YOU CAN’T WIN

You Can’t Win

BY
JACK BLACK

With a foreword by
ROBERT HERRICK

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1926
All rights reserved

Copyright 1925,
By Jack Black.

Copyright 1926,
By The Macmillan Company.

Set up and electrotyped.
Published September, 1926.

Reprinted October, 1926.
Reprinted December, 1926.

Printed in the United States of America
By The Cornwall Press

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This book is dedicated to Fremont Older, to Judge Frank H. Dunne, to the unnamed friend who sawed me out of the San Francisco jail and to that dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, “Sticks” Sullivan, who picked the buckshot out of my back—under the bridge—at Baraboo, Wisconsin.

The Author.

FOREWORD

The revelations of a thief or of a prostitute are rightfully suspected by the normal citizen of having been dressed for publicity, either sensational or sentimental or both. An unstable emotionalism in the subject, perhaps psychopathic, induces a melodramatic and unreal treatment of past experience. The tale is told not as it happened but rather as the subject likes, in reverie, to think it happened or as he believes the reader would like to have had it happen. There is nothing of that sort in Jack Black’s story of his life as a professional thief. The honesty of the “confession” is self-evident. With a few lapses into the conventional, the expected, he displays the rare literary power of letting the facts speak for themselves, without any window-dressing, either lachrymose or hilarious. He has an instinct for realities.

Indeed it is that mental grip, enabling him to perceive and apply realities, that obviously brought him out in the end so that he could break the shackles of his criminal habits and reinstate himself completely in accord with society. It was almost purely a mental feat. At the end, to be sure, he dwells upon the helpfulness of kind friends, especially of Mr. Older, of the “square deal” he got from Judge Dunne, and recognizes fully the impulse of gratitude to a friend who helped him escape from prison by “cutting out the hop”—the hardest single bond he had to break. Those were emotional responses. But if it had not been for his own good mind which he had slowly disciplined by reason, that resolve “to go straight” would have been but another feeble human aspiration for amendment with which the human hell is paved. The chief interest I find in Black’s rapid survey of his life as a thief is this progress of mental awakening and a corresponding growth of character as a man, without which all the help of kind and enlightened friends would have availed naught. It is what Black did for himself, what he was, that counted most.

Jack Black was an experimental psychologist: he discovered slowly and painfully, as most do, the psychological character of himself and of the world in which he was placed. Thus he explored the law of habit and the purely mental quality of self-control long before he attempted to apply his knowledge to his own case. Any habit, he maintains, apropos of the opium habit, can be broken provided the victim wants sufficiently to change, and he notes the power of substitution, welcoming even his worries as distractions, mentally, from the obsession of opium. His emphasis on the necessity of a subjective desire for change is an unerring diagnosis of self. He wanted another kind of life enough to make it come true. That is the great distinction of Jack Black as professional lawbreaker and person.

His case is so common in our restless, mobile civilization that it may be called typical or standard. An active, intelligent, likable boy with no stable ties, he adventured on the open road, almost by accident, the wide world tempting him on, took what he wanted, learned the habits and the resources of vagrancy, of criminality, of vice. But he did not sink to the dregs per formula. He went to the top of his society. Stirred by emulation with the only companions he had—hoboes, thieves, gamblers, yeggs—he distinguished himself not only by success in individual exploits but by a superiority of character that would not break, “snitch,” or play the other fellow’s game—and by loyalty to his mates.

Then came as he was emerging from youth the chance that landed him in a well-run Canadian prison and fertilized the seed of intellectual interest by giving him access to a good library. For the first time he discovered consciously his own mind—the interest of it—and from this period it is evident that the habit of reading, of thinking, gained on him until with relentless logic his mind, thus freed and fed, convinced him that his boy’s life of defiance and lawlessness was wrong. After he was convinced, it took years to free himself from all the implications of twenty years of crime. But once convinced, with a mind of that quality, the result was inevitable. Strange irony that the mental life so essential to Black’s salvation should have been further fostered by the gift of a library which Abe Ruef gave to the prison where he and Black happened to be fellow prisoners. Ruef had taken the money which he bestowed in this form on his fellow criminals from the public of San Francisco. Mr. Fremont Older, as a powerful newspaper editor, was largely responsible for putting Ruef into the prison (and later in freeing him!) where Ruef was indirectly an instrument in freeing Jack Black from his bonds.

There was an aspect of the Canadian-prison experience less commendable than its order and its providing the prisoners with a good library, its wholesome and on the whole human management so glaringly in contrast with the American prisons pictured in this story—and that was flogging. In these days of a return to medieval punishments for criminals, advocated by many leading citizens, it is well to realize how devastating to Black were his two experiences of brutal force—flogging in Canada, the strait-jacket in Folsom. They made him—and many others—inhuman wild beasts ready for murder or suicide. They left Black not cowed, but mutinous, hating and hateful. The experience was wholly bad and futile, except possibly as a test of his own growing self-control. It does not need Jack Black’s corroborative evidence to know that brutality does not pay, even when applied to the dangerous and to the outcast. In spite of the talk about reviving the whipping post, we know that the use of physical brutality—floggings, strait-jackets, and third-degree methods—will disappear: they are failures in getting results from human beings. It is only a crude society, as ours still is largely, that would tolerate what goes on often in our larger prisons, where the application of “justice” is left to a class little removed from the criminals on whom they operate. To maim and mutilate human beings, to terrify and brutalize them in order to correct them, is so obviously foolish and wicked that it hardly needs statement.

In some cases like Black’s the victim is not broken, but tempered and hardened in will, in evil. And that brings me to the most depressing fact in criminology that the present book illustrates: the criminal is almost always of an inferior mentality. It is only a superior mentality such as Black’s that can survive and ultimately win freedom. Probably Jack Black would admit that among his wide acquaintance in the criminal class only a few, a very few, had the mental quality, the character, to break their chains. The mass were condemned to remain criminals because of defective mentality. That suggests inevitably the confused subject of eugenics and birth control, in society’s relation to the criminal class, which it so much fears and detests, but before which it so often seems, as at the present moment, hopeless, like an ignorant, half well-meaning parent angry over a troublesome child whose troublesomeness is in large part the fruit of the parent’s own defective character. Many of these aberrant specimens might be deflected from crime by feeding their minds. Few ever can do it for themselves as Black almost wholly did it for himself. Does modern life offer youth sufficient mental stimulus? The motor car, the movie, bootleg liquor, and sex—these are the raw stimuli with which youth tries to infuse some color and movement into the tyrannous drabness of a standardized industrial life. In drawing his moral at the end Black forgets, as the middle-aged are wont to forget, the glamour and the lure of the “hangout” and the open road, which in his boyhood seemed to be the only way out of a cheerless drudgery. There are, of course, many other ways, which Black discovered later for himself. And that is why I think his story is so well worth while reading and pondering upon. Besides it is entertaining, because unvarnished and unpretentious.

Robert Herrick.

YOU CAN’T WIN

CHAPTER I

I am now librarian of the San Francisco Call.

Do I look like one? I turn my chair so I can look in the mirror. I don’t see the face of a librarian. There is no smooth, high, white forehead. I do not see the calm, placid, composed countenance of the student. The forehead I see is high enough, but it is lined with furrows that look like knife scars. There are two vertical furrows between my eyes that make me appear to be wearing a continual scowl. My eyes are wide enough apart and not small, but they are hard, cold, calculating. They are blue, but of that shade of blue farthest removed from the violet.

