CHAPTER XIX
Atlast I was sent for by the prison tailor to be fitted into a discharge suit, and knew that I hadn’t more than a week or ten days to do. A day or two later the same guards took me to the same room, where I found the doctor, the deputy warden, the flogging master, and the triangle all ready for me. I saw I was in for it. The atmosphere was a little more “official” than on the former occasion. Mr. Burr’s beard bristled more, and his eye was a little harder.The doctor looked me over with more interest. The guards turned their eyes away from mine as they trussed me up to the tripod, and the deputy warden’s “Now, Mr. Burr,” was ominously soft, smooth, oily.
The lashing is regulated by law as is every other detail of British penology. The strap is just so long, so wide, so thick, and so heavy. The flogging master can swing it just so far and no farther. Mr. Burr did the best he could with those limitations and reservations, and it was plenty.
To make an unpleasant story short, I will say he beat me like a balky horse, and I took it like one—with my ears laid back and my teeth bared. All the philosophy and logic and clear reasoning I had got out of books and meditation in my two years were beaten out of me in thirty seconds, and I went out of that room foolishly hating everything a foot high. I had a chance to cool off during the remaining week of my time, and the day of my release found me halfway rational again.
On my way out of the prison grounds I passed the deputy warden directing a gang of prisoners. I had nothing against them; I was going out and feeling good. I waved them a farewell. He turned on me savagely, snarling, “Be on your way.” I stopped, gave him my best dirty look, and turned my back on him and his prison forever.
I was in perfect physical condition; the regular sleep, regular work, and short ration of food had done that for me. I still had the money the lawyer at Victoria did not claim on me, the discharge money, and fare to the town I was sent from; in all enough to last me a month by careful management. My mind had beenso unsettled during the last weeks of my time in prison that I hadn’t decided where to go or just what I would do. There was no hurry about anything; it was a fine day; I had my liberty. I bought some tobacco and papers at a near-by store and lay down on the warm ground in the green grass under the Indian summer sun to think it over, take stock, and look to the future.
This would be a good place for me to say that I would have quit stealing then if the terrible lashing hadn’t embittered me and sent me out looking for revenge, but that would not be the truth. I don’t know to this day whether the law contemplates flogging as punishment, as a deterrent measure, or partly both. As a punishment it’s a success; as a deterrent it’s a failure; if it’s half and half one offsets the other and there’s nothing gained. The truth is I wouldn’t have quit, no matter how I was treated. The flogging just hardened me more, that’s all. I found myself somewhat more determined, more confident, and with a feeling that I would play this game of violence to the finish. I had taken everything they had in the way of violence and could take it again. Instead of going away in fear, I found my fears removed.The whipping post is a strange place to gather fresh confidence and courage, yet that’s what it gave me, and in that dark cell I left behind many fears and misgivings.
I got up and went my way with the thought that I had got more out of that prison and its keepers than they got out of me. I think the same to-day of every prison I went into. There were times when I thought I got a bit more punishment than wascoming to me, but I don’t regret a minute of it now. Each of us must be tempered in some fire. Nobody had more to do with choosing the fire that tempered me than myself, and instead of finding fault with the fire I give thanks that I had the metal to take the temper and hold it.
I have hopes that these lines will be read by many convicts and ex-convicts, and they are nothing if not critical readers. I am not trying to lay down any “rules and regulations” for their guidance on the outside, but I want to say this—any prisoner who comes out of prison saying to himself, “I can’t quit; it’s too late; I’m wrecked and ruined; every man’s hand’s against me; if I get a job some copper will snitch on me to my boss, or if that don’t happen the other ‘cons’ will blackmail me; there’s no use trying, I can’t quit”—any “ex-con” who says that is sentencing himself to a jolt that the most heartless and hard-boiled criminal-court judge couldn’t conceive of.
