But Hoppner rose from the camp fire that we'd been sleeping by, stretched, and remarked, "now, thank Christ, I'll be able to find a good seat in a pub again, just like in Sydney, and all the booze I can drink. We can go to some sailors' boarding house here, tell them we want to ship out, and they'll furnish us with the proper amount of drinks and take care of us, all hunky dory, till they find us a berth on ship ... of course they'll be well paid for their trouble ... two months' advance pay handed over to them by the skipper ... but that won't bother me a bit."

From the hill on which we lay encamped we saw all the ships in the harbour. I no longer feared the sea. Your true adventurer forgets danger and perils experienced as a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth.

* * * * *

We met a sailor on the street, who, though at first a stranger, soon became our friend and, with the quick hospitality of the sea, steered us to a pub known as the Green Emerald, bought us drinks, and introduced us to Mother Conarty, the proprietress.

"I'll ship ye out all right, but where's your dunnage?"

We confessed that we had run away from our ships down at Sydney.

The old sailor had spoken of Mother Conarty as rough-mannered, but a woman with "a good, warm heart."

She proved it by taking us in to board, with no dunnage for her to hold as security.

"Oh, they're good lads, I'm sure," vouched our sailor-friend, speaking of us as if we had been forecastle mates of his for twenty voyages on end ... the way of the sea!

Now Mother Conarty was not stupid. She was a great-bodied, jolly Irishwoman, but she possessed razor-keen, hazel eyes that narrowed on us a bit when she first saw us. But the woman in her soon hushed her passing suspicions. For Hoppner was a frank-faced, handsome lad, with wide shoulders and a small waist like a girl's. It was Hoppner's good looks took her in. She gave us a room together.

* * * * *

There was a blowsy cheeked bar-maid, Mother Conarty's daughter. She knew well how to handle with a few sharp, ironic remarks anyone who tried to "get fresh" with her ... and if she couldn't, there were plenty of husky sailormen about, hearty in their admiration for the resolute, clean girl, and ready with mauling fists.

* * * * *

"Mother Conarty's proud o' that kid o' hers, she is."

"And well she may be!"

* * * * *

"I've been thinkin' over you b'yes, an' as ye hain't no dunnage wit' ye, I'm thinkin' ye'll be workin' fer yer board an' room."

"We're willing enough, mother," I responded, with a sinking of the heart, while Hoppner grimaced to me, behind her back.

We scrubbed out rooms, and the stairs, the bar, behind the bar, the rooms back and front, where the sailors drank. We earned our board and room ... for a few days.

* * * * *

At the Green Emerald I met my first case of delirium tremens. And it was a townsman who had 'em, not a sailor. The townsman was well-dressed and well-behaved—at first ... but there lurked a wild stare in his eye that was almost a glaze ... and he hung on the bar and drank and drank and drank. It apparently had no effect on him, the liquor that he took.

"Say, but you're a tough one," complimented Molly.

But it began in the afternoon. He picked up a stray dog from the floor and began kissing it. And the dog slavered back, returning his affection. Then he dropped the dog and began picking blue monkeys off the wall ... wee things, he explained to us ... that he could hold between thumb and forefinger ... only there were so many of them ... multitudes of them ... that they rather distressed him ... they carried the man away in an ambulance.

* * * * *

Hoppner and I tired of the ceaseless scrubbing. One day we simply walked out of the Green Emerald and never showed up again. Hoppner stayed on in town.

I found that the Valkyrie had run up from Sydney to coal at Newcastle, for the West Coast. I thought that in this case a little knowledge was not a dangerous thing, but a good thing, as long as I confined that knowledge to myself. I knew that the Valkyrie was there. It was not necessary that the officers of the boat should know I was there ... which I wasn't, for I turned south, my swag on my back, and made Sydney again.

* * * * *

In Sydney and "on the rocks," that is with nothing to eat and no place to sleep but outdoors.

Of course I couldn't keep away from the ships. I arrived at the Circular Quay. I ran into the Sailors' Mission. They were serving tea and having a prayer-meeting. I wandered in.

A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me heartily welcome. Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a human way genuinely felt.

After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in any way.

"I suppose you can. I'm on the rocks bad."

He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a couple of shillings beside.

"I wonder if there's anything else I can do?"

"Yes, I'm a poet," I ventured, "and I'd like to get Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to read again." I said this as much to startle the man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I was hungry for Chaucer.

Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the time I was with him he proved a "good sport." He didn't take advantage of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.

He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed religion with him.

* * * * *

It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed myself full on Chaucer.

I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she must convert.

* * * * *

"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.

Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic visions marched across my mind at the question.

"I'd like to, right enough."

"Then here's a chance for you," and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin, pointing out an advertisement for cattlemen on the steamboat, South Sea King, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province of Pechi-li, Northern China.

"What are they sending cattle away up there for?"

"Supplies for troops ... The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the number given in the advertisement, and I'm sure they'll sign you on as cattleman, if you want the job."

"All right. I'll go now."

"No," looking me over dubiously, "you'd better not go there or anywhere else, in your present rig ... you're too ragged to apply even for such work ... hang around till morning, and I'll go home to-night and bring you a decent coat, at least. Your coat is worse than your trousers ... though they are ravelled at the bottoms and coming through in the left knee ... every time you take a step I can see a glint of white through the cloth, and," walking round me in a tour of inspection, "the seat might break through at any moment." All this was said without a glint of humour in his eyes.

* * * * *

Next morning the sky-pilot came down very late. It was twelve. But he had not forgotten me. "Here's the coat," and he solemnly unwrapped and trailed before my astonished gaze a coat with a long, ministerial tail. I put it on. The tail came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The sky-pilot did not.

Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, "You do look rather odd!"

The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.

"I say, what's so funny?"

"Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat."

"If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh about."

* * * * *

At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced, old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved lively beyond his appearance.

"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then, rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no, there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by ten o'clock this morning."

I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.

* * * * *

I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the South Sea King ... which lay in the harbour.

At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called "Nippers," he said. He, too, was going with the South Sea King ... not as a cattleman, but as stowaway. He urged me to stow away along with him. And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of "Skinny," which the rest called me during the voyage.

* * * * *

We strolled up to the men and joined them.

"Hello, kids!"

"Hello, fellows! Are you the cattlemen for the South Sea King?"

"Right you are, my lad ... we are that!"

The men went on with their arguing. They were fighting the Boer War all over again with their mouths. Some of them had been in it. Many of them had tramped in South Africa. They shouted violently, profanely, at each other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.

Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate forgotten ... I couldn't discover what it was about, myself ... only that one man was a fool ... another, a silly ass ... another, a bloody liar!

* * * * *

The launch which was to carry them to the South Sea King at this moment started nosing into the dock, on a turbulent zig-zag across the harbour; and the men forgot their quarrelling. It brought up at the foot of a pile and made fast.

"Come on, Skinny," Nippers urged me aggressively, "it's front seats or nothing. Act as if you owned the boat." We thrust ahead of the others and swarmed down the ladder ... heaping, swearing, horse-playing, the cattlemen filled the launch from stern to bow.

Nippers had been a professional stowaway since his tenth year. He had gone all over the world in that fashion, he had informed me. He was now sixteen. I was almost eighteen.

His six years of rough life with rough men had brought him to premature manhood, taught him to exhibit a saucy aplomb to everybody, to have at his finger-ends all the knockabout resourcefulness and impudence that the successful vagrant must acquire in order to live at all as an individual....

* * * * *

We were the first on deck.

"Where are the cattlemen's bunks?" Nippers asked of an oiler who stood, nonchalant, somewhat contemptuous, looking over the side at the seething, vociferous cattlemen.

Not wasting a word on us, the oiler pointed aft over his shoulder, with a grimy thumb.

We found a dark entrance like the mouth to a cave, that led down below. In our hurry we lost our footing on the greasy ladder and tumbled all the way to the bottom.

We had not time to rub our bruises. We plumped down and under the lower tier of bunks ... just in time ... the men came pouring down helter-skelter ... the talking, arguing, voluble swearing, and obscenity was renewed ... all we could see, from where we lay, was a confusion of legs to the knee, moving about....

They settled down on the benches about the table. They slackened their talk and began smacking their lips over ship-biscuit, marmalade, and tea.

* * * * *

Still we lay in silence. The screw of the propeller had not started yet. We dared not come out or we would be put ashore.

* * * * *

We were hungry. We could hear their tin plates clattering and clinking as the cattlemen ate supper, and smell the smell of cornbeef and boiled potatoes. Our mouths ran from hunger.