My nose is not long, not sharp. Nevertheless it is an inquisitive nose. My mouth is large—one corner of it is higher than the other and I appear to be continually sneering. I do not scowl, I do not sneer; yet there is something in my face that causes a man or woman to hesitate before asking to be directed to Dr. Gordon’s church. I can’t remember a time that any woman, young or old, ever stopped me on the street and asked to be directed. Once in a great while a drunk will roll over to where I am standing and ask how he can get to “Tw’ninth ’n’ Mission.”

If I gaze into the mirror long enough and think hard enough I can conjure up another face. The old one seems to dissolve and in its place I see the face of a schoolboy—a bright, shining, innocent face. I see a mop of white hair, a pair of blue eyes, and an inquisitive nose. I see myself standing on the broad steps of the Sisters’ Convent School. At the age of fourteen, after three years’ “board and tuition,” I am leaving to go home to my father and then to another school for “big boys.”

My teacher, a sweet, gentle Sister, a madonna, is holding my hand. She is crying. I must hurry away or I will be crying, too. The Mother Superior says good-by. Her thin lips are pressed so tightly together that I can barely see the line where they meet. She is looking into my eyes intently and I am wondering what she is going to say to me when the crunching of gravel warns us that the old coach is ready and I must be off. The Mother takes my teacher gently by the hand. I see them go through the wide door and disappear silently down the long, dark hall.

All the boys in the school, and there were fifty of them, lined up and gave me a noisy send-off. The old coachman clucked to his horses, and I was off for the train—and the world.

Any reader with a spoonful of imagination can picture me going home, then to other schools in turn, then to some sort of an office job; advancement here and there, always leading a well-ordered, quiet, studious life, until he finally places me in the respectable and responsible position of librarian of a metropolitan newspaper. That’s the way it should have been, but wasn’t.

The course I followed from that convent school to this library desk, if charted on a piece of paper, would look like the zigzag line that statisticians use to denote the rise and fall of temperature or rainfall or fluctuations of business. Every turn I made was a sharp one, a sudden one. In years I cannot remember making one easy, graceful, rounded turn.

It has often been a question with me just how much the best of it a boy has, who has his mother with him until his feet are well planted under him; who has a home and its influences until he gathers some kind of a working philosophy that helps him to face the world. There is no substitute for the home and the mother.

It may not mean much to the average chap to have a friend say: “John, I want you to meet my mother.” To me it means more than I can put on paper. It seems to explain to me why the man who so proudly says, “This is my mother,” is so many things that I am not and never can be. The insurance people have not yet got to the stage of insuring a man against a lifetime of failure, but if they ever do, I imagine the chap who can guarantee them that he will keep his mother with him until he is twenty will have a shade the best of it when he pays his premium.

I am not lugging in the fact that I was left motherless at the age of ten to alibi myself away from anything. Nevertheless I think a fellow has the right to ask himself if things might not have been different. My mother died before I got very well acquainted with her—I doubt if any child gives its parents much thought before the age of twelve or thirteen.

I probably thought that my mother was a person put into the world to scrub my face and neck and to be screamed and kicked at; to put scratchy, flannel rags around my neck with smelly grease on them when I had the croup; and to stand by the bed and keep me in it when I had the measles. I can remember distinctly how angry I became when she brought me a nice, new toothbrush and showed me what to do with it.

This was the greatest indignity of all—the last straw. I threw the thing away and refused to use it; told her up and down that I was “no girl” and wouldn’t have any “girl things.” She did not get angry and scold; she just went on with her work, smiling. She may have been pleased with my manly outburst. I don’t know.

I don’t remember that I was shocked or pained when she was buried. I cried, because it was expected of me. Mother’s relatives, a couple of sisters, whom I never saw before or since, were crying. I saw tears in my father’s eyes. So I tried to cry, and did. I know my father realized what we had lost and his grief was genuine, but I could not feel it then.

A few days later father sold our little cottage home and furnishings and we moved into the only hotel in the little town. Schools were few and far between for poor children then. I played around the hotel all day, running wild, till father came home from work. He would have his dinner, read a paper, and then put me to bed. After that he would read a book for an hour and go to bed himself. We lived this way for almost a year. Some nights he would put down his book and look at me strangely for minutes at a time. I was a problem, undoubtedly, and he was trying to decide what to do with me. A ten-year-old boy without a mother is a fit problem for any father’s mind, and my father was a thoughtful man.

Looking back at it, it seems to me that I was blown here and there like a dead leaf whipped about by the autumn winds till at last it finds lodgment in some cozy fence corner. When I left school at fourteen I was as unsophisticated as a boy could be. I knew no more of the world and its strange way than the gentle, saintly woman who taught me my prayers in the convent.

Before my twentieth birthday, I was in the dock of a criminal court, on trial for burglary. I was acquitted, but that is another story. In six years I had deserted my father and home, gone “on the road.” I had become a snapper-up of small things, a tapper of tills, a street-door sneak thief, a prowler of cheap lodging houses, and at last a promising burglar in a small way.

At twenty-five I was an expert house burglar, a nighttime prowler, carefully choosing only the best homes—homes of the wealthy, careless, insured people. I “made” them in the small hours of the night, always under arms.

At thirty I was a respected member of the “yegg” brotherhood, a thief of which little is known. He is silent, secretive, wary; forever traveling, always a night “worker.” He shuns the bright lights, seldom straying far from his kind, never coming to the surface. Circulating through space with his always-ready automatic, the yegg rules the underworld of criminals. At forty I found myself a solitary, capable journeyman highwayman; an escaped convict, a fugitive, with a background of twenty-five years in the underworld.

A bleak background! Crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests, trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! I see in the background four of them. County jails, workhouses, city prisons, Mounted Police barracks, dungeons, solitary confinement, bread and water, hanging up, brutal floggings, and the murderous straitjacket.

I see hop joints, wine dumps, thieves’ resorts, and beggars’ hangouts.

Crime followed by swift retribution in one form or another.

I had very few glasses of wine as I traveled this route. I rarely saw a woman smile and seldom heard a song.

In those twenty-five years I took all these things, and I am going to write about them.

And I am going to write about them as I took them —with a smile.

CHAPTER II

I was a problem to my father, running loose about the hotel while he was at work, and finally he took me to a Catholic school one hundred miles away. On that short trip my father and I got to be good friends, and I think I was closer to him that day than on any other of our lives. Father left that evening and told me to be good, mind the Sisters, and study hard.

I fell into my groove in the school with other boys of my age. Our days were passed pleasantly with our small studies, many prayers, and daily attendance at mass. The food was coarse but wholesome.

I never went home at vacation time. I spent those days in exploring near-by orchards, gardens, and fields, picking up fruit, vegetables, and berries, and other things that help to take the edge off a small boy’s appetite.

I spent much time about the barns and stables with Thomas, the coachman. I was an expert listener, a rare talent, inherited from my father, no doubt. Thomas was a ready talker. This is a combination that never fails to make firm and lasting friendships, and we became friends. He was a veteran of our Civil War, had been on the losing side, and came out of it full of hatred, lead, and rheumatism. His heroes were not Lee or Stonewall Jackson, but Quantrell, the guerrilla, Jesse and Frank James, Cole and Bob Younger.

I never tired of listening to his war stories, and often found myself piecing them together in the schoolroom when I should have been active with my studies.

I believe I was the only boy at the school who never went away on holidays and vacations to visit parents or relatives. The Sister Superior, probably realizing that my life was a bit too drab, often gave me the privilege of going to the village for mail and papers. This was a rare treat, and much sought by all the boys. It meant a long walk, a stroll down the village street, a chance to see people, maybe to buy a fat sandwich, a bag of peanuts, or a bottle of pop—no small things in a boy’s life. It also meant authority and responsibility, good things for a boy. I looked forward to these journeys. I always had a little small silver, for spending, from my father.

