The other picture is of the fifty destitute, homeless men I came in contact with during the few days I spent in San Antonio. I found all but two anxious and looking for work. These two, like many a rich man’s son I know, impressed me that they would die before they would work. They seemed to have lost all self-respect and had no compunction in begging a meal or a bed. One was a drinker and the other had a mad passion for reading anything and everything, yet even from these I frequently heard the expression, “I wish I had a job.”
There are, of course, the regulars, chained by habits of vice, on whom the police can put their hands at any time. I know them at a moment’s glance. It was not these poor unfortunates I came to San Antonio to study, but the itinerant workers who are lured from their dull towns to new and undeveloped centers of activity, believing work and high wages await them.
It was Saturday morning. While strolling down West Commerce Street, I met a young man in overalls, with jumper tucked under one arm. I greeted him:
“Hello, Jack! Can you tell a fellow where he can find a job?”
He looked at me with a laughing twinkle in his eye and answered, “I have nothing like that up my sleeve. I wish I had, and if I could, I would share it with you, pal. I am dead broke, too, and,” he continued, “this is my birthday. I am twenty-one to-day. God, but I feel wretched and dirty! I slept in a freight car last night in the I. & G. N. yards but it was a broken rest. The floor was hard and I was as cold as the devil, and then, too, a fellow can’t sleep much when he is fearful that at any moment a railroad or a city bull is going to put his hand upon him.”
I then asked if he had yet breakfasted, and he answered, “No. I have not eaten since yesterday morning.”
Making a trivial excuse, confessing I possessed a little money, we went to breakfast. As we sat down I picked up the morning paper, and he said at once, “Look at the want ads.” The only thing offered that morning was by a man in the Riverside Building who wanted ten grubbers.
“Let’s look it up,” I said.
“All right,” he replied. “I can grub, and I’ll do anything.”
We left for the place. The man was paying ten dollars an acre to men to grub his land, but the agent believed the work was all done. From the manner of the official in charge we fancied we were not of the right color or kind of men for the work.