There was a sort of camp for bums on the river bank under some trees. They had their fires there, and cans for boiling coffee. They used to lie around, washing and boiling their clothes, and swimming. They stole chickens around the neighborhood and anything else they could get.
One afternoon I was in swimming, when suddenly there was an alarm and everybody ran. I didn’t pay any attention to it at first; then I got out of the water and ran for my clothes. I had just about got them on when the police arrived and grabbed me.
They put me into the patrol wagon. I was the only one they got. Later they picked up one or two others around in the woods, and took us all down to the jail. I was scared half to death.
They put us all in one big room with a lot of other bums they’d picked up. The police had had a general order to clean up the town.
In the morning they took us all up to court. It was the first time I had been in court. We were all charged with vagrancy. When my name was called, I protested. I said, “Judge, you can’t call me a vagrant. I have twenty dollars down in the jail office.”
He looked at me as coldly and impersonally as if I had been a dish of parsnips. “Fifteen days on the chain gang. Next case.”
CHAPTER VII
I was taken downstairs and locked in a cell; I saw no more of the “bull pen” where I spent the night. My cellmate was a handsome, smiling young fellow about twenty-two or twenty-three. He looked like a country boy, rugged, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, sandy-haired. He seemed to be well acquainted in the jail.
Some one sang out, “Who’s the fresh fish, ‘Smiler’?”
“Another vag,” he answered. “Fifteen days.”