Walter Scott[date, etc.]MURDERED!!! R.I.P.!!!
Walter Scott[date, etc.]MURDERED!!! R.I.P.!!!
Walter Scott[date, etc.]
MURDERED!!! R.I.P.!!!
Certain types thrive on rough life, and others deteriorate. They might be likened to iron and steel. The true frontiersman is like the common iron as it is dug from the ground. His feelings and sensibilities have never been refined; therefore, contact with the elemental things of life has no debasing effect upon him. The educated person is more like steel—something produced by being subjected to a great heat and which must be tempered to the climate. Hard steel breaks at a low temperature; so does human intelligence break under rough handling. Place a gentleman back in the primitive life and he is pretty sure to become a squaw man or a crook; only a person of refinement has the will and cleverness to be criminal.
I was getting scared. The murder of Scott had given me a jolt and I decided I had had enough of California.I had been playing poker every night until I owed the Chinese cook so much money that I had to sleep with him for two months and let him collect my pay. I thought this was about as low as I cared to go; so, picking up my traps one day, I started for San Francisco—and home.
A third-class ticket was sixty-five dollars—we called it the “emigrant train.” Peddlers sold pieces of canvas and straw mattresses at the station, and these we stretched across the seats in such a way as to make a fairly comfortable bed. The rule was that if sixty people got together they could go through as a “car” and be a law unto themselves. So we “fired out” the married men, the women, and the children, and made up our own crowd. We had neglected to get the full number, however, so the authorities put in twelve Chinamen, and I remember sleeping with my feet against the bald head of one all during the trip.
It had taken me seven days to get out West, but the trip back was thirteen. We were never certain where our car was to be from day to day. A freight train would come along and we would be hitched to it, jogging along slowly, only to be dropped at some God-forsaken flag station, with no way of knowing how long we were to wait. Then, of a sudden, would come on the express, whisk us up and whirl us along for several hundred miles.
At every stop a line of boys and girls passed through the car with cans of fresh milk, pies, cakes, etc., and, augmented by a basket I had brought from San Francisco, my food cost me only ten dollars for the whole trip. A passenger was rude to one of these children,knocking him over and spilling all of his milk. We promptly put him out of our car, back with the women and children.
We were a motley crowd—all nationalities. There was the usual “bad man from Texas.” He talked loud, swaggered, and bluffed, and kept the car in a general uproar. His food for the trip—as far as we could see—consisted of several feet of bologna sausage which he had hung from the rack above his seat. When he deemed it time to eat, he would take out his vicious-looking knife and “hit it a lick.” However long or short the slice, he would eat it, saying:
“The Texan only eats what he can get by the might of his right arm.”
Every once in a while his “might” would get beyond all control and he would knock a hunk of the sausage in among the crowd of poor chattering Chinamen, frightening them almost out of their senses. Then, to make matters worse, he would dive for it with his dangerous-looking knife. I used to argue with him about this action until the bald-headed Chinaman in the seat in front of meknewI had saved his life. Every morning a pot of tea, made hot by the stove at the end of the car, was on the floor beside my bunk.
It was the Texan who told the other men not to play poker with me, as my hands were “too soft” and I must be a card sharp. When I accosted him with it he only said, “Well, howdidyou get those hands?” and was much amused when I answered, “Painting pictures.”
We never left the train that we did not encounter some strange adventure. At one station, in a shed forhorses, we saw the body of a negro with sixteen bullet holes in it, a sight that would have been carefully guarded from the eyes of first-class passengers. At Ogden City we bribed the trainman to tell us that we would have several hours to spare. There was a camp of seventy-five tramps on the border of the lake, and their antics had been terrorizing the citizens. These men of the road accepted us as bosom companions, told us stories, and finally fed us a wonderful dinner of chicken and all sorts of delicacies, cordially inviting us to join them permanently.
Instead of being a bore, the trip was one of the most delightful I ever made and, except for one small aftermath, marked the closing of a definite chapter in my life. I had been back only a short time when I was walking along Howard Street in Boston, my thoughts everywhere but out West. Noticing a crowd in front of a house, I drew up to see the excitement. It was nothing unusual for those days—a gang of toughs were wrecking a Chinese laundry. Standing at the door, uttering most horrible sounds and brandishing an ax in his hand, was an old Chinaman. Just then he saw me, stopped yelling, dropped his ax, and, to the astonishment of all, fell on my neck. All Chinamen looked alike to me, but there could be no doubt about it—it was my friend of the emigrant train. Of course I appealed to the police and the toughs were dispersed; but I had an awful time explaining to this frightened Oriental that I was not his savior.