He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a
cheap room for a week.
* * * * *
Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed
in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I
got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California....
"Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he
looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him."
They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons
had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,--had furnished them to
me--
"I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you
might get into trouble."
Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with
cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.
* * * * *
The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I
would travel in that guise.
* * * * *
With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a
much-abused school-copy of Caesar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin
I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and
tooth-powder--and a cake of soap--all wrapped up in my army blankets, I
set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum.
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