The other “con” who comes out time after time saying to himself cold-bloodedly and calculatingly, “I won’t quit,” might change his mind some time and say, “I will quit.” When he wills it, he does it, and no copper snitches him out of his job. If there is any such animal as the blackmailing “ex-con” he gives the “will” chap a wide berth.
I now went to Vancouver and took it easy for a week, resting up, reading papers, and trying to get my bearings. I saw nothing of Chew Chee, the China boy. He didn’t show up in the prison while I was there, and I have no doubt he quit stealing while he was all to the good and went on the square.
Falling in with an outfit of bums and beggars atVancouver I heard glowing reports of the prosperous mining towns in the interior of British Columbia and decided to visit them. A week’s journey over the Canadian Pacific Railway and down the Columbia River found me in the Kootenai mining district. Everything I touched turned to money. The sudden change from no liberty at all in prison to all the liberty in the world almost wrecked me. I didn’t think of saving the money so dangerously earned, but squandered it drinking, gambling, and making many trips across the line into the states where there were more opportunities for spending and dissipating.
At last a very valuable parcel of stones found its way into my hands. It was suicide to try to dispose of them on the Canadian side, and I bought a ticket to Pocatello and Salt Chunk Mary. I had been away from there almost four years, and had no fear that the town whittler would remember me, even if he was still on the job, and besides I was hungry for a look at Mary and for a feed of her beans and salt pork.
Arriving at Pocatello I hastened to her place. There was no change in its appearance except that it looked more forlorn and weather-beaten by reason of its contrast with the new buildings that had sprung up around it. In answer to my confident knock on the door a very genteel and refined colored woman opened it and asked me to step in. She looked at me strangely when I asked for Mary. “Why, Miss Mary Howard went away more than three years ago. She sold me the place for almost nothing, settled her affairs, and disappeared. Nobody in Pocatello knows why she left or where she went.”
I inquired at the bank, but they knew no more about her than the colored lady. I asked no more questions, but got the first train out for Butte, Montana, where I disposed of my stones and made the bums’ hangouts determined to find out the whys and wherefores of Mary’s disappearance. I remembered the night she crushed the calaboose for me, and if trouble had come to her I wanted to shoulder my end of it.
The bums all knew of Mary’s disappearance, but none of them would even make a guess as to what became of her. Almost ready to give up, I met one of the oldest and best informed bums on the road. His “monoger” (a corruption of monogram), “Hannibal,” was carved on every water tank between the two Portlands. I made his acquaintance in the Utah penitentiary, and had met him later on the road. He knew my connection with Foot-and-a-half George, but did not know I was with him when he was killed. I had not seen Hannibal since George’s death, and naturally the talk turned to it.
The burglary was long since outlawed, there was no need for me to conceal my part in it, so I told him all about the caper. He listened very attentively, and when I was done said: “You must have been there, for that tallies exactly with what I heard. Over three years ago I met a bum by the name of ‘Rochester Red’ at ‘Stew Junction’ (Puyallup, Washington). Red was five miles outside of that county seat the night you and George got that box. This is what he tells me.
“He’s just finished a long stretch in the stir at Canon City. His health ain’t none too good, so hejumps over into Utah and down on the ‘poultice route,’ where he won’t be pestered by bulls while he’s recuperatin’ on good fresh air an’ green vegetables an’ plenty of bread and milk. He flops in a haystack five miles out of the town where you people cut the caper. At daylight the next morning the hoosiers drag him out and he thinks they’re goin’ to lynch him. They take him into the town an’ give him a look at the stiff laid out on the courthouse floor. He raps to George, an’ just as you say, he is almost cut in half by the two shotgun loads. Red don’t see any use in givin’ himself a bawl-out by identifyin’ any dead burglars, so he dummies up on the natives an’ in a couple of days they let him go, an’ he keeps on goin’, for they are proper hostile. When Roch’ Red tells me this, I dash into Portland and out over the Short Line into Pocatello, an’ tells Mary.”
“What was all your hurry about?” I asked.