—"wish I had something to scoff, I'm starvin'," groaned Nippers, "but we'll hafta lay low till the bloody tub pulls out or we'll get caught an' dumped ashore."

Supper done with, the men were sitting about and smoking. They were soon, however, summoned up on deck, by a voice that roared down to them, from above, filling their quarters with a gust of sound.

We were alone now, perhaps,—it was so still.

With an almost imperceptible slowness, Nippers thrust his head out, as cautiously as a turtle ... he emerged further.

He made a quick thrust of the arm for a platter of beef and potatoes, that stood, untouched, on the table ... someone coughed. We had thought we were alone. Nippers jerked back. The tin came down with a clatter, first to the bench, then to the floor. A big friendly potato rolled under to where we were. We seized on it, divided it, ate it.

Contrary to our conjecture, some of the men must have stayed below. Someone jumped out of a bunk.

"There's rats down here!"

"—mighty big rats, if you arsks me."

"It's not rats," and I could hear a fear in the voice that quavered the words forth, "I tell you, buddy, this ship is haunted."

"—haunted!" boomed the voice of a man coming down the ladder, "you stop this silly nonsense right now ... don't spread such talk as that ... it's stowaways!"

We saw a pair of legs to the knees again. We lay still, breathless. A watch chain dangled down in a parabolic loop. Then followed a round face, beef-red with stooping. It looked under apoplectically at us.

"Ah, me b'yes, c'm on out o' there!"

And out we came, dragged by the foot, one after the other, as I myself in my childhood have pulled frogs out from a hole in a brook-bank.

"I've been hearing them for hours, Mister," spoke up the little, shrivelled, leathery-skinned West Indian negro, who spoke English without a trace of dialect, "and I was sure the place was haunted."

* * * * *

We stood before the captain, cap deferentially in hand.

But he looked like anything but a man in charge of a ship. He was short. In outward appearance, moreover, he was like a wax doll. He had waxen-white cheeks with daubs of pink as if they had been put there from a rouge pot. His hair was nicely scented, oiled, and patted down. His small hands were white and perfectly manicured.

Nippers began to snicker openly at him. But the sharp variety and incisiveness of the oaths he vented at us, soon disabused us of any opinion we might have held that he was sissified....

"What's wrong with you, you young —— —— —— —— you?" began the captain. The snicker died slowly from Nipper's lips, and in his face dawned an infinite, surprised respect....

Then, after he had subdued us:

"So you're stowaways, eh?... and you think you're going to be given a free ride to Brisbane and let go ashore, scot free?... not much! You'll either go to jail there or sign up here, as cattlemen for the trip to China—even though I can see that your mouths are still wet from your mothers' tits!" And he ended with a blasphemous flourish.

Nippers and I looked at each other in astonishment. Of course we wanted to sign on as cattlemen. No doubt some of the men hired at Sydney had failed to show up at the wharf.

The ship's book was pushed before us.

"Sign here!" I signed "John Gregory" with satisfaction. Nippers signed after, laboriously.

"And now get aft with you, you ——!" cursed the captain, dismissing us with a parting volley that beat about our ears.

"Gawd, but the skipper's a right man enough!" worshipped Nippers.

We hurried down the ladder to gobble up what was left of the cornbeef and potatoes.... Nippers looked up at me, with a hunk of beef sticking from his mouth, which he poked in with the butt-end of his knife.... "Say, didn't the old man cuss wonderful, and him lookin' like such a lady!"

* * * * *

There was plenty of work to do in the few days it took to reach Brisbane, where the cattle were to be taken aboard. The boat was an ordinary tramp steamer, and we had to make an improvised cattleboat out of her. Already carpenters had done much to that effect by erecting enclosures on the top deck, the main deck, by putting up stalls in the hold. Every available foot was to be packed with the living flesh of cattle.

We gave the finishing touches to the work, trying to make the boarding and scantling more solid—solid enough to withstand the plunging, lurching, and kicking of fear-stricken, wild Queensland steers unused to being cooped up on shipboard....

* * * * *

We had made fast to a dock down the Brisbane River, several miles out from Brisbane ... nearby stood the stockyards, with no cattle in them yet.

In a day's time of lusty heaving and running and hauling we had taken on the bales of compressed fodder that were to feed the cattle for the twenty-day trip to Taku, China.

Then the little, fiery, doll-like skipper made the tactical error of paying each man a couple of bob advance on his forthcoming wages.

In a shouting, singing mob we made for Brisbane, like schoolboys on a holiday.

Two shilling apiece wasn't much. But a vagabond can make a little silver go far. And there are more friends to be found by men in such a condition, more good times to be had—of a sort—than a world held by more proper standards can imagine.

In both brothel and pub the men found friends. There were other sailors ashore, there were many swagmen just in from the bush—some with "stakes" they had earned on the ranches out in the country ... and in their good, simple hearts they were not averse to "standing treats."

* * * * *

As if by previous appointment, one by one we drifted together, we cattlemen of the South Sea King—we drifted together and found each other in the fine park near the Queensland House of Parliament.

We had, all of us, already over-stayed our shore-leave by many hours. We grouped together in informal consultation as to what should be done—should we go back to the ship or not?

"We might run into a typhoon ... with all them crazy cattle on board!" voiced one....

* * * * *

Nevertheless, perhaps because it was, after all, the line of least resistance, because there regular meals awaited us, and a secure place of sleep, by twos and threes we drifted back, down the long, hot, dusty road, to where the South Sea King lay waiting for us ... the mate, the captain, and the cattle-boss furious at us for our over-stayed shore-leave....

* * * * *

The cattle had been there these many hours, bellowing and moving restlessly in their land-pens, the hot sun blazing down upon them.

* * * * *

Our cattle-boss, it seems, knew all about the handling of his animals on land. But not on sea. When, the following morning, we started early, trying to drive the cattle on board ship, they refused to walk up the runway. In vain the boss strewed earth and sod along its course, to make it seem a natural passage for them ... they rushed around and around their pens, kicking up a vast, white, choking dust,—snorting, bellowing, and throwing their rumps out gaily in sidelong gallopades ... all young Queensland steers; wild, but not vicious. Still full of the life and strength of the open range....

Then we scattered bits of the broken bales of their prepared food, along the runway, to lure them ... a few were led aboard thus. But the captain cried with oaths that they didn't have time to make a coaxing-party of the job....

At last the donkey-engine was started, forward. A small cable was run through a block, and, fastened by their halters around their horns, one after the other the steers, now bellowing in great terror, their eyes popping for fear—were hoisted up in the air, poised on high, kicking, then swung down, and on deck.

You had to keep well from under each one as he descended, or suffer the befouling consequences of his fear ... we had great laughter over several men who came within the explosive radius ... till the mate hit on the device of tying each beast's tail close before he was jerked up into the air.

What a pandemonium ... shouting ... swearing ... whistles blowing signals ... the chugging respiration of the labouring donkey-engine ... and then the attempted stampede of each trembling, fear-crazy animal as soon as he rose four-footed, on deck, after his ride through the sky....

* * * * *

The ship was crammed as full as Noah's ark. In the holds and on the main deck stood the steers, in long rows....

On the upper deck, exposed to all the weather, were housed the more tractable sheep, who had, without objection, bleated their way aboard docilely up the runway—behind their black ram ... that the cattle-boss had to help on a bit, by pulling him the few first yards by his curly horns.

* * * * *

As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up. Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the river....

Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the ocean.

* * * * *

There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle head, forward—as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been separated—he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.

* * * * *

But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct personages:

There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of the sheep on the upper deck;

There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;

The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm—made that way from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;

There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of night-watchman, "to break him of his superstitious silliness";

There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty ... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the minute the South Sea King reached an English port, they loved each other so deeply!) ...

Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me, informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over ... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.

One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman, bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing the men, as was his duty,—found the big fellow, with whom he used to crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep. The watchman shook him by the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.

The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper, for that day....

The next day was Sunday. It was a still, religious afternoon.

We men ranged in two rows aft. The body had been sewn up in coarse canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.

The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ... an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.

No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body, like a floral decoration flung after....

* * * * *

We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy, monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites, with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the confined existence that was theirs—such an abrupt transition from the open range—they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous, pleading faces....

* * * * *

If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else surviving a day's work in the hold.

For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ... and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes, to protect our feet from the harder hoof.

Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.

Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic steer-kicks,—each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell ... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky and feel as if we had come into paradise....

* * * * *

"I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!"

"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"

* * * * *

At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom—I studied with greater pleasure than I ever did before or since.

* * * * *

As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were broken-spirited things.

But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air, "The Black Devil," as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead. He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a gelding. The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.

He had evidently been someone's pet before he had been sold for live meat, to be shipped to China.