The time passed quickly and pleasantly enough. I learned many prayers, practiced for singing in the church choir, and became an altar boy, serving the priest at mass. I liked learning the prayers and the Latin responses to the priest, but did not make much headway with my other studies.

I liked the dear, simple old priest to whom I made my first confession, and at times thought I would like some day to be a priest myself. Between my admiration for old Thomas, the coachman, with his stormy stories of the war, and my love for the quiet old priest, my mind was always pulling me this way and that—whether I should become a priest, or a soldier like Tommy, limping around with his short leg and his rheumatism.

One day when I was waiting for the mail I heard a nice old lady ask the postmaster whose boy I was.

He said, “That’s one of the boys from the convent. You can tell them a block away. They are all perfect little gentlemen. They say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you.’ I do not know how the Sisters do it, but they can surely bring boys up. I wish I could do it with mine.”

When I returned with the mail I told the Superior what I heard the postmaster say about her and her boys. She seemed very much pleased, smiled, and said: “Boys are good when they are taught to say their prayers and to fear God.” Shortly after, I was appointed “mailman.” I went to the village every day after school. When the weather was fine I walked; if it was bad, I rode in or on the coach with Tommy. This was the first and only “appointment” of my life. I did not think it over then, but I know now I was not given it because I said “please” or my prayers—I got it because I had told the Superior the nice things the postmaster said. “Please” is a good word in its place; but it does not get one appointed to anything. It has a proper place in a small boy’s vocabulary. And it is also much used by a certain class of prisoners and supplicants who are always “pleasing” somebody and are never pleasant to anybody.

Your capable beggar on the street does not say “please.” He rips off his spiel in such exact and precise language that he gets your dime without it. You so admire his “art” that you do not miss the “please.” His is an art. He omits the “please” because he knows you do not use it except when you want the mustard.

Looking back, it seems to me that our life in the convent was not properly balanced. We had none of the rough, boisterous times so dear to the small boy, no swimming, baseball, football. We were a little too cloistered, too quiet, too subdued. There was no wrestling, no boxing, no running and jumping and squabbling and shuffling and shouldering about. Of course I learned all those later. But I learned them quickly, too quickly—all in a bunch. That put me out of balance again. Those exercises should have been mixed in with my studies and prayers.

One stormy day I came out of the post office and as usual handed up the paper to Tommy, whose habit it was to glance at the headlines and return it to me. This day, however, he found something that interested him. He put the horses’ lines between his legs and crossed his knees on them. I sat beside him on the box and shivered in the wind. He read on and on, column after column, then turned to an inner page, fighting the paper in the wind.

At last, and it seemed an hour, he folded it up carefully and returned it to me. “Good news to-day, Tommy?” “No, boy, no good news. Bad news, awful news, terrible news.” He spoke in an awed voice, a voice that carried reverence. “Terrible news —Jesse James has been murdered, murdered in cold blood and by a traitor.”

He fell silent and spoke to me no more that day. Later he told me many things about Jesse James. He worshiped him, and like many other good people of Missouri firmly believed that neither of the James boys ever fired a shot except in defense of their rights.

I delivered the mail and hastened to tell the other boys that Jesse James was dead, “murdered.” Many of the older boys knew all about him—he was their hero, too—and the things they told me made me decide to get the paper and read his story myself. The next day, strangely enough, I passed the Superior’s office when she was out to lunch. The paper was folded neatly, lying on some older papers on the corner of her neat desk. I walked in and took it. I put it away carefully, but many days passed before I got to the reading of it. I was so occupied with my duties as altar boy, and so busy with preparing for my first communion and learning new prayers, that the James boys and all other worldly things had no place in my mind.

Those were intense days. I lived in another world.

At last I found time to read my paper. On my way for the mail I slowly dug out the story of Jesse James’ life and death, word by word. How I studied the picture of this bearded and be-pistoled hero! And the sketches of his shooting and the house in which it was done. Then came the story of his bereaved mother. How my boyish sympathy went out to her, as she wept for her loss and told the story of the lifelong persecution of her boys, Jesse and Frank, and how she feared that the hunted fugitive, Frank James, would also be dealt with in the same traitorous fashion. How I loathed the traitor, Bob Ford, one of the James boys gang, who shot Jesse when his back was turned, for a reward! How I rejoiced to read that Ford was almost lynched by friends and admirers of Jesse, and had to be locked in the strongest jail in the state to protect him from a mobbing. I finished the story entirely and wholly in sympathy with the James boys, and all other hunted, outlawed, and outraged men.

When I had done with the paper I passed it along to the other boys, who read it and handed it about till it was finally captured by the Superior. It was limp and ragged from usage. The Superior promptly traced it back to me. When asked where I got it, I told her I had taken it from her desk. I was lectured severely on the wrong of taking things without asking for them. I told her I did not ask for it because I was afraid she might refuse me. She said nothing, and did not offer to give me any, from which I understood that we were not to have papers. I was also relieved of my job as mailman. I was no longer to be trusted.

My teacher heard of my disgrace. She took me into her study, and we talked the thing over. The loss of my job was nothing; I would be going home soon, anyway. I must not feel bad about the lecture, I had done nothing wrong. I would have returned the paper, only the other boys wanted to read it. I discovered that she looked at it the same way I did.

She asked me if I wanted more papers. I was on fire for papers and told her so. She promised to get me one every day, and did. When I read it I returned it to her.

The James boys’ story ran on for days and I followed it word for word, sympathizing with the hunted fugitive, Frank, wishing I were old enough and strong enough to find him and help him escape his pursuers and avenge his brother’s death.

When that story was over I turned to other crime stories and read nothing else in the papers. Burglaries, robberies, murders—I devoured them all, always in sympathy with the adventurous and chance-taking criminals. I reconstructed their crimes in my boyish mind and often pictured myself taking part in them. I neglected my studies and prayers to rove about in fancy with such heroes as Jimmy Hope, Max Shinburn, and “Piano Charlie,” famous “gopher men,” who tunneled under banks like gophers and carried away their plunder after months of dangerous endeavor.

Looking back now I can plainly see the influence the James boys and similar characters had in turning my thoughts to adventure and later to crime.

CHAPTER III

At last the day came for me to go home, for I had passed my fourteenth birthday and was too old to stay at the Sisters’ School.

I wanted to kiss my favorite teacher good-by, but didn’t quite dare do it. So I rode down to the station with Tommy, who bought me a fifty-cent knife, out of his salary, only twelve dollars a month, and went away to join my father.

Father took me back to the same hotel, to the same room. He had occupied it during the three years I had been away, and the only change was that he put a small bed in it for me. Everything was new and strange to me. Men coming and going all day, eating and drinking. Everything was noise and bustle, and it took me a few days to get used to this new life.

I found lots of papers lying around—some cheap novels, Police Gazettes, etc.—and I read them all, everything I could get hold of. I saw my father only at night, and occasionally we would take a walk then for an hour.

One evening as we were returning from our walk, we came upon a man whose team of horses was stalled in a mud hole. He was beating the horses, and cursing them with the most fearful oaths. I stopped still in my tracks and began praying for him. Father looked back, saw me standing still, and said: “What are you doing, John, listening to that mule skinner swear?”

I finished my prayer and caught up with him.

“You will learn to swear soon enough, John, without stopping to listen to these teamsters,” he said a little severely.

