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Nevertheless I think a fellow has the right to ask himself if things might not have been different.
He was a sharp at mathematics, and I think my failure to learn multiplication hurt him more than if he had caught me spelling bird with a “u,” or sugar with two “gs.”
She had talked furiously, with a storm of bitter words. Now she stopped and smiled. “Yes, this appetite of mine saved my life. I’ll never die hungry if I can help it.
“Julia,” I asked, “did you take the hog man’s money?” “No,” she snapped, bristling. She lied bravely, and I knew it, and respected her for it, somehow. It was one of those lies you know to be a lie and yet believe. The beauty of her lie was that she just let it go with that plain, short “No!” She did not go into any long explanations or excuses, or blame it on anybody else. It was a perfect lie, any way you look at it.
“Well, John, you’ll be what you’ll be, and I cannot help or hinder you. Go back to your job in the morning if you like.”
I’d do what everybody else does when they’re wrong an’ get caught at it. I’d get mad an’ cuss hell out of ’em.”
This adventure fascinated me. I gave no thought to the burglary. It seemed right that I should have a coat and food. My money was behind in the jail. I couldn’t buy them. I had stolen them. Somehow I felt satisfied, as if I had got even with somebody.
That was a snide little caper we cut back there and I wouldn’t have touched it only you had to have a coat. How would you like to be a prowler, kid?”
How could a boy help admiring such wisdom? I was flattered to be taken up by one so experienced, so confident and active about his work, and withal, so carefree, happy, and smiling.
I had an attorney. But the bums had already tried me and I was found not guilty.
From black powder he turned to dynamite and afterward was one of the first to “thrash out the soup”—a process used by the bums and yeggs for extracting the explosive oil, nitro glycerine, from sticks of “dan” or dynamite.
I say they had character because, while they did wrong things, they always tried to do them in the right way and at the right time.
When a bums’ “convention” is to be held, the jungle is first cleared of all outsiders such as “gay cats,” “dingbats,” “whangs,” “bindle stiffs,” ”jungle buzzards,” and “scissors bills.”
This may seem strange, but it’s a fact. The underworld beggars are the most reliable and trustworthy, the most self-sacrificing and the quickest to help of any class of people outside the pale of society.
It was a colorful Tenderloin—loud, drunken, odorous, and stupid from hop. Its bad wine, ill women, and worse song have gone to join the Indian, the buffalo, the roulette wheel, and the faro box. Deeply and securely dug in, it yielded slowly, inch by inch, and with scant grace, to the sledgehammer blows of the militant Father Caraher.
“You see, kid,” Sanc continued, “those people are excited and frightened. You have to think for them and for yourself, too.
Not one house burglar in a hundred is caught in the act. It’s always when he is trying to sell his plunder.
“The police are not chumps, kid; they are just lazy, that’s all. If they worked as thoroughly at their business as I do at mine, I don’t know what would happen.
Even at that age I had stumbled upon one truth, and that is, ‘The best way to get misinformed is to ask a lot of questions.’
“Vandalism, they will call it,” he said after destroying probably five hundred dollars’ worth of glass, “but in reality it is a scientific experiment and a success.”
The most successful bunko man is the one who bunkoes himself before he goes after a sucker.’
I don’t feel like going to work as a laborer at two dollars a day, or as a clerk for fifteen a week. I’m not speaking disparagingly of them, mind you—fact is, they have more real courage than we have, working for such wages.
“Kid,” he said later, “this is the season of peace on earth and good will to men. Who gives to the poor lends to the Lord, but when I give anything to the poor I am going to have a better motive. However, we are not givers; we are takers, and our taking should be reasoned out rationally. We will reverse this ‘giving and lending.’ We will rob the rich and discomfit the devil; thereby perhaps, finding favor in the sight of the Lord.
In Pocatello, as in every other Western town in those days, it was the correct custom and usage for sporting people to go on a big jamboree once or twice a year. A jamboree was usually preceded by a run of good or bad luck. If the celebrant got hold of a bunch of easy money he or she “went on a tear” to celebrate the good luck. If the luck got too bad, the way to change it was to go out and get drunk. The length of these celebrations was determined by the size of the party’s bankroll or the strength of his constitution.
