..
as who would have not?
* * * * *
Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding
address the office of the _National Magazine_, in New York, I hopped a
freight shortly after dawn. It was a fast, through freight. Because of
lack of practice I boarded it clumsily, and almost went to my death
under its grinding, roaring wheels, there in the Laurel freight-yards. I
sat, trembling with the shock to my nerves, on the bumpers.
I hopped off at Argentine, just outside of Kansas City.
I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee
together....
But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of
the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone--an
idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the
writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.
Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual
"Jesus-Christ'-ing" over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I
got up and walked away stiffly--never again to be a tramp.
The reporter of the _Star_, who covered the stockyards, took me to a
little sturdy cattle merchant, who agreed to ship me to New York, in
care of five carloads of calves ... for a fee of ten dollars. I
persuaded him that I would mail him that ten on arrival at my point of
destination .
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