Chapter 8

About the first of August, after bidding Mother goodbye, Curly and I hopped a freight for Cheyenne. We got there about 3AM, peddled the town that day, and at midnight we were in the yards waiting for a freight to be made up. However, we were accosted by a watchman who ordered us out of the yards. We went toward the depot, and later, when the freight came along slowly, Curly grabbed a side ladder and started climbing. I let a couple of cars pass that had only one side handle (with the ladder on the rear end of the car), as they are dangerous to grab at night. When I saw that the following car had a side handle I started running; but before the ladder reached me I stumbled over a switch bar, spraining my ankle. I waited several minutes after the caboose passed me. When Curly didn't come back, I knew that he thought that I had caught the train and hadn't missed me until the train was rambling too fast for him to jump off. I also knew he would wait for me at North Platte. I limped back toward the depot and as I did so, an east-bound passenger train pulled in. I waited until the engines had been changed, hoping to be able to ride the blind baggage; but from the way the shack stuck around, I decided I wouldn't have a chance. The engineer was oiling the dark side of the engine, and when he walked around the cowcatcher and started oiling on the depot side, I pulled a stunt I had heard about and crawled between the cowcatcher and pony trucks.

Sure enough, there was plenty of room, as I had been told. I sat upon the six-inch-wide wooden cross member, with my back leaning against two slanting iron supports, while my feet rested comfortably on the heavy wooden V-shaped member that formed the point of the cowcatcher. When the train pulled out, I was thinking how surprised Curly would be to find me waiting for him in North Platte when he reached there.

Robert Burns knew what it was all about when he wrote that "The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." Also, I want to take off my hat to the bard who sang "Oft in the stilly night, when slumber's chains had bound me", for oft in that stilly night, unbound by slumber's chains, I would have given anything I possessed to be outside of that cowcatcher. Grasshoppers big, grasshoppers small, grasshoppers short and grasshoppers tall came through the bars of that cowcatcher, whole and in pieces, to plaster me with their sticky bodies. When the train stopped for water I squirmed out from under and, going back a car or two, I climbed on top and rode into Julesberg, reaching there as day was breaking.

During the night, the train I was on passed an eastbound freight parked on a siding, and I knew it was the one Curly was on. I cleaned up as best I could and when the freight pulled in, I located Curly in an empty boxcar and gave him the laugh of his life. We had breakfast at a restaurant near the depot and rode the same freight out again, riding it to North Platte. As we got off there, a shack came along who proved to be an ex-tramp whom Curly knew; and he squared us for a ride with the crew, who were to take the train to Grand Island. They in turn squared us to Omaha, where I bought a new suit and hat, for the ones I wore had been so badly stained by the grasshoppers that they were utterly ruined.

We journeyed on in leisurely fashion, stopping off in all the larger towns; and at each place, as our sales dwindled we took to the jungles again, where we met many tramps and shared with them their lumps and mulligans. Curly seemed to be quite well known to many of them, and as we both contributed freely to the purchase of food and drink, we were more than welcome. Curly drank no liquor and I made only a pretense of doing so, just to be sociable. Curly talked me out of doing even that; which was not hard to do, as I disliked it anyhow.

We stopped over for a day or two in Chicago, where I looked up several of my former schoolmates, and then moved on. We ducked most of Indiana, going via the Michigan Central Railroad, but before reaching Detroit we turned south and went to Toledo. From there we passed through Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Springfield (Mass.) to Boston. I had a self-imposed mission near Boston; it was to visit the town of Sharon, my mother's birthplace, and incidentally to make inquiries concerning her relatives. Mother, whose maiden name was Billings, was a direct descendant of Roger Billings, who came to this country from England in 1635. He settled in Worcester, Mass., near Squantum, died in November of 1683, and was buried in the old cemetery at Quincy.

