The boy grinned. "I rolled a guy for twenty dollars in Portsmouth
Square… He was drunk, at that," he finished, as if in justification.
At this moment the door of the cell was opened. The three white men started forward expectantly. But it was the Chinese who was wanted. A group of his countrymen had come to bail him out.
The man who had been silent suddenly spoke to the policeman as he was closing the door again.
"You might as well lock me up proper for the night," he flung out, bitterly. "I guess they're not coming to get me now."
The policeman led him away, in the wake of the disappearing Chinese.
The youth turned to Starratt with a chuckle:
"The old boy's kinda peeved, ain't he? Well, he'll get over that after a while… The first time they jugged me I thought—"
"Then you've been up before?"
"Before?… Say, do I look like a dead one? This isn't a bad habit after you get used to it… So far I've only made the county jails. Some day I suppose I'll graduate… But I'm pretty wise—vagrancy is about all they've ever pinned on me."
Fred looked at his new friend curiously. There didn't seem to be anything particularly vicious about the youth. He merely had learned how to get his hands on easy money and jails were an incident in his career. Without being asked, he described his first tilt with the law. He had come, a youth of seventeen, from a country town up North. He had run away from home, to be exact; there was a stepmother or some equally ancient and honorable excuse. He had arrived in San Francisco in January without money or friends or any great moral equipment, and after a week of purposeless bumming he had been picked up by a policeman and charged with vagrancy. The obliging judge who heard his case gave him twenty-four hours to leave town. He went, in company with a professional tramp, upon the brake beams of a freight train that pulled out for Stockton that very night. But at Stockton the train was overhauled by policemen in wait for just these unwelcome strangers from a rival town, and the two were told to go back promptly where they came from. They got into San Francisco more dead than alive, and then the inevitable happened. They were haled before the selfsame judge who had given the youth such an amazing chance to get started right. He treated them both to thirty days in the county jail, and the youth emerged a wiser but by no means a sadder man. He had learned, among other things, that if one were to be jailed one might just as well be jailed for cause. The charge of vagrancy was very inclusive, and a man could skirt very near the edge of felony and still manage to achieve a nominal punishment. He told all this simply, naturally, naively—as if he were entertaining an acquaintance with a drawing-room anecdote. When he finished, Fred inquired:
"And how about bail to-night?"