“Hah,” Hannibal replied. “That’s somethin’ Red didn’t know, an’ somethin’ you don’t know. But you’re all right, an’ I don’t mind tellin’ you.
“George and Mary was raised in my home town, Hannibal, Missouri, an’ George was her brother. They was a mysterious pair, an’ there’s no use tryin’ to figure what become of Mary.”
When my breath came back, I said: “Well, that explains to me why George ‘sprayed’ Gold Tooth with all that lead at Pocatello.”
“Oh, yes. Tell me about that, Blacky. I never got the straight of it.”
In return for Hannibal’s tale, I ordered a fresh bottle, and over it told him the story of Gold Tooth’s death at the hands of Foot-and-a-half George.
Unable to gather any more information about Mary, I turned to work again, making the towns of Spokane, Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma, confining myself strictly to house burglary, which is “one man” work. This kind of thievery is fast becoming a thing of the past. Better lighting, policing, and locking systems; the apartment house; the building of “tighter” residences; the better treatment of dogs which makes them more intelligent; and more efficient and careful servants have combined to put the old-time house burglar almost out of business. And that is well, for of all manner of theft it is the most nerve-racking on both the burglar and the householder.
I never crawled into a window that I didn’t think of Smiler. I never stepped in or out of a door without thinking of old George. Yet I kept it up for years, and quit it only because I got tired of playing the peon for crooked pawnbrokers and getting “fifty fifty” from the professional “fences.” The fences’ notion of “fifty fifty” is to put a lead dollar in the Salvation Army tambourine and ask the lassie for fifty cents change.
In the midst of plenty I found myself starving, and in self-defense turned to the more direct business of highway robbery. My experience with house burglary in the small hours of the night left me a nervous wreck and an opium smoker. Almost every house prowler turns to booze or drugs. Reader, I’ll ask you if you wouldn’t take a jolt of booze or hop after an experience such as this?
You are a burglar; you have put in a week “tabbing up” a residence. You decide to “make” it; it looks all right; no children, you haven’t seen a dog. The nightarrives. You jump into the yard. It’s two o’clock. You look the house over. Every door and window fastened, not even an open coalhole, no porch to go up. You go back to a kitchen window and perform a very delicate operation—taking a pane of glass out piece by piece. Then you put your hand in, release the catch, and raise the window slowly, noiselessly. You find inside on the windowsill bottles, boxes, corkscrews, can openers, and a toothbrush. These you pick up, one at a time, and place outside, below the window.
Now you are in the window, and you find that below, inside, is the kitchen sink. You get in without disturbing dishes or pans and open the kitchen door, so you will have a getaway in case anything causes you to hurry out. You have been almost an hour getting in the house and you haven’t started on the job yet.
It is very dark in the house, but you light no matches, nor do you use a flashlight; you are an expert, you know your business. Your years at this work have developed a “cat” sense in you. You can sense an object in front of you without seeing or feeling it. You feel your way slowly, silently into the dining room. Your eyes are getting accustomed to the dark and you distinguish a few objects—table, chairs, sideboard. You sit in a chair and remove your shoes, shoving them down in your back pockets, heels up.
You are going upstairs where the sleepers and valuables are. You button your coat and pull your hat down over your eyes to hide your face from the sleeper should he wake up on you and switch on a light. It takes you fifteen minutes to get up the stairs; they creak frightfully and you must find solid placesto put your weight. You know your business, so you keep as close to the banister as possible, where the step boards are nailed down tight and can’t shift and creak. You know the creaking won’t wake sleeping people, but you don’t know yet whether they are asleep. If they should be lying in bed awake, they would know what the creaking meant and you might get shot.
Now you are at a bedroom door, it’s latched but not locked. You take hold of the doorknob in a certain way and turn it slowly till it won’t turn any farther. The hall you are in is dark and dead silent. You push the door open an inch and you can hear the gentle, regular up-and-down breathing of the healthy sleeper. You wait a long time, maybe five minutes, with your hand on the doorknob, listening intently. Yes, there are two sleepers in the room.
