George smiled and took a better grip on my hand. “Yes, I remember you, young fellow. You’ve grown some. Have you gathered any wisdom?”
“I’ve gathered enough to know that you are entitled to any part of this,” I said, producing my small bankroll.
“This is payable to-morrow night,” he said, taking twenty dollars.
The money was returned promptly and a bond of friendship and confidence was formed that remains unbroken. I came to know him as “Rebel George,” prince of bunko men, the man who developed and perfected the “gold-brick” swindle. After stealing a fortune and losing it at faro bank, he quit in answer to the prayers of his faithful wife, who had for years shared his vicissitudes in and out of prison. At the age of sixty, prison bent and money broke, he started life on the level and when last I heard of him he was in a fair way to succeed in his small business.
From Butte I journeyed to Spokane, Washington, and then to Seattle. I marvel now that I did not stop in one of those spots of golden opportunity and go to work. With the money I would have saved in a couple of years I could have bought land or lots that would have made me independent in ten years. I think land hunger is inherited. I had no desire then, nor have I now, to own land. The desire to possess land, whether inherent or acquired, appears to me to be a sure safeguard against a wasted, dissolute, harmful life.
I had now become so saturated with the underworld atmosphere that no thought of any kind of honest endeavor entered my mind. Fully realizing their value, I passed by many splendid opportunities in the booming Western towns; not that I was lazy or indolent, but that business and the hoarding of money had no attraction. I will leave it to the scientists and investigators to explain why Johnnie Jones lands in a pulpit, and his chum next door, with equal opportunity, lands in a penitentiary. It’s too deep for me. I know I never had any money sense and never will have, and I know that had I been blessed, or cursed, with land hunger and money sense I would to-day have more honest dollars than I ever had crooked dimes.
Twenty years of moderate application to his business will make most any man independent. In twenty years a journeyman mechanic will handle more money than a first-class burglar, and at the end of that time he will have a home and a family and a little money in the bank, while the most persistent, sober, and industrious burglar is lucky to have his liberty. He is too old to learn a trade, too old and broken from doing time to tackle hard labor. Nobody will give him work. He has the prison horrors, and turns to cheap larcenies and spends the balance of his life doing short sentences in small jails.
In rare instances the broken thief finds friends, sympathetic, understanding, and ready to help him. Strong and kindly hands at his elbows ease him over the hard spots and direct him to some useful place in the world. Some understand such kindness and respond by breasting the current and battling upstream with their best strokes; others do not, or can not understand, and, like dead fish, float down and away forever.
My apprenticeship under the Sanctimonious Kid was all that could be desired by either of us, yet my education was far from finished. At Seattle, almost broke, and doubtful about being able to do anything worth while by myself, I cast about for a “sidekicker.” Seattle was rebuilding after her big fire. Money was plentiful, and I never saw such an aggregation of beggars, tramps, thieves, and yeggs as were gathered there. Gambling, prostitution, and the smuggling of opium flourished unmolested. The thieves hung out in Clancey’s gambling house, and were protected and exploited by him. They thought Clancey was a little “Hinky Dink” in a little Chicago.
Every time a thief showed up with a hundred dollars he was “pinched,” but Clancey took him out in an hour—for the hundred. When it was too late they found out that it was he who had them “pinched.” Clancey died broke.