I said, “But one. This young man with me wants it.”
The attendant gave him a towel and the young man went to his bath. But we were given to understand, in a decisive manner, that we were not welcome and not wanted. The bath thus given my companion was the first gratuity ever granted me, in all my wanderings, by the Y. M. C. A.
The first remark the young man made after coming from the bath was, “I feel so good, I think I could go without eating for a week.”
Turning to me abruptly he said, “I tell you, Jack, I can’t beg or steal, and I’m not going hungry or bedless another day.”
I suggested the Associated Charities. “They might possibly help us.”
“That would be begging, wouldn’t it? Besides, that place is for sick men, isn’t it? I am not sick. No! I am going into the navy. Let us go over to the Post Office, to the United States Marine Office, and see what they have to offer.”
Although he was a young man, a graduate of the grammar school, a perfect type of physical manhood, straight as a poplar, five feet eleven inches in height and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds, he could not get in, and was referred to Fort Sam Houston for enlistment. As we left he said, “I am going to ask the first soldier I see about going in. He probably will give me twenty-five cents for a meal and tell me to keep out of the goldarn place.” He continued, though, in a decided manner, “I am going into the army,—not because I want to, but because there seems to be no other immediate opportunity offered.”
And so we parted, he to enter the army, I to be left alone with my thoughts.
Two-thirds of our army to-day is made up of boys who are forced into it. It is the volunteer who makes a good soldier, but these boys are not volunteers—with them it is compulsory. Monday morning I went to the army post to see if the boy had done what he said he was going to do. I found him there a soldier, giving three of the best years of his life for sixteen dollars a month, instead of receiving the privilege of labor by being temporarily cared for in a Municipal Emergency Home until he could help himself.
And, now, I will portray briefly the story of “The young man with the hoe,” who made his way into southern Texas. He was penniless, and was arrested on the Frisco line because he was discovered riding a freight train. He told me how he was given thirty days in a Texas convict camp, and how they nearly killed him there for being charged with trespassing on the property of the railroad company. I somehow felt that the convict camp had almost killed the best within him, for he remarked as we were strolling down the street toward our destination, “I have a nice gun on me. I think I will pawn it, because if a fellow has a gun on him and has nothing to eat nor any place to sleep he is liable to do something he will be sorry for.” He took his gun into a pawnshop and left it there for thirty-five cents.