Then out of this awful silence comes a coughing from a room at the back of the hall. You stiffen and your hand goes to your coat pocket. You hear a glass clink against a pitcher, and you know that man is awake. You hear him turn over in bed, and straighten out for another sleep. You remain rigid for another five minutes and then feel your way down the dark hall to make sure he has gone back to sleep.
His door is ajar, and now he is snoring. You wish he wouldn’t snore; he might wake somebody else, he might wake himself. Snorers do wake themselves. The expert burglar doesn’t fancy the heavy snorer; he likes the sleeper that wheezes gently, softly, regularly. You feel your way back to the front room. You want that first. That’s where you have decided the best stuff is to be found. Your hand is on the doorknobagain, and you open the door another inch, slowly, noiselessly.
Now something soft, yielding, obstructs it.
This thing that softly blocks the door is probably a rug or an article of clothing. That’s easy. You release the doorknob, stoop slowly, and put your hand around inside. Yes, it’s a rug, a fur rug. You nip a few strands of hair in your fingers and tug at it gently. The thing comes to life with a scared howl that turns your blood to ice water. You jump up, pull the door shut with a bang, and hasten to the top of the stairs with sure and certain step. It took you fifteen minutes to ascend that stairway. You know every inch of it. You straddle the banister and slide down—it’s quicker and safer. In the dining room you slam the door shut, and none too soon. The man upstairs has released the big mastiff and he’s roaring at the dining-room door. You made no mistake when you left the kitchen door open. You dash through it, pulling it shut behind you just as the man inside opens the dining-room door for his dog.
You take the back fence, tearing your clothes. The big dog is in the back yard now; you hear his ferocious growls plainer than ever. You run into a vacant lot, toward the next street. You hear the master urging his dog to follow you, but he is too well trained and refuses to leave his own yard.
The householder is a regular man; not to be balked of his burglar he opens up with a six-shooter and empties it at you. After the first shot you instinctively begin making side jumps like a bucking broncho. You don’t make as much distance, but you reduce your chance of getting hit. Every time the gun goes offyou can feel the slug boring a hole in your back. You don’t realize it has already passed you when you hear the pistol crack. His gun empty, his shooting stops.
You feel like throwing a few slugs in his direction; but, well, you are in the wrong. You are safe now, it would only make matters worse if you hit him, and besides, he and his pistol and his dog have made enough noise already to rouse the neighborhood and you’re lucky if you can get out of the block without bumping into Mr. “John Law.”
You make a big detour and get downtown safely, so exhausted from the intense physical and mental concentration that you are barely able to drag one foot after the other. Yes, reader, I’ll admit you might go to your room and to bed and drift off into sweet, refreshing slumbers; but I never could do it. I always had to hunt up a hop joint and roll myself a few pills, “just for the good of my nerves.”
You are still a burglar, reader. You get up the next evening, put on a different suit and hat, and go out for your “breakfast.” You dismiss from your mind the incident of last night as lightly as a gambler would forget the loss of a few dollars. You remember the dog that recognized you in the hotel barroom years before, and with the thought that it would be well to keep out of this mastiff’s neighborhood you turn your mind to the business of the night. You take a long time to eat, looking through all the papers. You read about a burglar “shivering somewhere in his lair after escaping in a panic of fear from Mr. ——— and his mastiff and pistol.”
This makes you mad. You say to yourself: “What do those reporters expect of a man? Do they wanthim to shoot everybody in sight, cut the dog’s throat, carry out everything valuable, and burn the house down? Can’t they understand that the burglar’s first thought is the loot and his second thought is to get out of the house as quietly and quickly as possible without harming people when they wake up on him? And what madness for the householder to try to corner a burglar in the dark, prepared to resist capture but not to kill for loot. When he senses a burglar in his house, why can’t he say in a loud voice, ‘Is that you, Percy?’ and give him a chance to fade away quietly? He’ll do it. He knows there are plenty of other houses.”
