One night in the Baldwin Hotel Annex I got a roll of bills that rather surprised me, and I was still more surprised when I read in the next evening’s paper that George Dixon, the little colored champion fighter, had lost his money to a burglar. At the Baldwin bar the next night somebody asked him what he would have done had he been awakened by the burglar.
Dixon, always a good loser, smiled. “I’d ’a’ done just what you’d ’a’ done. I’d ’a’ gone right back to sleep till that man went on out.”
CHAPTER XV
During my stay in San Francisco I lived at the Reno House, a small workingman’s lodgings in Sacramento Street. It was owned by a man named Rolkin, a carpenter, who invested his small savings in it knowing nothing about the hotel business. He had a “crazy notion” that he could put clean linen on every bed every day in this cheap place and survive. His competitors said he was insane. He persisted, however, and on that “crazy idea” he built a string of fine hotels that he counts to-day like a barefoot Franciscan counting his beads.
I brought a terrible cold out of the Seattle jail that hung on for months. I got worried about it and went to a doctor. After looking me over carefully he pronounced one of my lungs bad and said I was in a fair way to fall into consumption. He advised me to go to a different climate, not to worry and get into a panic about it, and to take cod-liver oil. “Not the emulsion,” he said, “but the raw oil. It’s nasty stuff to take, but it will save you. Take it for a year if you can stomach it that long.”
I followed his advice. The cold was gone in a week, and in a month I gained ten pounds. I stuck to the nauseating raw oil for a year, and to-day I firmly believe that if I hadn’t I would have long ago succumbed to the dreaded prison scourge, T.B.
One night as I was meandering over Kearny Street toward the Coast somebody fell into step beside me. I looked around and saw Soldier Johnnie. We were well met, and I asked about his visit home. “Hell, I only got as far as ‘Chi.’ I bumped into a tribe of hungry bums, winter-bound and starving there. They were living off the free-lunch counters and the weather was so fierce they couldn’t stay out on the street long enough to beg a dime for a ten-cent ‘flop’ in the Knickerbocker Hotel. They were so miserable and forlorn that I went over to the West Side and rented a housekeeping joint and gave them an indoor ‘convention.’ In six weeks my thousand dollars was gone and I put in the rest of the winter hanging around Hinky Dink’s and Bathhouse John’s. When the weather got right I rambled west to Salt Lake. I was going to hold it down in ‘The Lake’ till George came out, but I met a beggar that had put in the winter here in the city and he implored me to come out here and take one look at the ‘box’ in the Wigwam Theater. I’ve looked it over and it’s the softest thing I ever saw. It’s older than I am and I can beat it with a fifty-cent hammer.”
“Do you need any help?”
“No. An outside man would only attract the cops. I’ll plant inside before the place closes and get out some way after I get the coin.”
Johnnie didn’t even waste fifty cents for a hammer. He found one in the stage carpenter’s kit. He got something over a thousand dollars, all in gold, and I persuaded him to let me buy tickets to Sacramento, where I exchanged it for paper money. We got “under” a night passenger train and held it into Truckee, where we spent a few days fishing and drinking mickies of alcohol with some congenial bums we found by the river. The weather was fine, and we journeyed through Nevada on slow freight trains, sitting in the open side door of a clean box car, with our legs dangling outside, looking for the scenery.