If anything happens to be wrong with the bumpers and they slip past, of course you get squeezed to death; or, if you miss the link, or it gets caught or anything, your head or arm is liable to be smashed off. Then you’ve got to watch all the time, for if you stub your toe or forget for a second, you’re gone. I kind of think that the switch-yards make a feller reckless and desperate, and I don’t believe that a man that works in the switch-yards or stock yards looks at things quite the same as other people. Still you know them fellers ain’t bad. You’ve seen ‘em cry when they went home to tell a lady how her man had been run over, or tell some old woman about how her boy had got hurt, and you know we always helped the boys out and we didn’t have much money either. “You remember we was workin’ together in the yards when the strike come on. I was in debt, just as I always have been. Somehow I never could keep out of debt; could you? The rich people say it’s because we drink so much, but I’d like to see them try to live on what we get. Why, you know we hardly ever go to the theater, and if we do we go up in the gallery. I never had a job of work done on my teeth in my life except once when I paid a quarter to get one pulled. Do you s’pose any of us would ever think we could get a gold fillin’ in our teeth? Now that suit of clothes over on the bed is the first whole suit of new clothes I ever had. The guard brought ‘em in a little while ago, and I’m to put ‘em on in the mornin’. But I guess they won’t do me much good. I’d rather they had taken the money and give it to the kid for a rockin’ horse or candy. “But I was tellin’ about the strike. My, the way I go on! I guess it’s because this is the first time I’ve had a chance to say anything to anyone since it happened, and of course it’ll be my last. As soon as I got back my lawyer told me not to talk to anyone, but I don’t see what difference it would have made—them detectives seemed to know everything and a good deal more, they knew more about me than I ever knew about myself.