George smiled 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 not understand, 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,
and Frank 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, the gamblers 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
better tell 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 murder
of 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.”