When we took him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us hell's own fight—out of sheer indignation—back there in Brisbane. He flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies. Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were of cardboard.

The agile little ex-jockey kept running in front of him, hitting him on the nose and nimbly escaping—in spite of his wing-like, wasted arm, quicker than his pursuer ... that smashed through, while he ducked and turned....

"I'll be God-damned," yelled the captain from the safe vantage of the bridge, "fetch me my pistol," to the cabin boy, "I'll have to shoot the beast!"

All this while the big black Jamaica cook had been calmly looking on, leaning fearlessly out over the half-door of the galley ... while the infuriated animal rushed back and forth.

The cook said nothing. He disappeared, and reappeared with a bunch of carrots which he held out toward "The Black Devil."...

In immediate transformation, the little beast stopped, forgot his anger, stretched forth his moist, black nuzzle, sniffing ... and walked up to the cook, accepting the carrots. The cook began to stroke the animal's nose....

"You little black devil," he said, in a soft voice, "you're all right ... they don't understand you ... but we're going to be pals—us two—aren't we?"

Then he came out at the door to where the steer stood, took "The Black Devil," as we henceforth called him, gently by the under-jaw,—and led him into a standing-place right across from the galley.

* * * * *

As we struck further north under vast nights of stars, and days of furnace-hot sunshine, the heat, confinement, and dry, baled food told hideously on the animals ... the sheep seemed to endure better, partly because they were not halted stationary in one spot and could move about a little on the top deck.... But they suffered hardships that came of changing weather.

* * * * *

Especially the cattle in the lower hold suffered, grew weak and emaciated.... We were ever on the watch to keep them from going down ... there was danger of their sprawling over each other and breaking legs in the scramble. So when one tried to lie down, his tail was twisted till the suffering made him rise to his feet ... sometimes a steer would be too weak to regain his feet ... in such a case, in a vain effort to make the beast rise, I have seen the Irish foreman twist the tail nearly off, while the animal at first bellowed, then moaned weakly, with anguish ... a final boot at the victim in angry frustration....

Last, a milky glaze would settle over the beast's eyes ... and we would drag him out and up by donkey-engine, swing him over and out, and drop him, to float, a bobbing tan object, down our receding ocean-path.

* * * * *

The coast of Borneo hovered, far and blue, in the offing, when we struck our first, and last, typhoon. The mate avowed it was merely the tail-end of a typhoon; if that was the tail-end, it is good that the body of it did not strike down on us.

The surface of the ocean was kicked up into high, ridge-running masses. The tops of the waves were caught in the wind and whipped into a wide, level froth as if a giant egg-beater were at work ... then water, water, water came sweeping and mounting and climbing aboard, hill after bursting hill.

The deck was swept as by a mountain-torrent ... boards whirled about with an uncanny motion in them. They came forward toward you with a bound, menacing shin and midriff,—then on the motion of the ship, they paused, and washed in the opposite direction.

Here and there a steer broke loose, which had to be caught and tethered again. But in general the animals were too much frightened to do anything but stand trembling and moaning ... when they were not floundering about....

Down below was a suffocating inferno. For the hatches that were ordinarily kept open for more air, had to be battened down till the waves subsided.

* * * * *

At the very height of the storm, we heard a screaming of the most abject fear.

The jockey had passed, in forgetful excitement, too close to his enemy, The Black Devil—who had not forgotten, and gave him a horn in the side, under the withered arm.

Several sailors carried the bleeding man aft to the captain ... who dressed his wound with fair skill. The jockey was not so badly injured, all things considered. The thrust had slanted and made only a flesh wound ... which enabled the fellow to loaf on a sort of sick-leave, during the rest of the trip.

* * * * *

The storm over, frantically we tore off the hatches again ... to find only ten steers dead below. The rest were gasping piteously for air. It was a day's work, heaving the dead stock overboard ... including the two more which died of the after-effects....

When we went to look the sheep over, we found that over a third of them had been washed overboard. The rest were huddled, in frightened, bleating heaps, wondering perhaps what kind of an insane world it was that they had been harried into.

* * * * *

The story of this cattleboat unfolds freshly before me again, out of the records of memory ... the pitiful suffering of the cattle ... the lives and daily doings of the rowdy, likeable men, who were really still undeveloped children, and would so go down to the grave ... with their boasting and continual vanity of small and trivial things of life.

* * * * *

All the time I was keeping a diary of my adventures ... in a large, brown copybook, with flexible covers. I carried it, tightened away, usually, in the lining of my coat, but occasionally I left it under the mattress of my bunk.

Nippers observed me writing in it one day.

That night it was gone. I surmised who had taken it.

Seeking Nippers, I came upon him haltingly reading my diary aloud to an amused circle of cattlemen, in his quarters aft.

"Give me that book back!" I demanded.

He ignored me.

"Give him a rap in the kisser, Skinny!"

I drew back, aiming a blow at Nippers. He flung the book down and was on me like the tornado we had just run through ... he was a natural-born fighter ... in a twinkling I was on the floor, with a black eye, a bleeding mouth.

I flung myself to my feet, full of fury ... then something went in my brain like the click of a camera-shutter ... I had an hallucination of Uncle Landon, coming at me with a club....

I plumped into a corner, crouching. "Don't hit me any more ... please don't, Uncle Lan!"

"He's gone crazy!"

"Naw, he's only a bloody, bleedin' coward," returned another voice, in surprise and disgust.

Someone spat on me. I was let up at last.... I staggered forward to my bunk. My book had been handed back to me. It's a wonder I didn't throw myself into the sea, in disgust over the queer fit that had come over me. I lay half the night, puzzling ... was I a coward?

Not unless an unparalleled change had occurred in me. I had fought with other children, when a boy ... had whipped two lads at once, when working in the Composite factory, that time they spit into my book.

* * * * *

One day a fishing-junk hove into sight, just as if it had sailed out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration,—swinging there in the mouth of a blood-red sunset ... then, like magic, appeared another and another and another....

"Fishing-junks," ejaculated the mate, "—pretty far out, too, but a Chink'll risk his life for a few bleedin' cash ... and yet he won't fight at all ... an' if you do him an injury he's like as not likely to up an' commit suicide at your door, to get even!"

"That's a bally orful way to get even with a henemy!" exclaimed a stoker, who sat on the edge of the forward hatch.

"I should say so, too!"

Then, far and faint, were heard a crew of Chinese sailors, on the nearest junk, singing a curious, falsetto chantey as they hauled on a bamboo-braced sail....

"A feller wot never travelled wouldn't bloody well believe they was such queer people in the world," further observed the philosophic coal-heaver.

* * * * *

Next morning the coast of China lay right against us, on the starboard side ... we ran into the thick of a fleet of sampans, boats fashioned flat like overgrown rowboats, propelled each by a huge sculling oar, from the stern ... they were fishers who manned them ... two or three to a boat ... huge, bronze-bodied, fine-muscled, breech-clouted men ... as they sculled swiftly to give us sea-room each one looked fit to be a sculptor's model.

Their bodies shone in the sun like bronze. Several, fearing we might run them down, as we clove straight through their midst, raised their arms with a shout full of pleading and fright.

"What's the matter? are they trying to murder some of these poor chaps?" I asked.

"No ... we're just having a little fun ... what's the life of a Chink matter?"

* * * * *

"I say, if the Chinks up where the Boxers are fighting are big and strong as them duffers, here's one that don't want no shore-leave!" commented someone, as we stood ranged by the side.

"I always thought Chinamen was runts."

"Oh, it's only city Chinks—mostly from Canton, that come to civilized countries to run laundries ... but these are the real Chinamen."

* * * * *

After the cattle had been unladen, the crew were to be taken down to Shanghai and dumped ashore ... as it was an English Treaty port, that would be, technically, living up to the ship's articles, which guaranteed that the cattlemen aboard would be given passage back to English ground....

But I was all excitement over the prospect of making my way ashore to where the Allied troops were fighting....

* * * * *

Dawn ... we were anchored in Taku Bay among the warships of the Allied nations ... grey warships gleaming in the sun like silver ... the sound of bugles ... flags of all nations ... of as many colours as the coat of Joseph.

"Well, here we are at last!"

* * * * *

Next day the work of unloading the cattle began ... hoisted again by the horns from our boat of heavy draught to the hold of a coasting steamer, that had English captain and mates, and a Chinese crew.

Some of the steers were so weak that they died on deck ... as they were dying, butchers cut their throats so their beef could be called fresh.