You give it up, put these idle speculations out of your mind, and go out into the street. You have been busy locating “prospects.” Your thoughts turn to the most likely one. There’s the gambler that runs the poker games in back of the cigar store. He turns the game over to an assistant at twelve o’clock, takes the bankroll, and goes home. You decide to “take him home” to-night. You hang around till he comes out and get in behind him. You “tail” him to a genteel-looking place with a “private board” sign in a downstairs window. He lets himself in with a key. You are across the street; you wait a while and observe that a dark room on the second floor has been lighted. Your man is at the window pulling down its shade. You have his room located, and you go away to kill the next two hours.
Two o’clock; you are in the dining room downstairs. You were lucky enough to find an open window. You don’t open any doors here, you decide to retreat by the window, if necessary. This is a boarding housewith a number of people in it, and you don’t have to creep around so carefully. A noise on the stairs or in the hall of a boarding house doesn’t mean much.
You go upstairs quickly and find a light in the hall. You put it out; not by pushing the button, but by unscrewing the globe a little. You are an expert; you don’t want any light; you don’t want any one to get a look at you in a lighted hallway. You prefer darkened rooms, because in the dark you have the best of the situation.
You find his door; more luck, it’s not locked! You must be careful with this chap; he is a bad sleeper, thin, nervous, “touchy,” an incessant smoker and a heavy coffee drinker. You step into the room and close the door but don’t latch it. He is asleep, breathing, as you expected, very softly. His clothes are on a big rocker—nothing in them but some silver and a watch. You take the silver, “heft” the watch and leave it; it’s not solid. You’re disappointed, the roll of bills should have been in his trousers’ pocket. You feel on the table by the head of his bed; it’s not there. On the dresser; not there. Oh, well, you’ll have to go under his pillow after it, that’s all. This operation calls for your best professional touch; your perfect technique is needed here; he’s a light sleeper.
You are on one knee beside his pillow. You lay a gun on the floor within easy reach. If he wakes up on you that’s his bad luck; you’ll stick him up, take his money, and lock him in his room. He is lying on his side facing you and not eighteen inches away. You can feel his breath against your face. You pull up your right coat and shirt sleeves to the elbow, your left hand lifts the outer end of the pillow ever solittle while your right, palm down, slowly, carefully, worms its way beneath his head. Your ear notes his breathing. So long as it is regular, he is asleep; if it breaks off he is waking up. While he sleeps he has no more control over his breathing than over his heartbeats, and you can plainly hear it, and when you cannot hear it you know he is awake. With your ear alert for the danger signal and your hand under his pillow your mind is racing all over the universe.
“No wonder,” you think, “they hang men in some parts of the world for this kind of burglary—going into a man’s sleeping room with a gun and taking his property from under his head while he sleeps. No wonder your hair is graying above your ears, and wrinkles showing up in your forehead.”
You make up your mind to quit this racket—it’s too tough—but your hand goes further under the pillow. Careful as you are, the slight movement beneath his head seems to disturb this catlike sleeper. His breathing catches, halts, and no longer reaches your ear. You become petrified, your mind on the gun beside you. With a jerky movement he turns over, and you wait till he goes sound asleep again.
His back is to you now, and his head on the farther end of his pillow. This makes it easier. You explore and explore, but feel nothing. Slowly you withdraw your arm. You must look farther; in his shoes, his hat, the dresser drawers, the clothes closet, and, that failing, you will put the gun on him, wake him, and make him dig it up. You have been there almost two hours. It will soon be dawn; you must hurry. You search everywhere, but no bankroll. You go around the bed and your arm is quickly thrust underthe other pillow in the last hope of finding it. It’s not there; no use looking farther. You decide to wake him and demand it.
Having made up your mind to stick him up, you must now transform yourself from the silent, stealthy prowler into the rough, confident, dominating stick-up man. You walk around to the back of the bed and stop to plan your new move. Now you have it all straight in your mind. You will go to the side of his bed where you first started in on him. That puts you between him and the door and leaves him no chance to get out into the hall. You will touch him gently on the shoulder. He will wake up in alarm.
