We were a motley crowd—all nationalities. There was the usual “bad man from Texas.” He talked loud, swaggered, and bluffed, and kept the car in a general uproar. His food for the trip—as far as we could see—consisted of several feet of bologna sausage which he had hung from the rack above his seat. When he deemed it time to eat, he would take out his vicious-looking knife and “hit it a lick.” However long or short the slice, he would eat it, saying:
“The Texan only eats what he can get by the might of his right arm.”
Every once in a while his “might” would get beyond all control and he would knock a hunk of the sausage in among the crowd of poor chattering Chinamen, frightening them almost out of their senses. Then, to make matters worse, he would dive for it with his dangerous-looking knife. I used to argue with him about this action until the bald-headed Chinaman in the seat in front of me knew I had saved his life. Every morning a pot of tea, made hot by the stove at the end of the car, was on the floor beside my bunk.
It was the Texan who told the other men not to play poker with me, as my hands were “too soft” and I must be a card sharp. When I accosted him with it he only said, “Well, how did you get those hands?” and was much amused when I answered, “Painting pictures.”
We never left the train that we did not encounter some strange adventure. At one station, in a shed for horses, we saw the body of a negro with sixteen bullet holes in it, a sight that would have been carefully guarded from the eyes of first-class passengers. At Ogden City we bribed the trainman to tell us that we would have several hours to spare. There was a camp of seventy-five tramps on the border of the lake, and their antics had been terrorizing the citizens. These men of the road accepted us as bosom companions, told us stories, and finally fed us a wonderful dinner of chicken and all sorts of delicacies, cordially inviting us to join them permanently.
Instead of being a bore, the trip was one of the most delightful I ever made and, except for one small aftermath, marked the closing of a definite chapter in my life. I had been back only a short time when I was walking along Howard Street in Boston, my thoughts everywhere but out West. Noticing a crowd in front of a house, I drew up to see the excitement. It was nothing unusual for those days—a gang of toughs were wrecking a Chinese laundry. Standing at the door, uttering most horrible sounds and brandishing an ax in his hand, was an old Chinaman. Just then he saw me, stopped yelling, dropped his ax, and, to the astonishment of all, fell on my neck. All Chinamen looked alike to me, but there could be no doubt about it—it was my friend of the emigrant train. Of course I appealed to the police and the toughs were dispersed; but I had an awful time explaining to this frightened Oriental that I was not his savior.
Chapter V: Adventures in Æstheticism
Paris and Student Days
My first trip to Europe cost me forty dollars and my faith in human nature. The former was the price of an emigrant ticket on the boat and my food from London to Paris; the latter was caused by my lending a fellow passenger—a Frenchman—my best overcoat and never seeing it again. As he taught me a great deal of French, however, I may have been repaid.
There was never an idle moment in the steerage. Every noon we were all hustled up onto the deck—even to a man with a broken back—and our bunks washed out with chloride of lime. This was before the days of wholesale fumigation, and the company was taking no chances. At mealtime were brought in huge baskets of bread and large cans of coffee; we produced our own dishes and were fed much in the fashion of a barbecue, with hunks of meat. After two days I was invited by the purser to sit at his table, and so dined in splendor with the cooks, steward, and “barkeep” on virtually the same fare as the first cabin.
One night we arranged a mock marriage between a giggling Irish girl and rather a crazy fellow with a gray beard. I was the high priest. The barkeeper had given us some whisky and the noise of the merrymaking must have reached the upper deck, for just at its height the leading lady and some members of a well-known opera company that was crossing came down with the captain to see our show. I knew that this would mean the dampening of all our fun, so I stopped them, saying that we had not been invited to their entertainments, and demanded that the privacy of the emigrants should not be broken. The captain seemed amused, but agreed, and they went away, much to the annoyance of the opera star.