The only one who desired to go ashore there, I made my way, when it was dark and the last load of steers was being transferred to shore, down below to the hold of the coaster. I stood in a corner, behind an iron ladder, so that the cattle couldn't crush me during the night ... for the Chinese had turned them loose, there, in a mass.

* * * * *

I stumbled ashore at Tongku, a station up a way on the banks of the Pei Ho river.

My first night ashore in China was a far cry from the China of my dreams ... the Cathay of Marco Polo, with its towers of porcelain.... I crept, to escape a cold drizzle, under the huge tarpaulin which covered a great stack of tinned goods—army supplies. A soldier on guard over the stack, an American soldier, spotted me.

"Come, my lad," lifting up the tarpaulin, "what are you doing there?"

"—Trying to keep from the wet!"

"—run off from one of the transports?"

"Yes," was as good an answer as any.

"You're pretty cold ... your teeth are chattering. Here, take a swig o' this."

And the sentinel reached me a flask of whiskey from which I drew a nip. Unaccustomed as I was to drink, it nearly strangled me. It went all the way down like fire. Then it spread with a pleasant warmth all through my body....

"Stay here to-night ... rather uncomfortable bed, but at least it's dry. No one 'ull bother you ... in the morning Captain ——, who is in charge of the commissariat here, might give you a job."

* * * * *

That next morning Captain —— gave me a job as mate, eighty dollars Mex. and a place to sleep, along with others, in a Compound, and find my food at my own expense....

Mate, on a supply-launch that went in and out to and from the transports, that were continually anchoring in the bay. Our job was to keep the officers' mess in supplies....

"And, if you stick to your job six months," I was informed, "you'll be entitled to free transportation back to San Francisco."

My captain was a neat, young Englishman, with the merest hint of a moustache of fair gold.

Our crew—two Chinamen who jested about us between themselves in a continuous splutter of Chinese. We could tell, by their grimaces and gestures ... we rather liked their harmless, human impudence ... as long as they did the work, while we lazed about, talking ... while up and down the yellow sweep of the Pei-ho the little boat tramped.

* * * * *

"It's too bad you didn't arrive on the present scene a few weeks, sooner," said my young captain ... "it was quite exciting here, at that time. I used to have to take the boathook and push off the Chinese corpses that caught on the prow of the boat as they floated down, thick ... they seemed to catch hold of the prow as if still alive. It was uncanny!"

* * * * *

We slept, rolled up in our blankets, on the floor of a Chinese compound ... adventurers bound up and down the river, to and from Tien-Tsin and Woo-shi-Woo and Pekin ... a sort of caravanserai....

* * * * *

Though it was the fall of the year and the nights were cold enough to make two blankets feel good, yet some days the sun blazed down intolerably on our boat, on the river....

When we grew thirsty the captain and myself resorted to our jug of distilled water. I had been warned against drinking the yellow, pea-soup-like water of the Pei-ho....

But one afternoon I found our water had run out.

So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they did, the river water.

The captain clutched me by the wrist.

"Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it, you'd be afraid!"

"What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me," I boasted....

The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....

In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain —— who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless tramp....

"I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by looking at you!"

He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.

"Sick! yes, sick of laziness!"

Captain —— was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.

* * * * *

I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ... and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing together with my influence the East and the West....

I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese, printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....

The everyday world swung into my ken again.

Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.

They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.

At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of them,—had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, worse than the worst American "rot-gut." ...

"Wisht I c'd git off the dock an' rustle up another drink somewheres."

"They wouldn't let us off this dock fer love nor money," spoke up a lithe, blue-shaven marine to me—the company's barber, I afterward learned him to be....

"Yah, we got ter stay here all afternoon, an' me t'roat's es dry es san'paper."

"Where are they taking you to, from here?"

"Manila!... the Indiana's waitin' out in th' bay fer us."

"—Wish I could get off with you!" I remarked.

"Wot's the matter? On th' bum here?"

"Yes."

Immediately the barber and two others, his pals, became intensely, suspiciously so, interested in my desire to sail with them....

"—Tell you wot," and the company barber reached into his pocket with a surreptitious glance about, "if you'll take these bills an' sneak past to that coaster lyin' along the next dock, the Chinese steward 'ull sell you three bottles o' whiskey fer these," and he handed me a bunch of bills ... "an' w'en you come back with th' booze, we'll see to it that you get took out to the transport with us, all right ... won't we, boys?"

"—betcher boots we will."

* * * * *

"God, but this is like heaven to me," exclaimed the barber, as he tilted up his bottle, while the two others stood about him, to keep him from being seen. The three of them drank their bottles of whiskey as if it was water.

"That saved me life...."

"An' mine, too. You go to Manila wit' us, all right,—kid!"

* * * * *

Toward dusk came the sharp command for the men to march aboard the coaster that had drawn up for them. The boys kept their word. They loaded me down with their accoutrements to carry. I marched up the gangway with them, and we were off to the Indiana.

I was the first, almost, to scamper aboard the waiting transport in the gathering dusk ... and, to make sure of staying aboard, I hurried down one ladder after the other, till I reached the heavy darkness of the lowermost hold. Having nothing to do but sleep, I stumbled over some oblong boxes, climbed onto one, and composed myself for the night, using a coil of rope for a pillow.

I woke to find a grey patch of day streaming down the ladder-way. My eyes soon adjusted themselves to the obscurity.

And then it was that I gave a great, scared leap. And with difficulty I held myself back from crying out.

Those curious oblong boxes among which I had passed the night—they were hermetically sealed coffins, and there were dead soldiers in them. Ridges of terror crept along my flesh. Stifling a panic in me, I forced myself to go slow as I climbed the iron rungs to the hold above ... where living soldiers lay sleeping in long rows....

Still undetected, I scrambled along an aisle between them and put myself away in a sort of life-preserver closet. Not till I had heard the familiar throb of the propeller in motion for a long time, did I come forth.

* * * * *

During the voyage of, I believe, eight days, I loafed about, lining up for rations with the boys ... no one questioned me. My engineer's clothes that I had taken, in lieu of part of my wages, from the slop-chest of The South Sea King, caused the officers of the marines to think I belonged to the ship's crew ... and the ship-officers must have thought I was in some way connected with the marines ... anyhow, I was not molested, and I led a life much to my liking ... an easy-going and loafing and tale-telling one ... mixing about and talking and listening ... and reading back-number magazines.

* * * * *

One day my friend the barber called me aside:

"Say, kid, I've been delegated to tell you that you've got lice." I flamed indignant.

"That's a God-damned lie! and whoever told you so is a God-damned liar, too! I never had a louse in my life."

"Easy! Easy!... no use gittin' huffy ... if it ain't lice you got, wot you scratchin' all the time fer? Look in the crotch of yer pants and the seams of your shirt, an' see!"

I had been scratching a lot ... and wondering what was wrong ... my breast was all red ... but I had explained it to myself that I was wearing a coarse woolen undershirt next my skin ... that I had picked up from the slop-chest, also.

The barber walked jauntily away, leaving me standing sullenly alone.

I sneaked into the toilet, looking to see if anyone was about. I turned my shirt back. To my horror, my loathing,—the soldier's accusation was true!... they were so thick, thanks to my ignorant neglect, that I could see them moving in battalions ... if I had been the victim of some filthy disease, I could scarcely have felt more beyond the pale, more a pariah. I had not detected them before, because I was ignorant of the thought of having them, and because their grey colour was exactly that of the inside of my woolen shirt.

I threw the shirt away, content to shiver for a few days till we had steamed to warmer weather ... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed myself.... I had, up to now, had experience with head-lice only ... as a child, in school....

I look back with a shudder even yet to that experience. During my subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them biting at all ... but most tramps "boil up"—that is, take off their clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them—whenever they find opportunity.

* * * * *

Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers and stowaways free transportation back to America....

A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning....

* * * * *

All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two potatoes, to a tin plate ...

For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then lied and boasted, myself....

My most unique adventure aboard the Thomas; making friends with a four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a Shakespearean scholar....

"It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities about food and lodging—it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life ... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a soldier and citizen."

Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as, to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move, he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the book.

His talk was fascinating—except when he insisted on repeating to me his own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....

Once Lang recited by heart the whole of King Lear to me, having me hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line or miss a single word ... which he did not....

Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.

* * * * *

As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and warm-hearted—the best men, individually, in the world.

I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud and independent, American and self-reliant....

Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might have picked up at second-hand book stores....

However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards seemed never to wear out.

And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet ... he wanted to "put on dog," as the Indians say.

He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines.

I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step.

He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a cheap room for a week.

* * * * *

Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California....

"Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him."

They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,—had furnished them to me—

"I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you might get into trouble."

Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.

* * * * *

The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I would travel in that guise.