In self-defense I told him I was not listening to the man, but praying for him. “The Sisters taught us to do that,” I said. “They taught us to pray for all sinners.”

Father wore a long beard, the custom of his day. When he was very thoughtful or vexed with some problem, he had a habit of twisting up the end of his beard into a pigtail. He would then put the pigtail between his teeth and chew on it.

After I explained what I had been doing, he looked at me strangely, twisted up his beard, put the end in his mouth, and began chewing. He took my hand, something he never did before, and we walked home in silence. He went straight upstairs, and I found some fresh papers, which I read downstairs. When I went up to go to bed he was sitting in his chair, staring at the wall and still chewing his beard. My coming aroused him. He said, “Good night, John,” and we went to bed.

The next evening he came in as usual. He read his paper and I read whatever came to my hand. When we went upstairs, he said: “John, the Sisters taught you many prayers, did they?” “Yes, sir, all the prayers. I know them all,” I said proudly.

“How about reading?” he asked. I read him a piece from a newspaper fairly well.

“And writing, John? Yes, I know you learned to write and spell. Your letters to me were very good. How’s your arithmetic, John? How many are eight times nine, John?”

I was stuck. I hesitated and blushed. He saw my confusion and gave me an easier one. “Seven times six, John?”

I was stuck again and got more confused. “Start at the beginning, John, maybe you can get it that way.”

I started at seven times one, got as far as seven times four, and fell down. This was torture. I think he saw it, too, for he said, “Oh, well, John, that will come to you later. Don’t worry about it; just keep on trying.”

He was a sharp at mathematics, and I think my failure to learn multiplication hurt him more than if he had caught me spelling bird with a “u,” or sugar with two “gs.” After a month of idleness it was decided that I should go to the district school, which had been built in our town while I was at the Sisters’. I got a new set of books and started bravely off.

We had a woman teacher, very strict, but fair to us all. I learned rapidly everything but arithmetic, which did not seem to agree with me, nor does it yet, for that matter. I also learned to play ball, football, marbles, and, I must admit, hooky, the most fascinating of all small-boy games. These new games, and so many other interesting new things, soon crowded the prayers into the background of my mind, but not entirely out of it. I said them no more at night and morning, nor any other time. But I still remember them, and I believe now, after forty prayerless years, I could muster a passable prayer if the occasion required it and there were not so many people about who could do it so much better.

After school, having no chores to do, I loitered around the hotel office. One day I found a dime novel entitled, “The James Boys.” I seized upon it and devoured it. After that I was always on the lookout for dime novels. I found a place where they were sold. I would buy one and trade with some other boy when it was read. If I could not trade it, I took it back to the store and the woman gave me a five-cent one for it. The nickel one was just as thrilling, but shorter. I read them all. “Old Sleuth,” “Cap Collier,” “Frank Reade,” “Kit Carson.” Father saw me with them, but never bothered me. One day he brought me one of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. I read it and was cured of the five- and ten-cent novels.

Between going to school and to the depot in the evening to see the train come in, and hanging around the hotel bar watching the town’s celebrated ones, especially the “bad men” who had killed or shot somebody somewhere some time, I put in fairly busy days. The time flew.

I got to be quite looked up to by the other boys of my age. I “lived at the hotel,” had “nobody to boss me around,” didn’t have to “run errands and chop kindling and go after the groceries and carry milk.” When a new boy showed up, I was the one to show him around. I remember distinctly, now, that in less than a year after I left the Sisters, I was going down the street with a new boy when we came upon one of the town drunkards and bad men. I pointed him out with pride. “See that old fellow? That’s old Beverly Shannon. He’s been out to Leadville. He killed a man out there and nearly got hung. You ought to hear him swear when he gets drunk and falls down and nobody will help him up.”

There was admiration in my voice. Our town was full of bad men. All had been in the war on one side or the other. Everybody had a pistol or two, and a shotgun or a rifle. Everybody knew how to use them. No small boy’s outfit was complete without a pistol. Usually it was a rusty old “horse pistol,” a cap-and-ball affair, some old relic of the Civil War. By a great stroke of fortune I got two of them. I was helping an old lady to move some things out of her cellar when we ran across them in a trunk.

“Lord, Lord,” she said, “are those awful things here yet? I thought they had been thrown away years ago. Johnnie, take them out and bury them somewhere. Throw them away so I will never see them again.”

These two old pistols made me feel important, established. I began to look about me. It was time I began to be somebody. My latest hero was the man that kept the bar in the hotel. He owned the building, leased the hotel, and ran the bar himself. He was a fat man, and he wore a fancy striped vest with a heavy gold watch chain across it and a twenty-dollar gold piece dangled from the chain for a charm. He had been out to California. It was the only twenty-dollar piece in the town. He was a small politician, the town fixer. When anybody got into any trouble and had to go before the justice of the peace, he went down to the hotel and saw “Cy” Near. Cy would say, “Leave it to me, that’s all, leave it to me.” When it was all over the fellow would come down to “Cy’s” and order drinks for everybody in sight, several times. Then he would say, “What do I owe you, Cy?”

“Owe me? Owe me for what?”

“Why, you know, Cy, for fixing up that little trouble.”

“Oh, that’s what you mean. Say, you don’t owe me a thin dime, not a greasy nickel.” Cy would wave a fat arm in the air. “I don’t take money for helping my friends. I sell licker, good licker; that’s my business.”

The chap would buy a few more rounds of drinks, thank Cy again, and start for the door. Cy would shout, “Hey, George, I forgot to tell you. I’m rafflin’ off a hoss an’ buggy and you’d better take a half dozen tickets. You stand to win a good rig.”

Around election time Cy would round up all the fellows he could, remind them that he had befriended them, and say, “What do we care who’s President of the United States? What we want is a decent justice of the peace and town marshal.”

I decided to pattern my life after Cy’s. He was a popular, successful man. I began swinging my arms about, talking in a loud, hoarse voice, wearing my hat on the back of my head. Cy smoked big cigars. I tried one, and gave up the notion of smoking, at least for a while.

It was not long till my fancy for the saloon keeper changed. One evening when the train came in a single traveler got off. He was a tall, lean man, who walked like a soldier, erect and with a confident step. He had a short, stubby, gray mustache. He wore a gray suit, a gray hat, and held a pair of gloves in his hand. He walked quickly toward the front of the train and waited by the baggage car till a trunk was tossed out. An express man near by was told to take the trunk over to the hotel.

I followed the gray man to the hotel. Presently the trunk was left in front and I went to inspect it. It was a leather trunk, with brass fittings, plastered over with stickers from many hotels and steamship lines. It was scratched and battered and travel-stained. The thing fascinated me. I stood around and felt it, read the stickers, some of them from foreign parts of the world, and wondered what kind of man he could be that possessed such a wonderful trunk.

I was restless and disturbed when the porter took it upstairs out of my sight. It had roused strange thoughts and longings in my mind that I did not understand then. I know now that it suggested travel, adventure by land and sea—the world.

I now pulled my hat down from the back of my head and wore it properly. I straightened up, kept my hands out of my pockets, walked with a quick step, and assumed a confident, positive manner. I even began to think about a mustache, bristly, cut down like the gray man’s. I must have a gray suit, gray hat, gloves, and a leather trunk. A big problem for a boy with no income.

I determined to earn some money and looked about for after-school work. After my father, I thought the saloon man, Cy, was the wisest man in our town. For some reason which I never could figure out, I did not submit the matter to my father, but went to the saloon man. Maybe it was because he was easier to talk to. We went over the situation carefully. There was no job in sight that either of us could think of. At last Cy said, “Well, if you’re so crazy about a job, I’ll make one for you.”