“Eh, what? What is it? Who is it? Turn on the light.”
Then you will say to him in a firm, kindly tone: “Listen to me and don’t get excited.” You will put the cold muzzle of the gun against his neck and now your voice will be cold, hard, threatening. “Do you feel that? That’s a gun. If you move I’ll let it go. You just keep cool and don’t get yourself killed over a few lousy dollars. I want that bankroll of yours; I know it’s here. Tell me where it is and make it easy on yourself—and be quick about it.”
Yes, that’s the way you will handle him. You start on around to the side of his bed. You remember you have been in the room almost two hours and a half. It will soon be daylight. You look at the window. Yes, there it is; a faint line of gray down the edge of the curtain, the dawn. You must hurry. You are by his side now. You take a better grip on the gun, reach out to touch him, and—pandemonium breaks out in the adjoining room.
It’s only an alarm clock going off, but it petrifies you standing up and tears every nerve in your body up by the roots. You don’t bolt out of the room in a panic; you remain perfectly still. Your mind jumps into the other room. Your sleeping gambler kicks out his legs, turns over with a jerky movement, mutters a string of curses, pulls the covers over his head, and settles himself for more sleep.
You don’t pay much attention to him now. The next room concerns you more. The noise of the alarm clock changes to a dull, empty, hollow protest. You know somebody has his hand on the bell, smothering it till he can turn it off. Now it stops. You hear somebody lumbering about, every step shakes the floor. He must be a big, heavy man who puts his heels down first when he walks. You hear him push a button and a vertical crack of light appears at the head of the bed you are standing by. You know what that is. This is an old house, and that’s a folding door.
The man now unlocks his door and steps out into the hall. You step softly to your door and listen. He goes heavily down the hall, muttering to himself. You hear him push the light button a couple of times but he gets no light—you unscrewed the globe; he thinks it’s burnt out. You hear him open and shut a door; he is in the bathroom. You turn back to your man. Then a window is thrown up with a bang in the room on your other side. Daylight is racing on you. You can see clearly now. You hear other noises. The place is becoming a hornet’s nest. You must give it up and get out. You’re not broke. You don’t have to risk everything here. You step out of the room,close the door softly, go downstairs, and out the front way.
Yes, reader, you went down the street and into a restaurant where you ate heartily. Then to bed for a good, healthy, sound sleep.
Not me! I went back to the hop joint.
You get up the next evening, go to the same restaurant, get something to eat, and look over the papers. You find nothing about your doings; you didn’t expect to. You know the gambler missed his silver. You know he will suspect somebody around the boarding house and lock his room door in future. You take stock and decide to lay off for a few nights and give your luck a chance to switch.
You are slowly making up your mind to get out of this burglary racket; it’s too tough. Suppose you had stuck up the gambler. Maybe his money was downstairs in a safe and you wouldn’t have got it. You would have had to dash out into the street whether you got it or not. How could you tell who would be in the street when you went out? The cop on the beat might be sitting on the front steps. You might bump into the milk man, the bread man, or the ice man. You decide that the whole thing is very uncertain, after all.
For the first time you see clearly this dangerous angle of this business of yours. You can plan and plot and scheme; you can figure out just what you’ll do from the minute you step into a place till you step out of it, but the great weakness of it is—you can’t tell who or what is going to be outside when you go out, and all your ingenuity can’t overcome it. You toss the whole thing out of your mind and go to atheater. After that you go to your room. It’s a warm night, you’re in no hurry about going to bed, so you sit in the dark by the window getting the cool air.
You wonder who will occupy the transient room directly across the light well from you. Last night a woman and two children were in it. They talked all during the forenoon and kept you awake. You hope they have gone away. Just as you are ready to go to bed a light is switched on in the room across the way. Idly you look over. The window is open and the curtain is up. A fat man with a pink complexion and gray hair is standing in the middle of the room. His door is still open, you can see through his room and out into the hall. He stands facing you, his legs apart, hands in his pockets, and his hat on the back of his head.