I secured the desired information and sent it to mother, after which we roamed up and down the coast from Portland, Maine to Jacksonville, Florida. The only state we missed was Vermont. Our net income from sales of phoney jewelry seldom exceeded four dollars per day, and more often was closer to three. New York City was a washout. Every little shop on the Bowery displayed a line of phoney jewelry, and I doubt if we averaged two dollars each per day. Waitresses and shop girls were our best bets, as most of the better-class hookers had "Charlies" who bought them the real goods.

The middle of September found me in Louisville again. Curly was going home to Detroit, and asked me to go with him to meet his folks and family. I knew he intended to settle down; and young though I was, I felt I would be a hindrance to his plans if I stayed there with him all winter, as he wanted me to do. I decided to go home, and told him so. He gave me loads of good advice; and that day I parted from the truest friend and one of the finest characters I have ever known.

I shall never forget that parting. It was a miserable day, with cold rain falling as we stood on the levee under a large tarpaulin, stretched on ropes to shelter some merchandise stored there. I had wanted to ride on one of the river stern-wheelers, and had bought second-class passage to Cairo on the one being loaded below us. We stood there hand in hand, not saying a word. I was on the verge of tears, and I think that he was as well, though he was not as emotional as I. When the boat's bell and whistle sounded the all-aboard warning, we embraced each other and I kissed him; then without saying goodbye, I ran down the levee and boarded the boat. I stood near the paddlewheel with tears streaming from my eyes, and waved in farewell until he was out of sight. I never saw Curly again. We wrote to each other occasionally for ten or twelve years. He was reconciled with his family, and several times offered me a good job in the fur business to which he succeeded on the death of his father. I hope to meet him again in the Great Beyond.

The little packet boat, Ohio Belle, was the slowest thing I ever had traveled on. An ox team would have been faster. We stopped every few miles to discharge and take on passengers and freight, and tied up to a landing the first night when the pilot was unable to find the channel because of rain and fog. When we reached Cairo I was glad to get ashore. However, not being satisfied that the packet I left was a fair sample of river travel, I bought first-class passage to Saint Lewis on a much larger boat, the Chickasaw.

There must have been a rate war at the time, for I paid only five dollars for a trip that lasted three days. There were many stops, but the food was so good that I wouldn't have cared if we had taken a month. However, I was destined to see more of the Chickasaw a couple of years later.

When I reached Denver, via side-door Pullmans, mother reminded me of my promise to go to school. Instead, I talked her into letting me learn the barber's trade. In those days, barbers, printers and cigar-makers were mostly booze-hounds and half-baked tramps. They changed jobs so often that one could be sure of finding emloyment at any one of those occupations in almost any fair-sized town, A west-side barber named Fred Lambert, who owned his own shop, taught me the trade; and as he was a skilled workman and I was dextrous, the spring of 1890 found me qualified to hold a job in the best of shops.

After leaving Lambert's, the first job I got was in the shop of two cousins whose names, strange as it may seem, were Wise and Likewise. The pay was a guarantee of seven dollars a week, with sixty percent of all I took in above fifteen dollars; but as I sat around the shop most of the time except on Saturdays and Sundays, I seldom exceeded my guarantee. The hours were from seven AM to nine PM except on Saturdays, when we were open until midnight, and Sundays, when we closed at one PM. We had one day off each week.

After a month of that, I quit to take a job as water boy and helper at a sandstone quarry near the mouth of Platte Canyon, about twenty-five miles from Denver. The pay was one dollar a day plus board and a bunk in a tent house. The quarry was a hogback, or ledge of rock, along the sides of which about fifty holes were drilled six feet apart, and loaded with black powder and dynamite. At night the loads were discharged, blowing down the whole face of the hogback. I learned to "punch steel" (hit a drill with a sledge) and was promoted to striker with seventy-five cents a day more pay. I liked the work which, while hard, did not tire me too much; and by early summer, the muscles of my arms and shoulders had grown so much I could no longer wear the suit I had bought the previous winter. In the nearby canyon the Platte River afforded excellent trout fishing, the fish ranging from one-half to six pounds.

