You are right. I didn’t have to go, but I went just the same. The opium smoker can always find a good excuse for an extra smoke. I went to the joint to celebrate my changed fortune and to propitiate whatever deformed deity it is that is supposed to look after the luck of a burglar. I must have propitiated to some purpose, for within a week another stroke of dumb luck more than doubled my bankroll, and I decided to take a lay-off.
Always in the back of my mind was the thought that some day I would go back and see my father. It was ten years since I ran away from him. Many things had happened to me. Something may have happened to him. He might need money or help. I was free to go; I had no associates to cling to; I was under no obligations to anybody. My time and money were my own. The hop habit was getting fastened on me, and this trip would give me a chance to break away from it. The notion of being respectable and feeling safe and secure for a few months took my fancy, so I started in to do the thing right.
My gun and burglar tools went to my bartender friend as presents. I was glad to get rid of the gun for a while. I could get another any time for ten dollars, and for another ten I could order by mail more instruments from an ex-burglar at Warsaw, Illinois, who manufactured them and advertised them in the Police Gazette as “novelties.”
I had always followed the Sanctimonious Kid’s advice in the matter of wearing careful clothes, but now I satisfied my hankering for a gray suit and hat. I thought of the leather trunk too, but it had no appeal any more. I remembered old Cy Near, and smiled to think how I had worshiped the twenty-dollar gold piece that dangled from the watch chain across his ample paunch.
I soon discovered that being respectable imposed many hardships and obligations I hadn’t thought of. One of them is paying railroad fare. I played the game square while I was at it, and gave up my money for a ticket and a berth in the sleeper. Here I encountered another hardship. My professional eye told me there were many fat pocketbooks beneath the pillows of my fellow travelers that my professional hand could have taken when the porter was out of sight, but I forebore.
At Kansas City I prowled about the neighborhood I had lived and worked in, but asked no questions. The crabbed, cranky widow’s boarding house was closed. Tex of the larcenous eye was gone, and so were the card and dice sharks. Cocky McAllister, the hack driver that helped me rescue Julia, was not around his old stand. The milkman I worked for, collecting bills from “them women,” was not at his place. The theater where Julia worked was still going, but she was not there. I passed Madam Singleton’s old place, but there was another name on the red-lighted pane of glass above the door. Still I asked no questions; they were all nothing to me. I could easily have found somebody to tell me what became of them all except, perhaps, Julia, but I was a stranger in my own town and preferred to remain one. My father was the only one I asked about. At the railroad offices, in the department where he had worked, I learned that he was dead.
A talkative old pensioner on the company who tended a door told me he had been dead three years; that he died after a long siege of sickness and had barely enough money left to bury him decently in the village graveyard beside my mother. I was not shocked to learn of his death; we had been too far apart for that. I wondered if my long silence and absence mightn’t have aggravated his illness and hastened his end. I was sorry not to have been with him when he was sick and needed me. I was glad he died without knowing what I had done to my life.
That was many years ago, but I wasn’t thoughtless even then, and I recall now, distinctly, how I realized with shame and regret that I had never done one thing to repay him for caring for me till I was able to shift, no matter how lamely, for myself. Looking back now, as I did then, I am forced to admit that the only consideration I ever showed for him was this: I never put his name, which is my name, on a police blotter or a prison register while he was alive, or after his death.
I had been dallying with the opium pipe almost daily for a year, yet I had no trouble when I gave it up—just a few restless days and nights and I forgot it. I gave this no thought then, but later when I saw an opium smoker doubled up with cramps and pleading for hop, and learned he had been “on the pipe” only three months, I got interested and began thinking it over and observing.
My observations and experience have convinced me that the drug habit, like most of our other habits, is largely mental. In another chapter I shall submit a few facts in support of this opinion.