You decide he is about half drunk. He takes his hat off and throws it out of your line of vision, probably at the dresser. Now he turns around, goes to the door, and kicks it shut with a bang. Back in the middle of his room he puts a fat hand in his capacious pants pocket and comes up with a small roll of paper money. He unrolls the bills, looking at them with a mysterious smile on his fat face. You don’t understand his smile and wonder if he is thinking how he cheated somebody in a poker game; he looks like a gambler.
The roll interests you, the outside one is what you call a “salmon belly.” It is a yellowback—a big bill. The fat man now gets a chair and places it directly in front of his window, but instead of sitting down he stands up on it unsteadily. You get alarmed and watch him intently. Surely he’s not going tojump out? No, he takes the string and pulls the curtain halfway down. All you can see of him now is his bulky midsection. The upper part of him is silhouetted against the curtain. He raises one hand above his head, the hand that holds the bills. You can see its blurred shadow as he runs it along the roller at the top of the curtain. He takes hold of one edge of the curtain now, pulls it down a little till the ratchet is released, and lets it go up with a rattle and bang. He puts both hands on the windowsill to steady himself as he gets off the chair.
He is still smiling, but there’s no mystery about it now. You sit in your room not fifteen feet away, open-mouthed in amazed admiration. What a fox he is, to roll his money up in the curtain! What a plant! What chance would a prowler have of finding his money?
He sits down with his back to you and you hear him drop one shoe on the floor; in about a minute you hear the other one drop. Then he goes over to the door, turns the key, and snaps the light out. In fifteen minutes you can hear him breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows.
He is healthy, he is a good eater and drinker, he is a sound sleeper. But the thing looks suspiciously soft to you and you wonder if the fat man might not be a smart dick framing for you. You decide he isn’t because he locked his door.
“Well,” you say to yourself, “bad luck or good luck, I’m going after that dough.”
You don’t mind his door being locked. You know your business; you have three ways of opening it. You go out and down the hall to a small room wherethe Chinese bed maker keeps his brooms, buckets, mops, and other things, and get a small parcel of delicate instruments you keep planted there. You go back to your room and wait till, say, four o’clock, when everything is dead and all the guests are in and abed. Then you go around into the fat man’s hall, put out the light, and go to work on his door.
You go about the opening of his door confidently, and with a sure touch. You know he is sleeping, you can hear his gusty breathing from where you stand outside. Now you have it unlocked, you open it, step in, and close it. The chair is still in place by the window. Your ear follows his regular breathing. You don’t creep around this room as you did in the gambler’s. You walk over to the chair, step upon it lightly, put one hand up against the roller, and pull the curtain down with the other. It makes a little noise. Your back is to the sleeper, but your ear tells you he is safe. When the curtain is about halfway down, your fingers touch the roll of bills, another little pull and you have it.
You step down off the chair and find his vest and trousers. His watch “hefts” heavy. You take it, and you take the silver out of his trousers—just to penalize him for trying to be foxy.
You go out, closing the door carefully behind you. Back in your room you examine the bills and silver carefully—you remember the twenty-dollar bill that cost you two years and two lashings. You find you have more money than you would have got out of both the places you failed in; enough to last you six months if you are careful and don’t gamble.
You plant your instruments in the little room downthe hall. Then you go out the back way to dodge the night clerk, and down to an all-night saloon where you put the bills away in your compartment in the big safe. The night bartender is “square”; he knows you and your business. You want to get rid of the watch as quick as possible. It’s worth a hundred dollars. You sell it to him for a twenty-dollar note, glad to be done with it.
Yes, reader, I know what you say to yourself now. You are saying: “Well, he doesn’t have to go to the hop joint this time.”