Cy was a bachelor, and lived in a single room in the hotel. He opened and closed his bar, did all the work, was always drinking, but no one ever saw him drunk.

“You can come in here in the morning before school and clean the place up. Sweeping out ain’t no man’s job, anyway, and I’m tired of it. You can wash up the glasses and dust up around the bar. In the afternoon when you come home from school, you can be around in case there’s any errands. At night you can look after the pool table, collect for the games, and see that they don’t steal the balls. You can serve the drinks when there’s a card game, and bring a new deck when some sore loser tears the old one up.”

I was so grateful to Cy that I gave him my very best “thank you.” Here was a chance to get on in life, to have my own money, and be independent and mix around with men—to learn something of the world. I was so taken with this notion that I hunted up the broom, which was worn down to the strings, and began sweeping out the barroom. There were no customers in the place. Cy stood by, his hat on one side of his head, a big cigar in the opposite side of his mouth, hands in pockets, and eyed me thoughtfully. When I had the place about half swept out, Cy came over and took the broom out of my hands. He turned it about, examined it carefully. “Johnnie, I think you’re on the square with me, and I’m going to be on the up and up with you. You go to the store and get yourself a new broom.”

I did that, and swept the place all over again. Having started to work without my father’s permission I decided to say nothing till I got well settled in my job. I had a feeling that he might veto the whole thing if I told him at the start, but if I waited a while and had a few dollars saved up he might let me continue.

Father knew Cy very well. On rare occasions he went into the bar and had a drink and a talk with him.

I worked faithfully, early and late. At the end of the week, in the afternoon when there was no customer about, Cy mysteriously beckoned me into his “office,” a small closet of a room at one end of the bar. It was simply furnished—a table, a chair, a large spittoon, one picture on the wall opposite the desk. A picture of the mighty John L. Sullivan in fighting pose. Cy seated himself at the table, put on a pair of glasses, and drew out a small notebook. He looked carefully about the room. Seeing the door of his office open, he told me to close it.

To me Cy had always been much of a mystery. He had been “out West”—to Leadville, Deadwood, and San Francisco. He owned the latest pattern of repeating rifle and a couple of “forty-fives.” He played poker. I thought I was now to be initiated into some of the secret activities of his life. Maybe he would ask me to do something dangerous. Well, whatever it was, I would do it. He wrote something in the notebook, then took three silver dollars out of his pocket and put them in my hand, carefully, without clinking them.

“Johnnie, this is pay day.”

I went back to work happy. Pay day, three dollars of my own money. I would have a gray suit, gray hat, gloves, and a leather trunk in no time. I would soon be a tall, handsome, distinguished-looking gentleman, on Cy’s money. I jingled my three dollars loudly and could hardly wait for my father to come home so I could tell him about my working and ask him to mind my money for me.

The possession of three dollars changed me at once. I became independent, confident, secure. When father came in I went to him without a single misgiving, feeling sure he would approve. I had my money in my hand and my spirit was high. I told him I had been working for Mr. Near all week; that I had three dollars in wages and wanted him to take care of them for me. He took the money and put it in his pocket, saying: “All right. Let me know when you want it.”

“And you don’t mind my working for Cy?”

“No. I don’t mind. Cy told me all about it. You will have to learn to work some time. And you will have to learn lots of other things. So you may as well start at Cy’s.”

He turned to his paper, and I thought the thing was settled, but as I went out of the room I saw him twisting up the end of his long beard.

The school work was no trouble to me. I put in a year, and vacation time came along almost before I knew it. I was saving all the money I earned as assistant to Cy, and was looking forward to earning more during vacation. I brought home to my father a report from the school which seemed to show that I had made good progress. He glanced at the card and threw it to one side.

“I suppose you have the multiplication table this time, John?”

“Oh, yes, I learned it at last.”

“How many are eight times nine, John?”

“Seventy-two, sir.”

“Good. Seven times six?”

“Forty-two, sir.”

“Correct, John.”

He did not seem to be much interested in my correct and prompt answers; kept on looking at his paper. Finally he looked at me and said: “And eight times thirteen, John?”

I was stuck again. This one froze me stiff. I got mad, red in the face. I took pencil and paper out of my pockets, figured it out, and give him the result. It seemed that he was taking advantage of me. Nobody at school had ever asked me that question. I felt wronged. I thought of my money and my two big horse pistols. If I was to be treated in this way I would take my money and pistols and go away where I could get a square deal. And if I did not get a square deal, I’d take it.

Father looked at the paper I gave him. “Why, you have it right, John. That’s good, very good.” He was stroking his beard thoughtfully, and I could not tell whether he was smiling or making a face.

Vacation was almost over. I needed new books for the coming season and spoke to father about them one night.

“Never mind them now. We will see about them later. We are going away, going to Kansas City. I have been promoted after all these years.”

“But I will lose my job,” I demurred.

“I’ll get you another job. Don’t worry. Do you want a regular job, working all day, or would you like to go to school some more?”

I decided to have an all-day job, and let the school go.

“All right,” he said, “we’ll see about it.”

My father made no fuss about leaving the small town where he had spent ten years of his life. He had no close friends or cronies. After my mother died, he seldom spoke to any one but me, and I think he was glad to go away. He was a cold, hard, silent Scotch-Irishman. He took no part in social doings, never went to church, belonged to no clubs; nor was he enough interested in politics to become a citizen and exercise the high privilege of voting on election day.

My good-bys did not take much time. Cy was sorry to have me go. He laboriously wrote me a fine letter of recommendation which he gave me along with a large, worn silver watch, that wound with a key. It weighed almost a pound, and I was proportionately proud of it. My boy friends envied me in going away to a big city and impressed upon me the necessity for taking my pistols with me. Unnecessary advice; I had no intention of leaving them behind.

And last of all I hunted up old Beverly Shannon, the bad man. He was a hooknosed old man with hard eyes and a long chin whisker dripping tobacco juice. He had worn the Northern blue, and drew a small pension for a “bad leg.” Times when he was half drunk, limping around town in search of more drinks, some one would say: “Look out, ‘Bev.’ You’re limpin’ on the wrong leg.” This always brought a string of eloquent curses from him, and a warning that they had “better be keerful. I hain’t stopped killin’ jest ’cause Abe Lincoln says the war’s over.”

In those days all roads led to the harness shop, and there “old Bev” was always to be found when sober, outside the shop on a bench under a tree. There he met all the droughty farmers and entertained them with war stories and tales of his wanderings “out West.” He was always invited to drink with them. His pension kept him in food. His life held no serious problem.

I found him on his bench, sober and sorry for it. He passed the time of day with me, and I told him I was going away and had come to say good-by.

“Goin’ to the city, huh? Well, don’t let ’em rub it into you. You ain’t a very strong boy.” He was a foxy old man. He leered at me out of his cunning eyes. “Have you got any shootin’ irons?” Long John Silver, the pirate, could not have done any better in the way of complimenting a boy. I was fairly hooked. I assured him that I was well heeled, having two pistols.

“That’s good. You’ll git along all right. Now you run along. I’ve got to git me a farmer. I ain’t had my whisky yet.”

I hastily dug up enough silver out of my small pocket money for a couple of drinks, and gave it to him. As I went away I thought he looked like an old spider watching his web for a fly.

CHAPTER IV

In his new position father was forced to travel much, often leaving me to my own devices for weeks and sometimes months. I was put up at a small boarding house kept by a widow, who had two children. She was over-worked, sickly, and cranky. She had half a dozen boarders. Before he left, father gave me the money I had saved up, and told me to look about for a job.

