Notes of an Itinerant Policeman

by Josiah Flynt

I held out my nickel and thanked her. She blushed, and put her hands behind her back.

"I don't keep a hotel," she said, rather indignantly.

"But, madam, I want to pay you. I'm no beggar."

"You wouldn't have got it if you had been. Good-bye."

The tramps' methods of begging, as has been said, are largely regulated by circumstances and experience, but even the amateurs have theories about the profession, and they are never more interesting than when sitting around some "hang-out" camp-fire, discussing their notions of the kind of "ghost stories" that go best with different sorts of people. Indeed, the bulk of their time is passed in conferences of this character. Each man, like the passionate gambler, has a "system," and he enjoys "chewing the rag" about its intricacies. The majority of the systems are founded on the tramp's knowledge of women. Taking the country by and large, he sees more of women on his begging tours than of men, and it is only natural that his theoretical calculations should be busied mainly with women. Some tramps believe that they can tell to a nicety what a blonde woman will give in excess of a brunette, or vice versa, and the same of a large woman in contra-distinction to a small one. Much of their theorising in these matters is as futile as is the gambler's estimate of his chances of luck, but certain it is that after a long apprenticeship they become phenomenally accurate in "sizing up" people; and it is he who can correctly "size up" the greatest number of people at first glance and adapt himself to their peculiarities, that comes out winner in the struggle.

Next in importance to the ability to appraise correctly the generous tendencies of his patrons, and to modulate his voice and to concoct stories according to their tastes, come the tramp's clothes and the way he wears them. It probably seems to most persons that the tramp never changes his clothes, and that he always looks as tattered and torn as when they happen to see him, but the expert has almost as many "changes" as the actor. Some days he dresses very poorly; this is generally the case in winter; and on other days he looks as neat and clean as the ordinary business man. It all depends on the weather and the "beat" he has chosen for the day's work. Every morning, before he starts out on his tour, he takes a look at the weather and decides upon his "beat." The "beat" selected, he puts on the "togs" which he thinks suit the weather, and away he goes for better or worse. In New York city there are probably a hundred scientific beggars of this character, and they live as well as does the man with a yearly income of $2,000.

Sunday is the most dismal day in the week to the average tramp,—the beggar who is content with his three meals a day and a place to lie down in at night. But few men who go on tramp for the first time expect that Sunday is going to be any different from any other day in the week. They usually reach "the road" on a week-day after a debauch, and they find that their soiled clothes and general unkempt condition differentiate them in public thoroughfares very little from hundreds of workingmen. No policeman worries them with suspicious glances, and in large cities they pass unchallenged even in the dead of night. Indeed, they receive so little notice from any one that they wonder how they had ever imagined that outcasts were such marked human beings.

Then comes their first Sunday. They get up out of their hayloft, or wherever it may be that they lay down the night before, prepared to look for their breakfast just as they did on the previous day, and after brushing off their clothes and washing themselves at some pump or public faucet, they start out. In a small town they feel that something is wrong before they have gone a block, and by nine o'clock in large towns they decide to go without their breakfast if they have not yet got it. A change has come over the earth; they seem out of place even to themselves, and they return through back streets to their lodging-houses or retreats on the outskirts of the town, sincerely regretting that they are travellers of "the road."

A number of men in the world have to thank this Sunday nausea that they are to-day workers and not tramps. The latter feel the effects of it to the end of their days; it is as unescapable as death, but like certain seafaring men who never get entirely free of seasickness and yet continue as sailors, so old vagabonds learn to expect and endure the miserable sensations which they experience on the first day of the week. These sensations are due to the remnant of manhood which is to be found in nearly all tramps. The majority of them are for all practical purposes outcasts, but at breakfast-time, on Sunday morning, they have emotions which on week-days no one would give them credit for.

It was my fate, some years ago, to be one of a collection of wanderers who had to while away a Sunday in a "dugout" on a bleak prairie in western Kansas. We had nothing to eat or drink and practically nothing to talk about except our dismal lot. Toward nightfall we got to discussing in all earnestness the miserableness of our existence, and I have always remembered the remarks of a fellow sufferer whom we called "West Virginia Brown." He was supposed to be the degenerate scion of a noble English family, and was one of the best educated men I have ever met in Hoboland. He took little part in the general grumbling, but at last there was a lull in the conversation, and he spoke up.