“How did you do it?” Scott urged. “You said that I could sit up all night, you know, and I could listen very contentedly to an account of all your wanderings. They must be interesting for I suppose you beat your way everywhere. Come on, let’s have the whole story,” and he settled himself down to listen.
Johnson, who loved to have an audience for his adventures, was in his glory. He had had adventures galore and they lost nothing in his telling of them.
“If you really do not want to sleep for an hour,” he said, “I’ll tell you about them, but there is no use in trying to do it in less. It covers a great many years in spite of my young and boyish face.
“You asked me to tell you about my work. Well, that began when I was six years old. My father was a teamster in Duluth, and I was the oldest of eight children. The old man did not believe in any idlers in the house, and one morning when I was about six he kicked me out the front door and told me not to come back till I had earned something.” Johnson had never been taught any family pride and made no attempt to shield either his family or himself.
“There are a good many things I have forgotten since then, but I remember perfectly well what a pickle I was in that morning. I had had too many of those kicks to try to go back so I paddled away right up to the main street howling like a good fellow. Nobody paid any attention to me till I ran into a newsboy.
“‘Hello, sonny,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter with you? Lost a million on the races?’ I told him my troubles and he handed me a bundle of papers and told me he’d give me a cent for every ten I sold. ‘Don’t quit crying,’ he said, ‘keep it right up. That ought to sell them if anything will.’
“I made five cents out of it that morning and went home happy. The old man came in to dinner, took the money for my board and told me to get some more that afternoon. The newsy stocked me up again and I was such a little kid that lots of people bought from me. Well, I kept at that paper business for a long time, but the old man kept taking all of my money for board and it was not encouraging. At last I got wise enough not to take home all I earned and began to get ahead a little.
“When I was not selling papers I took to running errands and finally became a regular messenger boy. I learned to read the papers while I was selling them. I tell you I learned things on that messenger job. A messenger boy on a night shift sees everything in a town except the inside of the churches. One night about two A. M. I took a message away up town. It took a long time to get anybody up, but finally an oldish man came to the door. He looked at me a minute without taking the message I was trying to give him, and then pulled me into the house by the back of the neck.
“‘What are you doing out at this time of night?’ he asked sternly.
“I was sassy and told him that it was his fault for getting a message at that time of night.