There was nobody at the hotel that interested me. The widow was always whining and I kept away from her. Her children were too small for company, and I saw nothing of the other boarders except at mealtimes when they ate much and talked little.

The widow gave me a trunkful of books she had taken for a board bill. Among them I found a battered old volume of Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo,” on which I put in many nights. This sharpened my appetite for reading, and I went around secondhand bookstores, and got hold of the D’Artagnan tales and devoured them. Then “Les Misérables,” and on to the master, Dickens. The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I was miserable most of the time. As my money dwindled I resolved to find a job. I’d ask the landlady for advice.

I found her out in front, scrubbing the steps, red in the face and vicious looking. I told her I was thinking of going to work.

“Well, it’s about time you thought of that,” she snapped, “layin’ around here readin’ and eatin’ up your father’s money. You can get a job just like I did when my husband run off and left me with two brats on my hands. I just started out and asked for it at every place I come to till I got it, that’s all. And you can do it, too, if you got the gizzard.”

I left her and started my search. If there was a job in the city I determined to get it. I went through block after block, store after store, hour after hour. I got mostly “Noes” but some answered pleasantly, taking my name and address. I kept going until one morning I stopped in front of a cigar store—a dead-looking place, no customers. A man was reading a paper spread out on the counter. I went in and put my question to him. When he stood up I saw he was very tall and very thin. He looked sick. I had never seen an eye like his. It attracted me strangely. I could not have described it then, but I can now. It was a larcenous eye. He was very nice, asking many questions. How old was I? Did I ever work before? Where? I handed him Cy’s letter. He read it and asked me more questions. I have never answered so many questions since, except in a police station. At last he quit, and snapping himself together like a man coming out of a trance, he rapped his knuckles on the counter.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, kid. You come down here at nine o’clock every morning, open this joint up, and stay here till one o’clock. Then I come on and you go off till six in the evening. At six you come on and stay till ten, and call it a day. You can go to work right now. The sooner the better. In a week you will know the prices of the different things as well as I do, and I can leave you by yourself. Your wages will be three dollars a week and all the cigars you can smoke.”

“But I do not smoke.”

“Well, that’s your bad luck, kid, not mine. What do you say? Want to chance the job?”

I got right in behind the counter and he showed me the different cigars, cigarettes, and tobaccos, and told me their prices. In a week I knew all about the “store” and had learned to serve the few customers that came in, and to make change properly. I further learned that the store was but a “front” or blind for a poker game and dice games in the back room, and that I was a part of the “front.” My business was to sweep the place out in the morning, stand behind the counter in case any one wanted a cigar, and to keep an eye out for “new coppers on the beat” in the evening. The job was interesting. I soon came to know the poker players, crap shooters, and dice sharks who brought their victims into the back room to “clean” them. I often spent my afternoons in the back room watching the games and learning the life.

When there was no game, the sharks sat around practicing their tricks and bewailing their bad luck. Sometimes a poker player would show me how to “shuffle up a hand,” or cut the cards at a given place or “go out” with a hand. The dice shakers and crap shooters showed me their favorite “shots.” I was an apt scholar, absorbing everything like a young sponge. “Tex,” my boss (if he had any other name I never heard it), admonished me never to gamble. “Lay away from it, kid; it’s a tough racket. Look at me and my gatherings of forty years. I ain’t got a white quarter to my name; if it was rainin’ soup I couldn’t buy myself a tin spoon, and I’ve got a string of debts longer than a widow’s clothesline.”

Next door to the cigar store there was a small milk depot kept by a man and his wife. I used to go in every day for a glass of milk, and got acquainted with them. He delivered milk around his routes and the wife minded the shop. He was forever complaining about not being able to collect his money from “them women.” “Them women” were women who kept “parlor houses” in the Tenderloin district a few blocks from his milk store. They were good pay, but he could not get away from his work at the right hour to find them.

One day he told me he would pay me well if I would take the bills and go to the places and stay till I got the money. Here was a chance to earn more money, and I grabbed it. I went in and asked Tex, my boss, when would be the best time to call at those places to collect the milk bills.

If Tex had not gathered much of worldly goods in his forty years, he had at least learned something of the habits of “them women.” “I’ll tell you,” he said. “If you go in the morning you’ll find them asleep; in the afternoon they are out riding or shopping; and at night they will be either too busy or too drunk. Take my advice and go about five o’clock in the evening and you will catch them at dinner, or breakfast, or whatever they call it.”

I followed Tex’s advice that evening and collected three bills out of five. The milkman was pleased with my enterprise and gave me a dollar. Thereafter I collected his bills in the Tenderloin. I visited certain places weekly and was paid promptly. The women I met were nice to me, and I saw nothing of the other side of their lives. I worked faithfully at my two jobs, saved my money, and began looking in the store windows for my gray suit and gray hat. My work kept me so busy that I did not read much. Thoughts of travel and adventure were in the back of my mind, but that could wait. I was young; I must have money first. My two old, rusty pistols, almost forgotten now, lay neglected in the bottom of my little valise.

Tex had a “run of luck” and raised me to four dollars a week. I collected more bills for the milkman. Some of them he called “bad bills.” I kept after them persistently and nearly always got the money. The more hopeless the bill, the greater my commission was. I enjoyed going after them. The Tenderloin women were sure pay; and poor families were good, always had the money ready. I called on a tough saloon man, in a dingy little dive, about ten times to collect a two-dollar bill.

One day when I called he was serving several men at his bar, and when he saw me he said: “No use comin’ in here with that bill, kid. I ain’t goin’ to pay it. If your boss comes up here I’ll bust him in the nose. His milk is no good and he’s no good.”

“Mister,” I said, “I know he is no good, but I have to work and want to keep my job. If you knew just how hard my boss is you would feel sorry for me instead of being angry. He is so hard and no good that he told me if I did not collect your bill of two dollars to-day I need not come to work to-morrow, and that’s why I’m here.”

The customers looked at me. I stood my ground.

“Hell,” said the man, “I didn’t think he was that bad. Here, take the lousy money.”

I hurried back to the milkman. “Here’s Mr. Finucane’s two dollars.”

“How on earth did you ever collect it?”

“Oh, he just got tired and paid me, that’s all.”

“Well, I’ll make you a present of them,” said he handing me the money. “You certainly earned them.”

The following week I called at Madam Kate Singleton’s with my bill. The colored maid who opened the door showed me a seat in the hall and told me to wait. The madam was dressing. I sat there a few minutes and there was a ring at the door. The maid opened it and an excited little man brushed in, followed by two big men who were not a bit excited. As the door was closing I got a glimpse of a policeman in uniform on the steps.

One of the two men spoke to the maid who went upstairs, and in a minute the madam came down. She waved the men into a room off the hall and closed the door. I listened, but they talked too low for me to hear what they were saying. Presently the madam opened the door and called out: “Oh, girls, come downstairs every one of you.” Half a dozen girls appeared as if by magic. They were all brought into the room and the door closed again.

Nobody paid any attention to me. Now I heard loud voices in the room, but so many were talking at once that I could make nothing of it. Then one of the big men came out, went to the front door, opened it, and said to the policeman: “Send Mike around to the back; tell him to let nobody out. I’ll phone for the wagon. We’ll have to take them all to the station. They won’t talk.”

He disappeared into the room. I got up and opened the front door.

“Where are you goin’?” said the policeman.

“I’m going out, if you please.”

“Get back in there, if you please,” he snarled, “and stay there.”