* * * * *

With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a much-abused school-copy of Caesar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and tooth-powder—and a cake of soap—all wrapped up in my army blankets, I set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum."

Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity in me....

At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American economic conscience....

Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.

I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my Caesar.

Once or twice, sheriffs who were bent on arresting me because I had no visible means of support, let me go, because it awed them to find a tramp reading Shakespeare....

"It's a shame, a clever lad like you bein' a bum!"

* * * * *

Tramps, though anti-social in the larger aspects of society (as, for that matter, all special classes are, from millionaires down—or up), are more than usually companionable among themselves. I never lived and moved with a better-hearted group of people.

By "jungle" camp-fires—("the jungles," any tramp rendezvous located just outside the city limits, to be beyond police jurisdiction), in jails, on freights ... I found a feeling of sincere companionship ... a companionship that without ostentation and as a matter of course, shared the last cent the last meal ... when every cent was the last cent, every meal the last meal ... the rest depending on luck and Providence....

* * * * *

Tramps often travel in pairs. I picked up a "buddy" ... a short, thick-set man of young middle age, of Scandinavian descent ... so blond that his eyebrows were white in contrast with his face, which was ruddy with work in the sun. He, like me, was a "gaycat" or tramp who is not above occasional work (as the word meant then—now it means a cheap, no-account grafter). He had recently been working picking oranges ... previous to that, he had been employed in a Washington lumber camp.

* * * * *

Together we drifted along the seacoast south to San Diego ... then back again to Santa Barbara ... for no reason but just to drift. Then we sauntered over to San Bernardino—"San Berdu," as the tramps call it....

* * * * *

It struck chilly, one night. So chilly that we went into the freightyard to put up in an empty box-car till the sun of next day rose to warm the world.

We found a car. There were many other men already there, which was good; the animal heat of their bodies made the interior warmer.

The interior of the car sounded like a Scotch bagpipe a-drone ... what with snoring, breaking of wind in various ways, groaning, and muttering thickly in dreams ... the air was sickeningly thick and fetid. But to open a side door meant to let in the cold.

Softly my buddy and I drew off our shoes, putting them under our heads to serve as pillows, and also to keep them from being stolen. (Often a tramp comes along with a deft enough touch to untie a man's shoes from his feet without waking him. I've heard of its being done.) We wrapped our feet in newspapers, then. Our coats we removed, to wrap them about us ... one keeps warmer that way than by just wearing the coat....

* * * * *

The door on each side crashed back!

"Here's another nest full of 'em!"

"Come on out, boys!"

"What's the matter?" I queried.

"'stoo cold out here. We have a nice, warm calaboose waitin' fer ye!"

Grunting and grumbling, we dropped to the cinders, one after the other. A posse of deputies and citizens, had, for some dark reason, rounded us up.

One or two made a break for it, and escaped, followed by a random shot. After that, no one else cared to be chased after by a bullet.

They conducted us to what they had termed "the calaboose," a big, ramshackle, one-roomed barn-like structure. Piled in so thick that we almost had to stand up, there were so many of us—we were held there till next morning.

But we were served, then, a good breakfast, at the town's expense. The owner of the restaurant was a queer little, grey-faced, stringy fellow. He fed us all the buckwheat cakes and sausages we could hold, and won every hobo's heart, by giving all the coffee we could drink ... we held our cups with our hands about them, grateful for the warmth.

"Say, you're all right, mister!" ventured a tramp to the proprietor, as he walked by.

"Bet your God-damned life I'm all right!... because I ain't nothin' but a bum myself ... yes, an' I'm not ashamed of it, neither ... before I struck this burg an' started this "ham-and" and made it pay, I was on the road same es all o' you!"

"Kin I have more pancakes, boss, an' another cup of coffee?"

"You sure can, bo!... es I was sayin', I'm a bum myself, an' proud of it ... and I think these here damn bulls (policemen ... who were sitting nearby, waiting for us to finish) have mighty little to 'tend to, roundin' up you boys, now the orange-pickin' season's over with, an' puttin' you away like this ... why, if any one of them was half as decent as one o' you bums—"

"Sh! fer Christ's sake!" I admonished, "they're hearing you."

"That's jest what I want 'em to do ... I don't owe nothin' to no man, an' it's time someone told 'em somethin'."

* * * * *

Breakfast over, we were marched off to the courthouse. We were turned loose together in a large room. We felt so good with the sausage, cakes and coffee in our bellies, that we pushed each other about, sang, jigged, whistled.

As we had walked in, I had asked, of the cop who walked by my side—who seemed affable....

"Say, mister, after all what's the idea?"

"We had to make an example," he returned, frankly.

"I don't quite get you!"

"Last week a bunch of bums dropped off here at our town, and they almost ran the diggings for about twenty-four hours ... insulted women on the streets ... robbed ice-boxes ... even stole the clothes off the lines."

"In other words, you mean that a bunch of drunken yeggs dropped in on the town, gutted it, and then jumped out ... and we poor harmless bums are the ones that have to pay."

"—guess that's about how it is."

I passed the word along the line. My companion tramps cursed the yegg and his ways....

"They're always raisin' hell ... an' we git the blame ... when all we want is not loot, but hand-outs and a cup o' coffee ... and a piece of change now and then."

The yegg, the tiger among tramps—the criminal tramp—despises the ordinary bum and the "gaycat." And they in turn fear him for his ruthlessness and recklessness.

He joins with them at their camp-fires ... rides with them on the road ... robs his store or house, or cracks his safe, then flies on, taking the blinds or decking on top of a "flyer." The law, missing the right quarry, descends on the slower-moving, harmless bum. And often some poor "fall-guy" gets a good "frame-up" for a job he never thought of ... and the majesty of the law stands vindicated.

* * * * *

The charge against us was vagrancy. We were tried by twos.

"Come on, buddy!... you an' your pal."

My companion and I were led in before, I think, a justice of the peace. The latter was kindly-disposed toward me because I was young and looked delicate.

When I began my plea for clemency I appropriated the name, career, and antecedents of Simmons, the young soldier whose body-servant I had been, back in San Francisco. The man on the bench was impressed by my story of coming of a wealthy family ... my father was a banker, no less.

The justice waved me aside. He asked my buddy to show his hands. As the callouses on the palms gave evidence of recent hard work, he was set free along with me. We were the only two who were let off. The rest were sent up for three months each, I am told....

And, after all that, what did my buddy do but up and steal my blanket roll, with all in it—including my Caesar and Shakespeare—and my extra soldier uniform—the first chance he got!...

* * * * *

An American who had married a Mexican girl gave me work sawing and chopping wood. I stayed with him long enough to earn a second-hand suit of clothes he owned, which was too small for him, but almost fitted me ... civilian clothes ... my soldier clothes were worn to tatters.

* * * * *

I picked up another pal. A chunky, beefy nondescript. I was meditating a jump across "the desert." The older hoboes had warned me against it, saying it was a cruel trip ... the train crews knew no compunction against ditching a fellow anywhere out in the desert, where there would be nothing but a tank of brackish water....

My new chum, on the other hand, swore, that, to one who knew the ropes, it was not so hard to make the jump on the Southern Pacific ... through Arizona and New Mexico, to El Paso. He said he would show me how to wiggle into the refrigerator box of an orange car ... on either end of the orange car is a refrigerator box, if I remember correctly ... access to which is gained through the criss-cross bars that hold up a sort of trap-door at the top. It was in the cold season, so there was now no ice inside. These trap-doors are always officially sealed, when the car is loaded. To break a seal is a penitentiary offense.

I stood off and inspected the place I was supposed to go in at. The triangular opening seemed too small for a baby to slide through. I looked my chunky pal up and down and laughed.

"—think I can't make it, eh?... well, you watch ... there's an art in this kind of thing just like there is in anything."

Inch by inch he squeezed himself in. Then he stood up inside and called to me to try ... and he would pull me the rest of the way, if I stuck. He was plump and I was skinny. It ought to be easy for me. Nevertheless, it was the hardest task I ever set myself ... I stuck half-way. My pal pulled my shirt into rags, helping me through,—I had handed my coat in, previously, or he would have ripped that to pieces, too. It seemed that all the skin went off my hips, as I shot inside with a bang. And none too soon. A "shack" (brakeman) passed over the tops of the cars at almost that very moment. We lay still. He would have handed me a merciless drubbing if he had caught me, with my nether end hanging helplessly on the outside.

* * * * *

We squatted on the floor of the refrigerator box. When we reached Yuma my pal rose to his feet.

"Ain't yer goin' ta throw yer feet fer a hand-out?" he asked me.

