched. You see, I
had to nail her "outside," for she was a through freight with every door
locked and sealed.
The second time I was ditched the shack gave me a lecture. He told me I
was risking my life, that it was a fast freight and that she went some. I
told him I was used to going some myself, but it was no go. He said he
wouldn't permit me to commit suicide, and I hit the grit. But I nailed her
a third time, getting in between on the bumpers. They were the most meagre
bumpers I had ever seen—I do not refer to the real bumpers, the iron
bumpers that are connected by the coupling-link and that pound and grind
on each other; what I refer to are the beams, like huge cleats, that cross
the ends of freight cars just above the bumpers. When one rides the
bumpers, he stands on these cleats, one foot on each, the bumpers between
his feet and just beneath.
But the beams or cleats I found myself on were not the broad, generous
ones that at that time were usually on box-cars. On the contrary, they
were very narrow—not more than an inch and a half in breadth. I couldn't
get half of the width of my sole on them. Then there was nothing to which
to hold with my hands. True, there were the ends of the two box-cars; but
those ends were flat, perpendicular surfaces. There were no grips. I could
only press the flats of my palms against the car-ends for support. But
that would have been all right if the cleats for my feet had been decently
wide.
As the freight got out of Philadelphia she began to hit up speed. Then I
understood what the shack had meant by suicide. The freight went faster
and faster. She was a through freight, and there was nothing to stop her.
On that section of the Pennsylvania four tracks run side by side, and my
east-bound freight didn't need to worry about passing west-bound freights,
nor about being overtaken by east-bound expresses. She had the track to
herself, and she used it. I was in a precarious situation. I stood with
the mere edges of my feet on the narrow projections, the palms of my hands
pressing desperately against the flat, perpendicular ends of each car. And
those cars moved, and moved individually, up and down and back and forth.
Did you ever see a circus rider, standing on two running horses, with one
foot on the back of each horse? Well, that was what I was doing, with
several differences. The circus rider had the reins to hold on to, while I
had nothing; he stood on the broad soles of his feet, while I stood on the
edges of mine; he bent his legs and body, gaining the strength of the arch
in his posture and achieving the stability of a low centre of gravity,
while I was compelled to stand upright and keep my legs straight; he rode
face forward, while I was riding sidewise; and also, if he fell off, he'd
get only a roll in the sawdust, while I'd have been ground to pieces
beneath the wheels.
And that freight was certainly going some, roaring and shrieking,
swinging madly around curves, thundering over trestles, one car-end
bumping up when the other was jarring down, or jerking to the right at the
same moment the other was lurching to the left, and with me all the while
praying and hoping for the train to stop. But she didn't stop. She didn't
have to. For the first, last, and only time on The Road, I got all I
wanted. I abandoned the bumpers and managed to get out on a side-ladder;
it was ticklish work, for I had never encountered car-ends that were so
parsimonious of hand-holds and foot-holds as those car-ends were.
I heard the engine whistling, and I felt the speed easing down. I knew the
train wasn't going to stop, but my mind was made up to chance it if she
slowed down sufficiently. The right of way at this point took a curve,
crossed a bridge over a canal, and cut through the town of Bristol. This
combination compelled slow speed. I clung on to the side-ladder and
waited. I didn't know it was the town of Bristol we were approaching. I
did not know what necessitated slackening in speed. All I knew was that I
wanted to get off. I strained my eyes in the darkness for a
street-crossing on which to land. I was pretty well down the train, and
before my car was in the town the engine was past the station and I could
feel her making speed again.
Then came the street. It was too dark to see how wide it was or what was
on the other side. I knew I needed all of that street if I was to remain
on my feet after I struck. I dropped off on the near side. It sounds easy.