While the officers were waiting for the wagon one of the big men went upstairs and brought down two “guests.” They were about half awake and looked as if they had been on a drunk. They sat down beside me on the settee. One of them fell into a sound sleep and the other sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands on the sides of his head. Neither of them spoke. In a few minutes the wagon arrived. The girls were all ordered to go out and get in it, which they did. Then the two men and I were ordered to do the same. The madam and one of the big men got into a hack that appeared to be waiting and drove away.

The excited little man who had caused all the trouble got into the wagon with the other big man and sat beside him.

When I was being put in the wagon I protested and tried to explain, but the detectives roughly ordered me to shut up. The “harness cop” who had been at the front door went back to his beat. I did not see anything of Mike, who had been ordered to stay at the back door.

The girls laughed and joked on the way to the station and shouted “rubberneck” at everybody that looked in at the back of the open wagon. The police station was on one corner of Market Square, one of the busiest corners in the city. Hundreds of people were there daily, selling their produce. Their time was about evenly divided between serving their customers and watching the patrol wagon spewing its loads of humanity into the city prison. It seemed to me they were all there as we were unloaded and hurried through a solid lane of them into the police station. Madam Singleton was there before us, and with her was a tall, sharp-looking man, gray and about fifty. I never found out who he was, but he looked like a lawyer.

The madam, the tall man, and the two big men, who were plain-clothes detectives, went to one side, talking earnestly for a minute or two. The rest of us just stood there and waited. One of the detectives went into an office off the big room we were in, and came out at once with a man in uniform he called “captain.” The captain was a big, red-faced, gray-haired, good-natured Irishman. “Well, what’s this all about?” he said, smiling. The detective stepped over to the small, nervous man and said to the captain:

“Captain, this man complains that one of the girls in Kate Singleton’s place took one hundred dollars, two fifty-dollar bills, from him some time last night or this morning. We went down to her place and saw the girl. She denies that she took it.

“We searched her room and couldn’t find it. The balance of them don’t know anything, so they say. He wants them all searched. We couldn’t do it there, so we pinched everybody in the house and here they are, ten of ’em, seven women and three men.”

The captain took the little man in hand. “Who are you?” The little man hesitated.

“Come on, out with it. If you want any help here you’ve got to come clean.”

The little man gave him a name. I could not hear it.

“Where are you from?”

“Emporia, Kansas, is my town.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a hog raiser.”

“When did you come to the city?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“What did you come here for?”

“Oh, just to look around.”

The captain smiled. “How much money did you have when you got off the train here yesterday morning?”

“I had two hundred dollars in paper money and some small change.”

“How much have you spent since you arrived here?”

“I spent twenty-five dollars for a suit of clothes and fifteen dollars for an overcoat. I paid a dollar for a room and I spent about five dollars around town.”

“Is that all? Are you sure, now? Think again.”

“Yes, that’s all,” said the hog man.

“You’re a liar,” Madam Singleton said in a cold, level voice. “You gave Julia ten dollars.”

“Now, now, Kate,” said the captain, “don’t get excited. I’ll take care of this thing all right.” Then to the hog man:

“Guess you forgot about that ten dollars, hey?”

“Yes, I forgot that,” he said meekly.

“All right; now, how much have you in your pockets?”

He took out some bills and counted them. “Forty-five dollars is all I have.”

The captain counted them and returned them. “That’s correct. Now, which girl took your money?”

The man pointed out the youngest girl of the bunch. She was about twenty or twenty-two, a plump girl with a boyish face and lots of black hair. She was pleasant looking, but not pretty, and she did not look as worn and tired as the others.

She looked straight at him but never opened her mouth. The lawyer-looking man said to her: “Julia, did you take that man’s money?”

“No,” she answered.

“Take all these women in and have the matron search them. Madam Singleton, you have no objection to being searched, have you?” smiled the captain.

“None at all, captain, only make it short and sweet. I am losing time and money here.”

They all trooped off to a room down the hall.

An officer came out from behind the desk and searched me and the two drunks. We had no fifty-dollar bills, so he told us to sit on a bench in front of his desk. The lawyer, or bondsman, or fixer, or whatever he was, paced up and down the room nervously. The captain had gone back to his office.

In a few minutes a big, mannish-looking woman with red hands and a tough walk came along.

“Well, what did you find?” said the lawyer.

“Nothing. They didn’t have a hundred dollars among them.”

The lawyer then hunted up the detective and the hog man. The detective got the captain. The matron made her report and the officer who searched me and the other two did the same.

The captain turned to the hog man.

“All these people have been searched and your money has not been found. What do you want to do now?”

“I want that girl locked up. I know she got my money. I know I had two fifty-dollar bills rolled up with my other bills when I went into that house, and when I got to my room I looked at my money and they were gone.”

“How long was it before you got to your room after you left Madam Singleton’s?” asked the lawyer.

“Oh, I walked around for an hour or two.”

“Oh, you did, eh? Why, you probably had your pocket picked on the street.”

The big captain roared out a laugh and said to the lawyer:

“It must have been an Emporia, Kansas, pickpocket. No Missouri dip would take his roll, extract two fifty-dollar bills, and put the rest back in his pocket.”

The lawyer appeared to get angry. “You’ve searched everybody but me.”

He turned to the hog man fiercely. “Do you want me searched?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I want you searched. You are just the kind of a yap that gets up in the middle of the night and hides his money so carefully that he has to have a policeman find it for him in the morning. Go ahead and search him,” he said to the detective.

“All right, go ahead,” said the hog man.

The detective went through his trousers carefully, placing everything on a counter, then through his vest, then into his inner coat pocket. No money. Then, as an afterthought, just to make a good job of it, he felt in the coat pockets. In the first one was a bag of tobacco, and as he pulled a handkerchief from the last coat pocket two bills fluttered to the floor.

The lawyer stooped, picked up the two bills, looked at them, and handed them to the captain. The hog man’s eyes bulged till they looked ready to fall out of his head. He was making a dry noise down in his throat that sounded like the quack of a duck. The captain handed him the bills.

“Is this your money?” he scowled.

After inspecting the bills and recovering his voice, the hog man said: “Yes, I think it is.”

The lawyer plucked him by the lapel with one hand, and shook the other in his face. “You dirty little swine, get your property off that counter. Get out of here and back to your hog pastures before I have you locked up.”

The dazed and thoroughly crushed victim hastily gathered up his things and went out with them in his hands.

I was pop-eyed with amazement at this swift, smashing reversal of the situation. The two drunks beside me were but mildly interested. Nobody, from the captain down to Julia, the accused, seemed surprised. I could not understand why the whole crowd did not fall on the hog man and tear him to pieces. The captain disappeared into his office. The detective walked out to the sidewalk. The lawyer turned to Kate and the girls, bowing:

“Madam, and ladies, shall we depart?”

“It’s about time,” said the madam in a positive voice. “I’m hungry enough to eat a raw dog.”

They all moved out into the street. I was left on the bench with the two drunks. The detective strolled back in. The desk man pointed to us.

“What will I do with this outfit, Hayes?”

Hayes appeared to be disgusted. “Oh, charge them with drunk.”

“The kid’s not drunk.”

“Vag him then.”

“What were you doing in that joint, anyway?” to me.

“I went in there to collect a milk bill, sir, and was waiting for the money when all this happened.”

“Where is the bill?”

I produced it.

“Do you work for this man?” he asked, after inspecting it.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why in hell didn’t you say so at the start?”

“I tried to, sir, but everybody told me to shut up. The policeman would not let me go out.”

He turned to the drunks and asked them if they had ten dollars to put up for bail to appear in the morning. They had, and the desk man took them into another room. I saw them no more. When he came back, Hayes said:

“Take the kid upstairs: lock him up with George. I’ll find out about him.”