"No, I'm going to stick in here till I reach El Paso, if I can."

"What's the fun bein' a bum, if you're goin' ter punish yerself like that!"

"I want to find a country where there's growing green things, as soon as I can."

"So long, then."

"So long.. don't you think you'd better stick till we reach Tuscon? Some of the boys told me the 'bulls' (officers) here have been 'horstile' (had it in for the tramp fraternity) ... ever since a yegg bumped off a deputy, a while back."

"Naw, I'll take my chances."

As I rode on, alone, I stood up and took in the scenery like a tourist ... there danced away, and gathered in, the shimmering, sun-flooded desert ... an endless flat expanse of silver sage and sentinel cactus. I saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for sale in second-rate art stores.

* * * * *

I stuck till Tuscon was reached. There I was all in for lack of food and water....

A woman gave me a good "set-down" at her kitchen table. I was as hungry for something to read as I was for something to eat. When she walked out of the kitchen, leaving me alone for a moment, I caught sight of a compact little Bible that lay on the leaf of her sewing machine. Two steps, and I had it stowed in my hip pocket, and was back innocently eating ... the taking of the Bible was providential. I believe that it served as the main instrument, later on, in saving me from ten years in the penitentiary.

* * * * *

I was glad enough to hop to the cinders at El Paso. But El Paso at that time was "unhealthy" for hoboes. They were holding twenty or thirty of us in the city jail, and mysterious word had gone down the line in all directions, that quick telegraph by word-of-mouth that tramps use among themselves, to avoid the town—that it was "horstile."...

* * * * *

Again rolling miles of arid country. But this time, like a soldier on a long march, I was prepared: I had begged, from door to door, enough "hand-outs" to last a week ... throwing away most of the bread ... keeping the cold meats and the pie and cake. I sat in my open box-car, on a box that I had flung in with me, reading my Bible and eating my "hand-outs" and a millionaire had nothing on me for enjoyment.

I was half-way to San Antonio when I fell in with as jolly a bunch of bums as I ever hope to see in this world ... just outside a little town, in the "jungles."

These tramps were gathered together on a definite plan, and I was invited to join them in it: the plan was, to go, en masse, from town to town, and systematically exploit it; one day one man would go to the butcher shops, the next, another man would take them, and the first would, let's say, beg at the baker's ... and each day a different man would take a different section among the houses. Then all the food so procured would be put together and shared in common.

As usual, there was among them an individual who held them together—the originator of the idea. He was a fat, ruddy-faced alcoholic ex-cook, who had never held a job for long because he loved whiskey so much.

Besides being the presiding genius of the gang, he also did all the cooking. He loved to cook. Each day he jumbled all the mixable portions of the food together, and, in a big tin wash-boiler which he had rescued from "the dump" outside of town, he stewed up quite a palatable mess which we called "slum" or "slumgullion," or, more profanely, "son-of-a-b——."

For plates we used old tomato cans hammered out flat ... for knives and forks, our fingers, pocket-knives, and chips of wood.

It was a happy life.

One afternoon mysteriously our leader and cook disappeared—with a broad grin on his face. Soon he returned, rolling a whole barrel of beer which he had stolen during the night from the back of a saloon ... and had hidden it nearby in the bushes till it was time to bring it forth....

We held a roaring party, and had several fights. ("Slopping up" is what the tramps call a drinking jamboree.) This was the first time I got drunk in my life. It took very little to set me off ... I burned a big hole in my coat. I woke lying in the mud near the willows ... and with a black eye ... a fellow tramp affectionately showed me his finger that I had bitten severely ... for a day we had bad nerves, and lay about grumbling....

We kept quite clean. The tramp is as clean as his life permits him to be ... usually ... the myth about his dirtiness is another of the myths of the newspaper and magazine world ... though I have seen ones who were extraordinarily filthy....

We "boiled up" regularly ... and hung our shirts and other articles of apparel on the near-by willows to dry....

After about ten days of scientific exploitation of them, the "natives" of the town on the verge of which we were encamping, began to evidence signs of restlessness.

So we moved on to another town by means of a local freight.

Settled there in "the jungles," we hilariously voted to crown the cook our king. We held the ceremony, presenting him with a crown made out of an old tin pan, which one of the more expert among us hammered into a circlet and scoured bright with sand....

* * * * *

But soon I grew tired of the gang and started on alone.

"You'd better beat it on out of the South as quick as you can," an old tramp had warned me, "they're hell on a bum down here, and harder yet on a Yankee ... no, they haven't forgot that yet—not by a damn sight!"

I was soon to wish that I had listened to the old tramp's wisdom.

* * * * *

In the chill grey dip of an early spring dawn I dropped off a freight in the yards of the town of Granton.

I drew my threadbare coat closer as I made my way up the track, on the look-out for some place to go into and warm myself. Usually, in chilly weather, each railroad station throughout the country has a stove a-glow in the waiting room ... I found the railroad station, and the stove, red-hot, was there ... it was good to be near a fire. In the South it can be at times heavily cold. There is a moisture and a rawness in the weather, there, that hurts.

I was not alone. Two negro tramps followed me; like myself, seeking warmth and shelter. Then came a white tramp.

We stood around the stove, which shone red in the early half-light of dawn. We shivered and rubbed our hands. Then we fell into tramps' gossip about the country we were in.

The two negroes soon left to catch a freight for Austin. My fellow tramp and I stretched ourselves along the benches. He yawned with a loud noise like an animal. "I'm worn-out," he said, "I've been riding the bumpers all night." I noticed immediately that he did not speak tramp argot.

"And I tried to sleep on the bare boards of a box car."

We had disposed ourselves comfortably to sleep for the few hours till wide day, in the station, when the station master came. He poked the fire brighter, shook it down, then turned to us. "Boys," not unkindly, "sorry, but you can't sleep here ... it's the rules."

We shuffled to our feet.

"Do you mind if we stand about the stove till the sun's high enough to take the chill off things?"

"No."

But, standing, we fell to talking ... comparing notes....

"I've been through here once before," remarked my companion, whom I never knew otherwise than as "Bud."

"There's a cotton seed mill up the tracks a way toward town, and we can sleep there, if you want ... to-day's Sunday, and no one will be around, working, to disturb us. In the South it's all right for a tramp to sleep among cotton seed, provided he doesn't smoke there."

"Come on, then, let's find a place. I can hardly hold my head up."

We slumped along the track. A cinder cut into my foot through the broken sole of one shoe. It made me wince and limp.

Soon we came to the cotton seed house and looked it over from the outside. It was a four-square building, each side having a door. All the doors but one were locked. That one, when pushed against, tottered over. We climbed in over the heavy sacks, seemingly full of cement, with which the unlocked door had been propped to. It also was unhinged.

It was dark inside. There were no windows.

We struck matches and explored. We found articles of heavier hardware scattered and piled about, some sacks of guano, and about a dozen wired bales of hay.

"I thought this was a cotton seed mill," commented Bud, "because I saw so many niggers working around it, when I passed by, the other time."

"Well, and what is it, then?"

"Evidently a warehouse—where they store heavier articles of hardware."

"What are you going to do?"

"Twist the wires off a couple of these bales of hay, use it for bedding, and have a good sleep anyhow."

"But—suppose we're caught in here?"

"No chance. It's Sunday morning, no one will be here to work to-day, and we'll be let alone."

With a little effort we twisted the bales apart and made comfortable beds from the hay.

It seemed I had slept but a moment when I was seized by a nightmare. I dreamed some monstrous form was bending over me, cursing, breathing flames out of its mouth, and boring a hot, sharpened implement into the centre of my forehead. I woke, to find, that, in part, my dream was true.

There straddled over me an excited man, swearing profusely to keep his courage up. He was pressing the cold muzzle-end of a "forty-four-seventy" into my forehead.

"Come on! Get up, you —— —— ——! Come on out of here, or I'll blow your —— —— —— brains out, do you hear?"

Then I caught myself saying, as if from far away, perfectly calm and composed, and in English that was almost academic—"my dear man, put up your gun and I will go with you quietly. I am only a tramp and not a desperado."

This both puzzled and at the same time reassured my captor ... and made him swear all the louder,—this time, with a note of brave certainty in his tone.

His gun poked me in the back to expedite my exit. I stepped out at the open door into streaming daylight that at first dazzled my eyes. I saw waiting on the track outside a posse of about fifteen citizens.

"Good work, McAndrews," commended one of them, deep-voiced. The others murmured gruff approval.

McAndrews, from conversation that I gathered, was night-watchman in the yards. He had one red-rimmed eye. The other was sightless but had a half-closed leer that seemed to express discreet visual powers.

