CHAPTER XIV
Georgesmiled and took a better grip on my hand. “Yes, I remember you, young fellow. You’ve grown some. Have you gathered any wisdom?”
“I’ve gathered enough to know that you are entitled to any part of this,” I said, producing my small bankroll.
“This is payable to-morrow night,” he said, taking twenty dollars.
The money was returned promptly and a bond of friendship and confidence was formed that remains unbroken. I came to know him as “Rebel George,” prince of bunko men, the man who developed and perfected the “gold-brick” swindle. After stealing a fortune and losing it at faro bank, he quit in answer to the prayers of his faithful wife, who had for years shared his vicissitudes in and out of prison. At the age of sixty, prison bent and money broke, he started life on the level and when last I heard of him he was in a fair way to succeed in his small business.
From Butte I journeyed to Spokane, Washington, and then to Seattle. I marvel now that I did not stop in one of those spots of golden opportunity and go to work. With the money I would have saved in a couple of years I could have bought land or lots that would have made me independent in ten years. I think land hunger is inherited. I had no desire then, nor have I now, to own land. The desire to possess land, whether inherent or acquired, appears to me to be a sure safeguard against a wasted, dissolute, harmful life.
I had now become so saturated with the underworld atmosphere that no thought of any kind of honest endeavor entered my mind. Fully realizing their value, I passed by many splendid opportunities in the booming Western towns; not that I was lazy or indolent, but that business and the hoarding of money had no attraction. I will leave it to the scientists and investigators to explain why Johnnie Jones lands in a pulpit, and his chum next door, with equal opportunity, lands in a penitentiary. It’s too deep for me. I know I never had any money sense and never will have, and I know that had I been blessed, or cursed, with land hunger and money sense I would to-day have more honest dollars than I ever had crooked dimes.
Twenty years of moderate application to his business will make most any man independent. In twenty years a journeyman mechanic will handle more money than a first-class burglar, and at the end of that time he will have a home and a family and a little money in the bank, while the most persistent, sober, and industrious burglar is lucky to have his liberty. He is too old to learn a trade, too old and broken from doing time to tackle hard labor. Nobody will give him work. He has the prison horrors, and turns to cheap larcenies and spends the balance of his life doing short sentences in small jails.
In rare instances the broken thief finds friends, sympathetic, understanding, and ready to help him. Strong and kindly hands at his elbows ease him over the hard spots and direct him to some useful place in the world. Some understand such kindness and respond by breasting the current and battling upstream with their best strokes; others do not, or can notunderstand, and, like dead fish, float down and away forever.
My apprenticeship under the Sanctimonious Kid was all that could be desired by either of us, yet my education was far from finished. At Seattle, almost broke, and doubtful about being able to do anything worth while by myself, I cast about for a “sidekicker.” Seattle was rebuilding after her big fire. Money was plentiful, and I never saw such an aggregation of beggars, tramps, thieves, and yeggs as were gathered there. Gambling, prostitution, and the smuggling of opium flourished unmolested. The thieves hung out in Clancey’s gambling house, and were protected and exploited by him. They thought Clancey was a little “Hinky Dink” in a little Chicago.
Every time a thief showed up with a hundred dollars he was “pinched,” but Clancey took him out in an hour—for the hundred. When it was too late they found out that it was he who had them “pinched.” Clancey died broke.
In Clancey’s I found “St. Louis Frank,” a product of Kerry Patch, a poor quarter of St. Louis, Missouri. I knew him from the bums’ “convention” at Pocatello, where I met him first. He was clean looking and healthy and I liked him. About my own age, he was an honest, industrious, intelligent thief.
One night as we were looking around one of the smaller gambling houses, all the lights went out suddenly, but before we could get our hands on any of the money, they came on again. This started us to figuring a way to put them out at a given time when one of us could stand near a table and grab the bankroll. We found where the wires entered the building, andFrank volunteered to cut them if I would stand inside by the faro game and snatch the bankroll which was lying exposed in an open drawer beside the dealer. It looked so good that we enlisted two other “Johnsons,” one to plant himself by the dice game, and the other by the roulette wheel. All three of us were to be in readiness to make a grab when the lights went out and make our way out of the building in the darkness.
Saturday night, when the biggest play was on, Frank made his way to the roof and we took up our posts inside.
I took a position by the faro game. The drawer that held the bankroll was so situated that a right-handed man would be handicapped in reaching for the money. Being left-handed, the spot fell to me. The drawer was open and the big leather pocketbook containing the money was lying in the bottom of it in plain sight, and not two feet from where I stood. The second man, in charge of the game, the “lookout,” sat in a high chair at the dealer’s right. One of his feet was resting on the edge of the open drawer, and I saw at a glance that if he jammed the drawer shut with his foot when the lights went out he would trap my hand.
While I was thinking that over, Frank cut the wires and everybody in the big room did just what we expected; they remained perfectly still for a second waiting for the light to come on.
My hand was on the big fat “poke.” I heard a jingle of gold coins across the room, and somebody shouted: “Thieves! Thieves!” The drawer was jammed shut on my hand.