The women were gone, the drunks were out, and I was the only one detained. It looked all wrong to me. The sergeant took me down to the end of the hall and opened an iron door. It was as if he had opened the door to hell. My blood stopped circulating. We stepped inside and he locked the door behind us. Never since, except perhaps in the half dreams of opium, have I been so frozen with horror. We were standing on a balcony overlooking the half basement that served as the city prison. In front of us was a latticework iron door that opened on an iron stairway leading down into the cell house. The cells were built around the four sides of a cement-floored square, and opened into it. It was supper time and pandemonium was on.

The sergeant rapped on the iron door with his heavy keys, trying to attract the attention of some one below. Failing to make himself heard, he told me to stay there till he could get a “trusty” to take me upstairs. He went out the way we came in, and left me locked in between the two doors on the balcony. The cells below had all been thrown open and there were about fifty prisoners in the open space. They seemed to be about equally divided between negroes and whites, of all ages. The air choked me; it was putrid, heavy, and thick with the stench of foul food, foul clothes, foul bodies, and foul sewers. In the farthest corner of the square a gigantic black was standing guard over a huge smoking caldron.

He was shirtless and barefoot. A leather belt supported his overalls, his only clothing. Sweat glinted on his broad back and chest. He was armed with a long-handled ladle which he dished out the “stew” with, or beat back the stronger and more venturesome prisoners who crowded too closely around the caldron.

I saw no jailers or guards. There was no pretense at order. The younger and stronger men shoved and elbowed their way to the big stew pot, snarling and snapping at each other like a pack of starved dogs. Old men and young boys stood around waiting meekly for the strong to be fed first.

The big negro wielded his ladle, filling the tin pans nearest him. Bread was being served from a large box in another spot, but there appeared to be plenty of it and there was no scramble there. Several new-looking prisoners walked about, making no effort to get food. They were “fresh fish,” new arrivals, who had not yet acquired the “chuck horrors,” that awful animal craving for food that comes after missing half a dozen meals.

At last the weaker ones were served. The cursing, shouting, and fighting were stilled. The big negro wheeled his stew pot away and the empty bread box disappeared. Some of the prisoners went into their cells to eat; some sat down outside on the floor, while others ate standing. Some had spoons, others ate with their fingers, sopping at the bottom of the pan with a piece of bread.

The meal was quickly over. The tin pans, unwashed, were thrown into the cells. The young negroes began singing and buck dancing. White men who had been tearing at each other ten minutes before around the big pot were now laughing and talking in a friendly fashion, and everybody lit up a smoke. The air was so filled with tobacco smoke and steam from the stew that I could barely distinguish forms below.

It was growing dark and gas jets were lighted but gave no light. I heard a rattling of keys; somewhere some one shouted “Inside.” The shadowy forms shuffled into their cells, and there came the tremendous din of iron doors being slammed shut. The prison was locked up for the night.

I do not know how long I had been standing there. Not more than fifteen minutes, but it seemed a lifetime. A trusty prisoner appeared at my side.

“Come on, you.”

I followed him up a short stairway where he opened a door and we went into a short hall with cells on either side. It was directly above the city prison. As we passed down the hall I heard women’s voices; one of them shouted, “Fresh fish, girls.”

Faces appeared at the barred doors. A colored girl, as we passed her cell, said: “Hello, boy, what you-all been doin’?”

At the end of the hall the trusty stopped at a large room with a barred door. I could look inside. The room was well lighted. Newspapers were lying about. I saw two clean-looking cots, a table on which were books and a box of cigars, and a couple of chairs.

A man was pacing up and down the room, smoking. He wore a comfortable-looking pair of slippers and was in his shirt sleeves. He paid no attention to us till the trusty said: “George, the skipper sent up some company for you.”

He turned sharply and came to the door. He was a fine-looking man about forty years of age, well groomed, fresh shaven. He was tall. His hair was gray. His face was pleasant to look at. He might have been a doctor or lawyer. I found myself wondering what he could have done to get locked in a jail. He looked at me carefully for a minute. When he spoke his voice was surprisingly pleasant. There was a suggestion of the South in his drawl.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, kid, but if you are lousy don’t come in here, that’s all.”

The trusty assured George that I was not lousy, that there was no charge against me and I would be out in an hour or two.

I was locked in.

I had no jail manners then, so I just stood at the door with my hat on, intending to wait there till some one came to let me go. All prisoners do that the first time. Presently my companion told me to take my hat off and sit down, and try to be comfortable.

“You may get out in an hour and you may not. You never can tell. You are beginning young. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“What are you pinched for?”

I told him all about it.

“That’s everyday business here,” he said. “Usually the sucker is a married man and can’t squawk. But when he does squawk, like this one, the only thing to do is to blow back his money. Either the lawyer or one of the girls eased it into his coat pocket. That’s better than returning it to him and admitting that they tried to rob him.

“The whole thing was a stand-in from the captain down. Everybody’s satisfied. The sucker has his money, the girls are all out, Kate will charge Julia fifty dollars for the lawyer’s fee, and that ends it.

“You appear to be the only real sucker in the bunch. By God! Those coppers are fierce. They’ll leave you here till you rot. I’ve always said a copper is a copper till you cut his head off.”

He got a tin cup and scraped it across the bars of the door. The trusty bounced in. “Go down and get the desk sergeant.”

I never saw a prisoner get quicker action. The sergeant came at once.

“It’s a rotten shame to keep this kid locked up, Sam. Did you hear his story? Go down and get Hayes and tell him to let him go home. Send a messenger to his boss. I’ve got plenty of money down there; charge it to me.”

The sergeant went out, promising to “look into it right away.” Our cell—it was more like a room—was in a small corridor set apart for the women prisoners’ quarters. Down the hall I could hear them calling to each other and chatting back and forth from their cells. Somewhere a colored woman was singing a mournful dirge about “That Bad Stackalee.” The verses were endless. The point of the song seemed to be that the negro bully, Stackalee, had been killed with “a big forty-four gun over a damned old Stetson hat.” In the most harrowing tones at the end of every verse the singer moaned the sad refrain, “That ba-a-d Stackalee.”

Later I came to know that this song is a favorite among negroes when in great trouble, such as being locked in jail, being double-crossed by a friend, or parting with their money in a dice game. At such times thirty or forty verses of “Stackalee” invariably restores the laughing good humor and child-like confidence of the wronged one.

We heard a rattling of keys and a door opening. George put the side of his face against the cell door, so he could see down the hall.

“Get your hat, kid; here they are.”

The detective came up with my two bosses—the milkman and Tex, the gambler. The trusty opened the door.

“Out you go,” said the detective, “and the next time you get jammed up say something before you get thrown in. Holler before you’re hurt; that’s my motto.”

I said good-by to my benefactor, George, and thanked him awkwardly. When I met him years after and had a chance to return his kindness, I learned he was a most distinguished criminal; a man who had stolen fortunes and spent them, who had killed a crooked pal, and served many prison sentences.

“Forget it, kid, and don’t let them scare you out of your job. You go right back next week and collect your bills.”

Tex and the milkman escorted me to the cigar store. The evening games had not started when we went into the back room, so I told my story again. The milkman sympathized and promised to raise my commission on the bills. Tex was relieved to learn that I had not mentioned his “store” to the police.

Collection day came around again, and I made my rounds without incident till I got to Madam Singleton’s, the last place. A colored maid, the only person that escaped arrest the week before, opened the door. When she saw me she screamed at the top of her voice: