III

As a rule, the poke-out beggar has but one meal a day, usually breakfast. This is the main meal with all vagabonds, and even the lazy tramp makes frantic efforts to find it. Its quantity as well as its quality depends largely on the kind of house he visits. His usual breakfast, if he is lucky, consists of coffee, a little meat, some potatoes, and "punk 'n' plaster" (bread and butter). Coffee, more than anything else, is what every hobo wants early in the morning. After sleeping out of doors or in a box-car, especially during the colder months, a man is stiff and chilled, and coffee is the thing to revive him when he cannot get whisky, which is by no means the easiest thing to beg. I have known tramps to drink over six cups of coffee before they looked for anything solid, and I myself have often needed three before I could eat at all.

The dinner of the lazy beggar is a very slim affair. It is either a free lunch in a saloon, or a hand-out. This latter consists mainly of sandwiches, but now and then a cold potato will be put into the bundle, and also, occasionally, a piece of pie. After the tramp has had one or two of these impromptu lunches he persuades himself that he has had enough, and goes off for a rest. How often—but on account of bashfulness, rather than anything else—have I done the same thing! And what poor dinners they were! They no more satisfy a tramp's appetite than they would a lion's, but the indolent fellow tries to persuade himself otherwise. I once overheard a typical member of the class discussing the matter with himself, or rather with his appetite, which, for the sake of argument and companionship, he looked upon as a personality quite apart. He had just finished a slim and slender hand-out, had tossed into the bushes the paper bag that held it together, and, when I saw him, was looking up into the sky in a most confidential manner. Soon, and as if sorry he could not be kinder to it, he cast his eyes pityingly on his paunch, and said in a sad tone:

"Poor devil! I feel fer y'u—bet cher life I do! But yer'll have to stand it, I guess. It's the only way I know fer y'u to git along." Then he patted it gently, and repeated again his sympathetic "poor devil." But not once did he scold himself for his laziness. Not he! He never does.

His supper is very similar to his dinner, except that he tries now and then to wash it down with a cup of tea or coffee. Later in the evening he also indulges in another hand-out, unless he is on a freight-train or far from the abodes of men.

Such is the diet of the lazy tramp, and, strange to relate, despite its unwholesomeness and its meagerness, he is a comparatively healthy fellow, as are almost all tramps. Their endurance, especially that of the poke-out tramps, is something remarkable. I have known them to live on "wind-pudding" as they call air, for over forty-eight hours without becoming exhausted, and there are cases on record where they have gone for four and five days without anything to eat or drink, and have lived to tell the tale. A man with whom I once traveled in Pennsylvania did this very thing. He was locked into a box-car which was shunted off on an unused side-track a long distance from any house or place where his cries could be heard. He was in the car for nearly one hundred and twenty hours, and although almost dead when found, he picked up in a few days, and before long was on the road again. I saw him at the World's Fair at Chicago, and he was just as healthy and happy in his own way as ever.

In some of the sparsely settled districts in Texas tramps have suffered most appalling deaths by such accidents, but so long as a beggar keeps his freedom I do not believe that even a lazy one starves to death in this country. I know very well that people do not realize this, and that they feed tramps regularly, laboring under the delusion that it is only humane so to do.

But although the tramp hates honest labor, he hates starvation still more, and if he finds it impossible to pick up anything to eat, he will either go to jail or work. He loves this world altogether too much to voluntarily explore another of which he knows so little.