By "dropped off" I mean just this: I first of all, on the side-ladder,
thrust my body forward as far as I could in the direction the train was
going—this to give as much space as possible in which to gain backward
momentum when I swung off. Then I swung, swung out and backward, backward
with all my might, and let go—at the same time throwing myself backward
as if I intended to strike the ground on the back of my head. The whole
effort was to overcome as much as possible the primary forward momentum
the train had imparted to my body. When my feet hit the grit, my body was
lying backward on the air at an angle of forty-five degrees. I had reduced
the forward momentum some, for when my feet struck, I did not immediately
pitch forward on my face. Instead, my body rose to the perpendicular and
began to incline forward. In point of fact, my body proper still retained
much momentum, while my feet, through contact with the earth, had lost all
their momentum. This momentum the feet had lost I had to supply anew by
lifting them as rapidly as I could and running them forward in order to
keep them under my forward-moving body. The result was that my feet beat a
rapid and explosive tattoo clear across the street. I didn't dare stop
them. If I had, I'd have pitched forward. It was up to me to keep on
going.
I was an involuntary projectile, worrying about what was on the other side
of the street and hoping that it wouldn't be a stone wall or a telegraph
pole. And just then I hit something. Horrors! I saw it just the instant
before the disaster—of all things, a bull, standing there in the
darkness. We went down together, rolling over and over; and the automatic
process was such in that miserable creature that in the moment of impact
he reached out and clutched me and never let go. We were both knocked out,
and he held on to a very lamb-like hobo while he recovered.
If that bull had any imagination, he must have thought me a traveller from
other worlds, the man from Mars just arriving; for in the darkness he
hadn't seen me swing from the train. In fact, his first words were: "Where
did you come from?" His next words, and before I had time to answer, were:
"I've a good mind to run you in." This latter, I am convinced, was
likewise automatic. He was a really good bull at heart, for after I had
told him a "story" and helped brush off his clothes, he gave me until the
next freight to get out of town. I stipulated two things: first, that the
freight be east-bound, and second, that it should not be a through freight
with all doors sealed and locked. To this he agreed, and thus, by the
terms of the Treaty of Bristol, I escaped being pinched.
I remember another night, in that part of the country, when I just missed
another bull. If I had hit him, I'd have telescoped him, for I was coming
down from above, all holds free, with several other bulls one jump behind
and reaching for me. This is how it happened. I had been lodging in a
livery stable in Washington. I had a box-stall and unnumbered
horse-blankets all to myself. In return for such sumptuous accommodation I
took care of a string of horses each morning. I might have been there yet,
if it hadn't been for the bulls.
One evening, about nine o'clock, I returned to the stable to go to bed,
and found a crap game in full blast. It had been a market day, and all the
negroes had money. It would be well to explain the lay of the land. The
livery stable faced on two streets. I entered the front, passed through
the office, and came to the alley between two rows of stalls that ran the
length of the building and opened out on the other street. Midway along
this alley, beneath a gas-jet and between the rows of horses, were about
forty negroes. I joined them as an onlooker. I was broke and couldn't
play. A coon was making passes and not dragging down. He was riding his
luck, and with each pass the total stake doubled. All kinds of money lay
on the floor. It was fascinating. With each pass, the chances increased
tremendously against the coon making another pass. The excitement was
intense. And just then there came a thundering smash on the big doors that
opened on the back street.
A few of the negroes bolted in the opposite direction. I paused from my
flight a moment to grab at the all kinds of money on the floor. This
wasn't theft: it was merely custom. Every man who hadn't run was grabbing.
The doors crashed open and swung in, and through them surged a squad of
bulls. We surged the other way. It was dark in the office, and the narrow
door would not permit all of us to pass out to the street at the same
time. Things became congested. A coon took a dive through the window,
taking the sash along with him and followed by other coons. At our rear,
the bulls were nailing prisoners. A big coon and myself made a dash at the
door at the same time. He was bigger than I, and he pivoted me and got
through first. The next instant a club swatted him on the head and he went
down like a steer. Another squad of bulls was waiting outside for us. They
knew they couldn't stop the rush with their hands, and so they were
swinging their clubs. I stumbled over the fallen coon who had pivoted me,
ducked a swat from a club, dived between a bull's legs, and was free. And
then how I ran! There was a lean mulatto just in front of me, and I took
his pace. He knew the town better than I did, and I knew that in the way
he ran lay safety. But he, on the other hand, took me for a pursuing bull.
He never looked around. He just ran. My wind was good, and I hung on to
his pace and nearly killed him. In the end he stumbled weakly, went down
on his knees, and surrendered to me. And when he discovered I wasn't a
bull, all that saved me was that he didn't have any wind left in him.