"Now go on in an' fetch out the other bum," commanded the deep-voiced member of the posse, speaking with authority.

"There wasn't but only this 'un," McAndrews replied, with renewed timidity in his voice, scarcely concealed, and jerking his thumb toward me.

"But the little nigger said they was—ain't that so, nigger?"

"Yassir, boss—I done seen two o' dem go in dar!" replied a wisp of a negro boy, rolling wide eye-whites in fright, and wedged in among the hulking posse.

"Well, this 'un's all I seen!" protested the night watchman, "an' you betcher I looked about mighty keerful ... wot time did you see 'um break in?" turning to the negro child.

"Jes' at daylight, boss!"

"An' wot was you-all a-doin' down hee-ar?"

"He was a-stealin' coal f'um the coalkiars," put in one of the posse, "in cohse!"

All laughed.

"Anyhow, I done seed two o' dem," protested the boy, comically, "wot evah else I done!"

Everybody was now hilarious.

"Whar's yoah buddy?" I was asked.

"Did unt you-all hev no buddy wit' you?"

"Yes, I did have a buddy with me, but—" trying to give Bud a chance of escape,—"but he caught a freight West, just a little bit ago."

"You're a liar," said the one in authority, who I afterward heard was the head-clerk of the company that ran the warehouse. The negro boy had run to his house and roused him. He had drawn the posse together....

"You're a liar! Your buddy's still in there!"

"No, I'll sweah they haint nobuddy else," protested McAndrews.

But prodded by their urging, he climbed in again over the sacks of guano, and soon brought out Bud, who had waked, heard the rumpus, and had been hiding, burrowed down under the hay as deep as he could go.

There was a burst of laughter as he stood framed in the doorway, in which I couldn't help but join. He had such a silly, absurd, surprised look in his face ... a look of stupefied incredulity, when he saw all the men drawn up to receive him. From a straggled lock of hair that fell over one eye hung several long hay-wisps. His face looked stupid and moon-fat. He rolled his big, brown eyes in a despairful manner that was unconsciously comic. For he was, instinctively, as I was not, instantly and fully aware of the seriousness of what might come upon us for our innocent few hours' sleep.

"Come on, boys. Up with your hands till we go through your pockets."

On Bud's hip they found a whiskey flask, quarter-full. In my inside pocket, a sheaf of poor verse—I had barely as yet come to grips with my art—and, in an outside pocket, the Bible I had filched from the woman's sewing machine in Tuscon.

The finding of the Bible on my person created a speechless pause.

Then—

"Good Gawd! A bum with a Bible!"

Awe and respect held the crowd for a moment.

* * * * *

The march began.

"Where are you taking us to?"

"To the calaboose."

Down a long stretch of peaceful, Sunday street we went—small boys following in a curious horde, and Sunday worshippers with their women's gloved hands tucked in timidly under their arms as we passed by. They gave us prim, askance glances, as if we belonged to a different species of the animal kingdom.

Buck negroes with their women stepped out into the street, while, as is customary there,—the white men passed, taking us two tramps to jail. We came to a high, newly white-washed board fence. Within it stood a two-story building of red brick. On the fence was painted, in big black letters the facetious warning, "Keep out if you can." A passage in through the gate, and McAndrews first knocked at, then kicked against the door.

The sleepy-faced, small-eyed jailer finally opened to us. The wrinkled skin of the old man hung loosely from his neck. It wabbled as he talked.

"What the hell's the mattah with you folks?" protested McAndrews, the night watchman, "slep' late," yawned the jailer, "it bein' Sunday mawhnin'."

By this time the sheriff, summoned from his house, had joined us. A big swashbuckler of a man with a hard face, hard blue eyes with quizzical wrinkles around them. They seemed wrinkles of good humour till you looked closer.

"—s a damn lie ... you 'en Jimmy hev bin a-gamblin' all night," interjected the sheriff, in angry disgust.

* * * * *

They marched us upstairs. The whole top floor, was given over to a huge iron cage which had been built in before the putting on of the roof. A narrow free space—a sort of corridor, ran all around it, on the outside.

Eager and interested, the prisoners already in the cage pushed their faces against the bars to look at us. But at the sheriff's word of command they went into their cells, the latter built in a row within the cage itself, and obediently slammed their doors shut while a long iron bar was shot across the whole length, from without ... then the big door of the cage was opened, and we were thrust in. The bar was drawn back, liberating the others, then, from their cells.

The posse left. Our fellow prisoners crowded about us, asking us questions ... what had we done?... and how had we been caught?... and what part of the country were we from?... etc. etc....

From the North ... yes, Yankee ... well, when a fellow was both a Yank and a tramp he was given a short shrift in the South.

They talked much about themselves ... one thing, however, we all held in common ... our innocence ... we were all innocent ... every one of us was innocent of the crime charged against us ... we were just being persecuted.

* * * * *

That afternoon a negro preacher, short and squat, who, innocent, was yet being held for Grand Jury, delivered us a fearful half-chanted sermon on the Judgment Day. I never heard so moving, compelling a sermon. I saw the sky glowing like a furnace, the star-touching conflagration of the End of Things rippling up the east in increasing waves of fire, in place of the usual dawn ... I heard the crying of mankind ... of sinners ... for mountains to topple over on them and cover them from the wrath of the Lord....

* * * * *

"In co'hse I nevah done it," explained the preacher, "I had some hawgs of mah own. Mah hawgs had an under-bit an' an ovah-bit in dere eahs, an' de ones I's 'cused o' stealin', dey had only an ovah-bit. But heah dey's got me, holdin' me foh de pen."

* * * * *

The little grey-faced pickpocket—caught at his trade at the Dallas Fair, told me how easy it was to add an under-bit to an over-bit to the ears of the two hogs stolen, "Sure that sneakin' niggah pahson did it," he averred—but all the while he likewise averred that he hadn't picked the pocket of the man from whom he was accused of stealing a wallet....

"Yes, I'll admit Ah've done sech things. But this taime they was sure wrong. Ef I git framed up," he added, "I mean tuh study law ... pull foh a job in th' prison libery an' read up ... an' take up practice when I serve my term."

Beside the hog-stealing parson and the little grey-faced pickpocket there were also:

A big negro youth, black as shiny coal, who was being held over on appeal. He'd been sentenced to ninety-nine years for rape of a negro girl ... if it had been a white girl he would have been burned long ago, he said ... as it was, the sheriff's son, who was handling his case, would finally procure his release—and exact, in return, about ten years' of serfdom as payment. And there was a young, hard-drinking quarrelsome tenant-farmer, who was charged with having sold two bales of cotton not belonging to him, to get money for drinking....

There was another negro, hanging-handed, simous-faced, who had, in a fit of jealousy, blown two heads off by letting loose both barrels at once of his heavily charged shotgun ... the heads were his wife's ... and her lover's. He caught them when their faces were close together ... and they were kissing. But he seemed a gentle creature, tractable and harmless.

On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the big stove which heated the place. She was a girl of palish yellow colour. She was a trusty. She had been caught watching outside of a house while two grown-up negro women went within to rob.

* * * * *

Monday morning "kangaroo court" was called ... that court which prisoners hold, mimicking the legal procedure to which they grow so accustomed during their lives. We were arraigned for trial—the charge against us, that of "Breaking Into Jail."

The cotton thief served as prosecuting attorney. The negro youth in for rape of one of his own colour,—the sergeant-at-arms; while the negro preacher in for hog-stealing defended us ... and he did it so well that we were let off with ten blows of the strap a-piece. We had no money to be mulcted of, nor were we able to procure from friends, as the custom is, funds for the buying of whiskey and tobacco.

* * * * *

In a few days Bud and I had settled down into the routine of jail-life. Every morning we swept our cells, and all the prisoners took turns sweeping the corridor. The fine for spitting on the floor was ten lashes laid on hard. And each day before breakfast we soaked the seams of our clothes in vile-smelling creosote to kill off the lice and nits. We had no chance to bathe, and were given but little water to wash our face and hands.

* * * * *

"I wonder what they are going to do with us?"

"Anything they please," answered Bud gloomily.

"From thirty to ninety days on the county farm, I suppose?"

"We'll be lucky if we don't get from four to ten years in the pen."

"What for?"

"Burglary—didn't we break into that warehouse?"

* * * * *

Our meals were passed in to us through an open space near the level of the floor, at the upper end of the cage, where a bar had been removed for that purpose. We'd line up and the tin plates would be handed in, one after the other ... two meals a day. For breakfast a corn pone of coarse, white corn meal, and a bit of fried sow-belly. For dinner, all the water we could drink. For supper, breakfast all over again, with the addition of a dab of greens. On rare occasions the sheriff's son or the jailer went hunting ... and then we'd have rabbit. The sheriff had the contract, at so much per head, for feeding the prisoners.