The stone from this quarry was used solely to build the Fifteenth Street Theatre in Denver. It was located on the corner of Fifteenth and Welton Streets, and was about the ugliest structure I have ever seen. I had the honor(?) of being one of the first actors to adorn its stage when I played the juvenile part of Claude Melnotte in "The Lady of Lyons", produced by a local lady who taught acting and elocution. A beautiful girl who played a leading role in that amateur performance later became a distinguished actress; her name was Arlene Crater.

Sometime during the next two years I joined the local Turn Verein, where I learned to turn somersaults, flips, and simple twisters. I am convinced that one of the boys I met there later changed his name to Douglas Fairbanks and became a famous movie star. Every time I have seen him in the movies, an inner voice has whispered, "There's the boy who used to do the giant swing so easily."

Along about August, my wanderlust returned. I went to California, tramping all the time, and still peddling phoney jewelry. I met a tramp, "Frisco Fatty", who disliked booze as much as I did, and we teamed up. Fatty was an out-and-out moocher. He always wore a "bug"--a long, large blister on the forearm produced by binding a strip of Cantharides plaster to the arm overnight--or a "P. P."--in which the forearm carried two muslin-wrapped splints, around which Plaster-of-Paris bandages were wrapped. The whole arm was then dipped in water to harden the plaster. With the "bug" his spiel was that he had been scalded, and with the P.P., that he had broken his arm. Fortunately for him, X-rays were unknown at that time and no doctor would risk removing the splints, thus subjecting himself to a possible damage suit should the arm really be broken and fail to heal properly.

The "bugs" were not painful and lasted about two weeks, after which they dried up without leaving a scar. Some tramps used concentrated lye or nitric acid to produce "bugs". These, especially the lye, were painful at first but had the virtue of long life. They were usually placed on the back of the left hand for convenience in exposing the ugly ulcers to the "begee". The ulcers thus formed would usually take about a year to heal, after which another bug would be made upon the scar tissue of the previous one.

California was a Mecca for tramps in those days. Practically every county and town in the state, the larger cities excepted, had passed laws allotting a fee of two dollars each to the Justice of the Peace for every tramp convicted of vagrancy. Constables, and in some cases the Judges themselves, would visit the jungles daily and round up whatever tramps they could find. They made no arrests; they simply asked the men to come to the court house, where they were supposed to plead guilty to the charge of vagrancy, receive a sentence of twenty-four hours to get out of town, and accept a fifty-cent piece to speed them on their way, the Judge thereby clearing a dollar and a half on each conviction.

In connection with this practice, Liverpool Tony told me this story: At one roundup of tramps in a Southern California town, a Swede, who was not familiar with the procedure, refused to plead guilty. He defied the Judge to find him guilty because, he said, he had five dollars in his pocket. The Judge, an Irishman, defied in his own court, arose in righteous wrath and said, "OH! So I can't find yez guilty, can I? Well, yez are fined five dollars for contimpt of court and yez kin take tin days in jail for yersilf"- and then added triumphantly, "Now, can I find yez guilty?"

Fatty and I spent about six weeks tramping up and down the coast from San Diego to Seattle. We must have met at least two hundred tramps and carved our monickers on a hundred or more water tanks. I established a reputation for square shooting and liberality, and many tramps whom I met for the first time would grasp my hand in fellowship upon hearing my monicker, where ordinarily they would only nod at an introduction to a stranger. No one challenged me because of my age, for although only seventeen I was fully grown and had a perceptible beard; I had started shaving when I was thirteeen.

When October came, I said goodbye to Fatty and returned to Denver. I had formed no affection for him, though I liked him well enough. He said he was going to remain on the Coast that winter, but would look me up in Denver in the spring. He promised to write to me, but I never heard from him.