That was why I left Washington—not on account of the mulatto, but on
account of the bulls. I went down to the depot and caught the first blind
out on a Pennsylvania Railroad express. After the train got good and under
way and I noted the speed she was making, a misgiving smote me. This was a
four-track railroad, and the engines took water on the fly. Hoboes had
long since warned me never to ride the first blind on trains where the
engines took water on the fly. And now let me explain. Between the tracks
are shallow metal troughs. As the engine, at full speed, passes above, a
sort of chute drops down into the trough. The result is that all the water
in the trough rushes up the chute and fills the tender.
Somewhere along between Washington and Baltimore, as I sat on the platform
of the blind, a fine spray began to fill the air. It did no harm. Ah, ha,
thought I; it's all a bluff, this taking water on the fly being bad for
the bo on the first blind. What does this little spray amount to? Then I
began to marvel at the device. This was railroading! Talk about your
primitive Western railroading—and just then the tender filled up, and it
hadn't reached the end of the trough. A tidal wave of water poured over
the back of the tender and down upon me. I was soaked to the skin, as wet
as if I had fallen overboard.
The train pulled into Baltimore. As is the custom in the great Eastern
cities, the railroad ran beneath the level of the streets on the bottom of
a big "cut." As the train pulled into the lighted depot, I made myself as
small as possible on the blind. But a railroad bull saw me, and gave
chase. Two more joined him. I was past the depot, and I ran straight on
down the track. I was in a sort of trap. On each side of me rose the steep
walls of the cut, and if I ever essayed them and failed, I knew that I'd
slide back into the clutches of the bulls. I ran on and on, studying the
walls of the cut for a favorable place to climb up. At last I saw such a
place. It came just after I had passed under a bridge that carried a level
street across the cut. Up the steep slope I went, clawing hand and foot.
The three railroad bulls were clawing up right after me.
At the top, I found myself in a vacant lot. On one side was a low wall
that separated it from the street. There was no time for minute
investigation. They were at my heels. I headed for the wall and vaulted
it. And right there was where I got the surprise of my life. One is used
to thinking that one side of a wall is just as high as the other side. But
that wall was different. You see, the vacant lot was much higher than the
level of the street. On my side the wall was low, but on the other
side—well, as I came soaring over the top, all holds free, it seemed to
me that I was falling feet-first, plump into an abyss. There beneath me,
on the sidewalk, under the light of a street-lamp was a bull. I guess it
was nine or ten feet down to the sidewalk; but in the shock of surprise in
mid-air it seemed twice that distance.
I straightened out in the air and came down. At first I thought I was
going to land on the bull. My clothes did brush him as my feet struck the
sidewalk with explosive impact. It was a wonder he didn't drop dead, for
he hadn't heard me coming. It was the man-from-Mars stunt over again. The
bull did jump. He shied away from me like a horse from an auto; and then
he reached for me. I didn't stop to explain. I left that to my pursuers,
who were dropping over the wall rather gingerly. But I got a chase all
right. I ran up one street and down another, dodged around corners, and at
last got away.
After spending some of the coin I'd got from the crap game and killing off
an hour of time, I came back to the railroad cut, just outside the lights
of the depot, and waited for a train. My blood had cooled down, and I
shivered miserably, what of my wet clothes. At last a train pulled into
the station. I lay low in the darkness, and successfully boarded her when
she pulled out, taking good care this time to make the second blind. No
more water on the fly in mine. The train ran forty miles to the first
stop. I got off in a lighted depot that was strangely familiar. I was back
in Washington. In some way, during the excitement of the get-away in
Baltimore, running through strange streets, dodging and turning and
retracing, I had got turned around. I had taken the train out the wrong
way. I had lost a night's sleep, I had been soaked to the skin, I had been
chased for my life; and for all my pains I was back where I had started.
Oh, no, life on The Road is not all beer and skittles. But I didn't go
back to the livery stable. I had done some pretty successful grabbing, and
I didn't want to reckon up with the coons. So I caught the next train out,
and ate my breakfast in Baltimore.
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