Each morning I used to ask the jailer for the occasional newspaper with which he covered the basket in which he brought our food to us. One morning my eyes fell upon an interesting item:

The story of how two young desperadoes had been caught in the warehouse beside the railroad track, in the act of committing burglary ... the tale of our capture was briefly told ... the bravery of the night watchman and the posse extolled ... and the further information was conveyed, that, having waved preliminary examination (and we had, for they told us the justice was continually too drunk to examine us) we were being held over for Grand Jury ... on a charge of burglary.

Though he had predicted this, the actuality of it struck Bud all of a heap. He paced up and down the cage for the full space of an hour, hanging his ungainly head between his shoulders in abandonment to despair.

My reaction was a strange one. I wanted to sing ... whistle ... dance ... I was in the midst of adventure and romance. I was a Count of Monte Cristo, a Baron von Trenck. I dreamed of linguistic and philosophic studies in the solitude of my cell at the penitentiary till I was master of all languages, of all wisdom, or I dreamed of escape and of rising to wealth and power, afterwards, so that I would be pardoned and could come back and magnanimously shame with my forgiveness the community that had sent me up.

Bud stopped his pacing to and fro to stand in our cell-doorway. I was sitting on a stool, thinking hard.

"We can't do a thing," said Bud, "we're in for it, good and proper."

"—tell you what I'll do," I responded, "I'll write a letter to the owner of the warehouse and appeal to his humanity."

"You romantic jack-ass," yelled Bud, his nerves on edge. He walked away angry. He came back calmer.

"Look here, Gregory, I want you to excuse that outburst—but you are a fool. This is real life we're up against now. You're not reading about this in a book."

"We'll see what can be done," I returned.

* * * * *

At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance door, stood two cells not occupied. The last of these I had chosen for my study, a la Monte Cristo. The sheriff's son had lent me a dozen of Opie Reid's novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra. Here all day long I studied and wrote assiduously. And it was here I went to sit on my stool and write the letter to the owner of the warehouse ... a certain Mr. Womber....

In it I pointed out the enormity of sending to the penitentiary two young men, on a merely technical charge of burglary. For if we had gone into the place to rob, why had we so foolishly, then, gone to sleep? And what, at the final analysis, could we have stolen but bales of hay, sacks of guano, and plowshares? All of them too unwieldy to carry away unless we had other conveyance than our backs. It was absurd, on the face of it.

Furthermore, I appealed to him, as a Christian, to let us go free ... in the name of God, not to wreck our lives by throwing us, for a term of years, into contact with criminals of the hardened type—to give us one more chance to become useful citizens of our great and glorious country.

Bud laughed sneeringly when I read the letter aloud to him ... said it was a fine effort as a composition in rhetoric, but I might expect nothing of it—if the perpetually drunk jailer really brought it to its destination—except that it would be tossed unread into the wastebasket....

I pleaded with the jailer to deliver it for me ... told him how important it would be to our lives ... adjured him to consider our helpless and penniless state. He promised to deliver it for me.

"I have nothing to give you, now," I ended, "but, if I ever get free, I'll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the North."

* * * * *

A prisoner's first dream is "escape." Voices outside on the street, the sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away, the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls and in the cells—all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail's black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life. Even the termagant wife is turned into a domestic angel.

* * * * *

Under the smoky prison lamp made of a whiskey bottle filled with oil, and a shred of shirt drawn through a cork, we planned to cut out.

"The way to do it is easy," said the little pickpocket, "in the sole of every good shoe is a steel spring. I'll take the steel from my shoe. There's already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to reproduce the dialect). If we saw out another bar, that will give us enough room for going through. Then it will be easy to dig out the mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall. Once out, we can make for the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even their bloodhounds can't track us."

"And once I get over into Indian Territory or Arkansas, you'll never see me in Texas again," I muttered.

"How'll we conceal where we've been sawing?" Bud asked.

"By plugging up the grooves with corn bread blackened with soot that we can make by holding the wick of this smoky lamp against the cage-ceiling."

"And how'll we keep folks from hearing the sawing?"

"By dancing and singing while Baykins here" (alluding to a "pore white" fiddler who had almost killed a man at a dance) "while Baykins here plays 'whip the devil.'"

The very next day we began dancing and singing and taking turns at the chuckhole bar.

"Whip the Devil" is an interminable tune like the one about the "old woman chasing her son round the room with a broom."...

The mistake was, that in our eagerness we "whipped the devil" too long at a time. Naturally, the jailer grew suspicious of such sudden and prolonged hilarity. But even at that it took almost a week for them to catch on. We knew it was all up when, one morning at breakfast, the sheriff came in with the jailer.

"Boys, all back into your cells!" he growled.

The long bar was thrown over our closed doors.

The sheriff stooped down and inspected the chuck-hole.

"Why, Jesus Christ, they'd of been through in two more nights. It's good we caught them in time or they'd of been a hell of a big jail-delivery ... do you mean to tell me," turning to the jailer, "you never noticed this before?" and with one finger he raked out the blackened corn bread.

"You see, I'm a little near-sighted, Mistah Jenkins."

"Too damned near-sighted, an' too damned stupid, too."

The big iron door of the cage was locked again, the long bar thrown off our cell doors.

"Now, you sons of b—— can come out into the cage again; but, mind you, if any of you try such a thing again, I'll take you out one by one and give you all a rawhiding."

We received the abuse in sullen silence. For three days our rations lacked cornpone, for punishment.

We decided among ourselves that the negro preacher, to stand in well with the authorities, had given us away....

And if he had not, panic-stricken, pleaded with the sheriff to be taken out and put in a separate cell, I believe we would have killed him.

* * * * *

There was one more way. It was so simple a way that we had not thought of it before. The mulatto girl, who slept by the big stove, on a cot, just outside the cage ... a trusty and the jailer's unwilling concubine ... this slim, yellow creature was much in love with the lusty young farmer who had stolen the bales of cotton and sold them for a drunk. And it was he who suggested that, through her, we get possession of the keys. For, every day, she informed us, she passed them by where they hung on a nail, downstairs, as she swept and cleaned house for the jailer.

It was not a difficult matter to procure them. She would bring them up to us and hand them in through the chuck-hole, which the village blacksmith had repaired and once more reinforced with extra bars, "so them bastards won't even think of sawing out again," as the jailer had expressed it.

The evening she handed the keys in to us we were so excited we wanted to have "Whip the Devil" played again for our singing and dancing. But this might have once more awakened suspicion. Before, we had raised such a row as to have caused pedestrians to stop and listen in groups, wondering what made the men inside so happy....

There were three separate locks on the great cage door. One, two of them went back with an easy click. For the third we could find no key. There was nothing else to do now but to have recourse to singing and dancing again. Baykins started sawing his fiddle furiously while the big negro in for rape hammered and hammered on the lock to break it, with one prison stool after another, till all were tossed aside, broken as kindling wood is broken. It was good that the jailer was either deaf, or, like the heathen gods in the Old Testament, away on a journey. Finally, we gave up in despair. The big negro collapsed with a wail. The first sign of weakness I ever detected in him.

"Now it's shore either ninety-nine yeahs in de pen foh me, or ten yeahs for th' sheriff's son foh lawyah fees ... an' the footprints in de flowah bed ... of the man what done de rape was two sizes biggah dan mine."

* * * * *

The next day the jailer, of course, missed the keys. Panic-stricken, the mulatto girl was afraid to slip them back to their accustomed nail, for fear she'd be seen at it; or was it out of vindictiveness against the jailer that she had now actually hidden them somewhere (for, finding them of no use, we had handed them back to her)!

That same afternoon the sheriff, with his son and the little, shrivelled, stuttering, half-deaf jailer, came in at the door of the big room. It was easy to see what they wanted. They wanted the keys and they were going to make the girl confess where they were ... as she was the only other person, beside the prison authorities, that was in the way to come at them.

"Martha, we want them keys! Show us where they is, like a good girl!"

"'Deed, Ah don' know where dey is a-tall, Marse Sheriff!"

"Come on, gal, you was the only one downstairs exceptin' Jacklin heah!" pointing to the jailer.

The jailer nodded his head asseveratingly.

"Yes, Martha, tell us whar the keys air," urged the latter, with caressing softness and fright in his voice. He didn't want his mistress whipped.

"If you don't, by God, I'll whup the nigger hide clean off yore back," and the sheriff reached for the braided whip which his son Jimmy handed him.