Reaching down with my right hand I got the poke and tore my left hand out of its trap, leaving a piece of skin the size of a half dollar behind. There were three exits and we all got out safely in the scramble, and “weighed in” at my room.
Frank was there ahead of us. My grab yielded two thousand dollars in bills. The chap at the dice game put his hand on a stack of twenty twenty-dollar gold pieces, but it was too heavy and he fumbled it, getting only half. Our assistant at the roulette wheel got a couple of stacks of silver only.
The money was split at once, and our friends departed. Frank took most of our money out and left it with a saloon man we knew. I stayed in my room a couple of days waiting for my hand to heal.
One great failing of the thief is that when he gets money he immediately makes tracks for some hangout where he throws a few dollars on the bar just to “give the house a tumble” and let them guess where he “scored” and how much he got.
He looks wise, says nothing, spends a few dollars, and goes out. Then the guessing begins and it’s surprising what good guessers some poor thieves are.
Frank insisted that we go downtown a few nights later. I took the bandage off my hand and went along. We dropped into “Billy, the Mug’s,” bought a few drinks, and departed. Half a block away we were pounced on by a couple of “dicks.” One of them jerked my left hand out of my coat pocket where I had been keeping it to conceal the skinned place. “That’s enough,” he said, looking at it. They marched us down to the gambling house and showed us to the game keepers. They got no satisfaction there, thegamblers either could not or would not identify us. We were then taken down to the city “can,” where they searched us thoroughly, finding nothing but a few dollars in silver. We were questioned separately and together, but refused to talk—a guilty man’s only refuge. The officers ordered the man on the desk to put us on the “small book,” meaning to hold us as suspicious characters. “Maybe Corbett can get something out of you,” one of them said to us as they were leaving.
John Corbett was the officer in charge of the city jail. He was feared and hated from one end of the country to the other because of his brutality to prisoners. I doubt if a more brutal, bloodthirsty jailer ever flourished anywhere. He did not limit his beatings to underworld people. He beat up rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves impartially. Anybody that didn’t crawl for Corbett got a good “tamping.” He was repeatedly brought before the commission for his cruelty to unfortunates falling into his hands, but for years mustered enough influence to hold his job. Corbett’s treatment of prisoners was the shame and scandal of Seattle, and he kept it up until the women of that city got the right to vote. Then their clubs, in a body, went to the mayor and demanded Corbett’s removal. He was removed.
Corbett appeared and took me downstairs where the cells were, in a moldy, damp, dark half basement. He was a powerful man, not tall, but thick and broad. He was black-browed, brutal-faced, heavy-jawed. He opened a cell door and I started to step in but he detained me. I sensed something wrong. His brownish-red eyes gleamed like a fanatic’s. “You’d bettertell me all about that robbery, young man.” His voice was cold, level, and passionless.
“I know nothing about it, sir,” I answered very decently; I was afraid. Like a flash one of his hands went to my throat. He pinned me to the wall, choking me, and brought something down on my head with the other hand that turned everything yellow and made my knees weaken. Still holding me by the throat he lifted me clear of the floor and threw me into the cell like a bundle of rags. There was about a half inch of water on the cell floor. I lay there in it, and looked about me by the dim light of a gas jet out in the corridor. There was nothing in the cell but a wooden bench.
After a few minutes I crawled over to it, and, pulling myself up, stretched out, more dead than alive. If people can be corrected by cruelty I would have left that cell a saint.
St. Louis Frank, in another part of the jail, got a worse beating than I did.
Our friends outside were busy. At ten o’clock next morning James Hamilton Lewis, affectionately called “Jim Ham,” later United States senator from Illinois, then an ambitious fighting young lawyer who never “laid down” on a client, came to see us. At two that afternoon he had us out on a writ, free.
From that day on St. Louis Frank smiled no more. He became snarly, short spoken, and ugly. We got our money and parted. He went out on the road “bull simple,” simple on the subject of shooting policemen. The stories told about him are almost unbelievable. Years later I saw him in the San Francisco county jail where he was waiting trial for the murderof a police officer in Valencia Street. The day he went to San Quentin where he was hanged, he sang out to me: “So long, Blacky. If I could have got Corbett I wouldn’t care.”
All Corbett’s beating did for me was to make me a little more careful. I got a boat to San Francisco, not knowing just what to do, but with a notion of killing time till old Foot-and-a-half George finished his time in Utah, and meeting him. I dug up the hotel keys Sanc and I had planted and experimented a little in hotel prowling. I hadn’t the sure touch that came in later years with experience, and didn’t do much good.
One night in the Baldwin Hotel Annex I got a roll of bills that rather surprised me, and I was still more surprised when I read in the next evening’s paper that George Dixon, the little colored champion fighter, had lost his money to a burglar. At the Baldwin bar the next night somebody asked him what he would have done had he been awakened by the burglar.
Dixon, always a good loser, smiled. “I’d ’a’ done just what you’d ’a’ done. I’d ’a’ gone right back to sleep till that man went on out.”