You are right. I didn’t have to go, but I went just the same. The opium smoker can always find a good excuse for an extra smoke. I went to the joint to celebrate my changed fortune and to propitiate whatever deformed deity it is that is supposed to look after the luck of a burglar. I must have propitiated to some purpose, for within a week another stroke of dumb luck more than doubled my bankroll, and I decided to take a lay-off.
Always in the back of my mind was the thought that some day I would go back and see my father. It was ten years since I ran away from him. Many things had happened to me. Something may have happened to him. He might need money or help. I was free to go; I had no associates to cling to; I was under no obligations to anybody. My time and money were my own. The hop habit was getting fastened on me, and this trip would give me a chance to break away from it. The notion of being respectable and feeling safe and secure for a few months took my fancy, so I started in to do the thing right.
My gun and burglar tools went to my bartenderfriend as presents. I was glad to get rid of the gun for a while. I could get another any time for ten dollars, and for another ten I could order by mail more instruments from an ex-burglar at Warsaw, Illinois, who manufactured them and advertised them in thePolice Gazetteas “novelties.”
I had always followed the Sanctimonious Kid’s advice in the matter of wearing careful clothes, but now I satisfied my hankering for a gray suit and hat. I thought of the leather trunk too, but it had no appeal any more. I remembered old Cy Near, and smiled to think how I had worshiped the twenty-dollar gold piece that dangled from the watch chain across his ample paunch.
I soon discovered that being respectable imposed many hardships and obligations I hadn’t thought of. One of them is paying railroad fare. I played the game square while I was at it, and gave up my money for a ticket and a berth in the sleeper. Here I encountered another hardship. My professional eye told me there were many fat pocketbooks beneath the pillows of my fellow travelers that my professional hand could have taken when the porter was out of sight, but I forebore.
At Kansas City I prowled about the neighborhood I had lived and worked in, but asked no questions. The crabbed, cranky widow’s boarding house was closed. Tex of the larcenous eye was gone, and so were the card and dice sharks. Cocky McAllister, the hack driver that helped me rescue Julia, was not around his old stand. The milkman I worked for, collecting bills from “them women,” was not at his place. The theater where Julia worked was still going, but shewas not there. I passed Madam Singleton’s old place, but there was another name on the red-lighted pane of glass above the door. Still I asked no questions; they were all nothing to me. I could easily have found somebody to tell me what became of them all except, perhaps, Julia, but I was a stranger in my own town and preferred to remain one. My father was the only one I asked about. At the railroad offices, in the department where he had worked, I learned that he was dead.
A talkative old pensioner on the company who tended a door told me he had been dead three years; that he died after a long siege of sickness and had barely enough money left to bury him decently in the village graveyard beside my mother. I was not shocked to learn of his death; we had been too far apart for that. I wondered if my long silence and absence mightn’t have aggravated his illness and hastened his end. I was sorry not to have been with him when he was sick and needed me. I was glad he died without knowing what I had done to my life.
That was many years ago, but I wasn’t thoughtless even then, and I recall now, distinctly, how I realized with shame and regret that I had never done one thing to repay him for caring for me till I was able to shift, no matter how lamely, for myself. Looking back now, as I did then, I am forced to admit that the only consideration I ever showed for him was this: I never put his name, which is my name, on a police blotter or a prison register while he was alive, or after his death.
I had been dallying with the opium pipe almost daily for a year, yet I had no trouble when I gave it up—just a few restless days and nights and I forgot it. I gave this no thought then, but later when I saw an opium smoker doubled up with cramps and pleading for hop, and learned he had been “on the pipe” only three months, I got interested and began thinking it over and observing.
My observations and experience have convinced me that the drug habit, like most of our other habits, is largely mental. In another chapter I shall submit a few facts in support of this opinion.
Kansas City had nothing of interest for me now, and I left it, never to return. A cheap excursion ticket took me back west to the town of Los Angeles, where I finished the winter, fraternizing with the bums and yeggs from the road, polishing up old acquaintances, and gathering gossip from the four quarters of the underworld.