“You’re only beginning at this racket, Kid,” finished the veteran yegg. “Take my advice and be careful with your gun. It’s a good servant, but don’t let it become your master or it will hang you.”
We hadn’t been in Salt Lake ten days till one of the “dicks” that put me on trial in Smiler’s case came into the “Gold Room,” a gambling house we hung out in, and took me off to jail. They held me all day and that night, trying to dig up some charge to put against me. Judge Powers came the following day, and after a lot of palaver they charged me with vagrancy. He got me a bond and I was later dismissed.
Harry Hinds, who kept the Gold Room, saw the police and came back with the good news that we could stay in Salt Lake as long as we didn’t “bother” anybody in the city and that they didn’t care what we did outside the city limits.
We made our headquarters in the city for more than a year. We hung out in the Gold Room and our persistent attempts to beat the faro game kept us continually jumping into the near-by towns to replenish our bankroll. Dynamite was easy to get and we didn’t trouble ourselves to go to Ogden for the parcel I had left in the safety vault. We became quite established in Salt Lake and came to know many people. We lived at a quiet, second-class hotel, and went about our business in a decent, orderly manner.
George lost all interest in bums and their gatherings after the convention at Pocatello, and kept away from them. They still attracted me, and occasionally I went down to the jungle on the banks of the river Jordan that empties into the Great Salt Lake.
On one of those visits I fell in with a crippled beggar who had been down on the “poultice route” in southern Utah. He had formerly been a very capable thief, but the loss of a leg under a train at once disabled and reformed him, and he turned to begging, as many do when they can no longer steal. I had a bottle of “Dr. Hall” and as we passed it back and forth the beggar bewailed his misfortune in losing his leg and having to “dingdong” his way about the country for a few “lousy dimes.” “There’s a box,” he wailed, “in the county treasurer’s office in the courthouse at the town of ——— that I could chop the back out of with an ax, if I was able-bodied. The town whittler goes to bed when the general store closes at nine o’clock at night. There ain’t five hundred people in the town and they’re all in bed before ten o’clock. I went in to beg the county treasurer and he gave me four bits. The ‘box’ was open and I saw a stack of ‘soft stuff’ (paper money) that would make Rockefeller’s mouth water.”
He drank himself speechless and went to sleep mumbling his misfortune.
I told George about it and we looked it up on the map and found it was twenty miles off a railroad. “I don’t like the way it’s situated, Kid,” said George, “but there’s three or four thousand dollars there now while they’re collecting taxes, and we’d better look at it.”
We got a small roll of blankets each, and bought tickets to a town forty miles distant from the county seat. George went first, and I followed the next day. At this base he hired a saddle horse, and departed to look the spot over. He got back in a few days and reported that it was even “softer” than the cripple had pictured it.
“We’ll hike the forty miles into the town, Kid, by easy stages, beat off the box, and get a couple of horses out of the livery stable. By daylight we ought to be thirty miles away, where we will ditch the horses and plant in the jungles till night. After that we will have to hike nights till we get back to ‘The Lake.’”