Robbery has none of the complications of burglary. It is simple as one, two, three. You get it or you don’t.
The desire to possess land, whether inherent or acquired, appears to me to be a sure safeguard against a wasted, dissolute, harmful life.
Out in the street I cleansed my conscience by repeating the Sanctimonious Kid’s favorite parody: “Oh, room rent, what crimes are committed in thy name!”
His accusing words bit into me like an acid. They were laden with scorn. I turned hot with shame and confusion. Tapping the letter with a long, bony finger, he said: “Him letter talk you good man. What for, you good man?”
“To understand is to forgive,” it is said. I have long since forgiven the numberless, noisy stool pigeons that beset my crooked path because I don’t want any poison in my mind, but as yet I am unable to understand them.
The Sanctimonious Kid, who was something of a philosopher, said to me once: “Kid, ours is a crooked business, but we must not allow ourselves to think crooked. We’ve got to think straight, clearly and logically, or we are lost. Of course we’ll lose anyway, sooner or later, but let us not hasten the day by loose and careless thinking.”
I had already made up my mind I ought to hate somebody over the flogging and had about settled on Mr. Burr. But when he was gone I thought it all over again and saw there was no more sense in hating him than any machine I had carelessly got my fingers into.
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,
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“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.”
“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.”
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.
The expression, “I have him pegged,” which has crept into common usage, is thieves’ slang pure and simple, and has nothing to do with the game of cribbage as many suppose. The thief, to save himself the trouble of staying up all night watching a spot to make sure no one enters after closing hours, puts a small wooden peg in the door jamb after the place is locked up.
A visiting warden, surprised because there was no wall around Folsom, asked Murphy how he managed to keep the “cons” there. “That’s simple,” he said. “I’ve got one half of them watching the other half.” His system caused many murders and assaults and at last it climaxed in the bloodiest prison break in the history of California.
All the convicts needed was an organizer, a leader. He appeared in the person of Dick Gordon. With a sentence of forty-five years and a prior prison experience, Gordon saw no chance of getting out on the square and began planning to escape.
I preferred death to the loss of my credits.
When I got out I held up my hand and swore I would never make another friend or do another decent thing. I borrowed a gun and got money. I returned to Folsom by stealth and flooded the place with hop. I went about the country for months with but one thing in my mind, a sort of vicious hatred of everybody and everything.
I will not say there is honor among thieves. But I maintain that the thieves I knew had something that served as a good substitute for honor.
The worst hold the drug gets on a man is the mental hold. It becomes a mental habit. A man has to keep a hard grip on his mind; he has to want to quit, first, and keep wanting to quit all the time, then he can do it.
But the last words of my friend who had rescued me were always in my ears. “Lay away from that stuff. It will make a bum of you.” Hundreds of times it was just that memory that tipped the balance, and I would take only what I had allowed myself, no more. I believe now I quit because he said that to me. I felt that if I could not do that much, and it was the only thing he ever asked me to do, I wasn’t worthy of the friendship of such a man as he had shown himself to be.
I don’t believe in those radical cures. It stands to reason you can’t cure in three days a habit that it took you five or ten years to build up. I think any man can cure himself. He must first be cured mentally, he must want to be cured. If he doesn’t want to be cured, all the treatments in the world aren’t going to do it. You can lock men in prisons and deprive them of hop, and they will come right back and get it again because they don’t want to be cured. But the man who wants to quit can.
Looking me straight in the eye, she said in a tone of finality that left no chance of an answer: “You are mistaken; you don’t know me. My name’s not Mary, and I was never in Pocatello in my life.”
I realized that Judge Dunne would be taking a chance in giving me a sentence that amounted practically to nothing. He had his place on the bench and his reputation with his fellow judges and the people to consider. If I came out of prison and got into trouble immediately after, I would be double-crossing him. I saw it was up to me to square myself and go to work when I came out.
If I had gone back “sticking up” people, the judge’s critics could have said that he, and he alone, made it possible—and that’s precisely why I quit.
I cannot say I quit stealing because I knew it was wrong. I quit because there was no other way for me to discharge the obligations I had accepted.
