"Consequently I got to wondering how this matter could be better attended to. I looked over the expense accounts for police purposes, and found that our people were paying what seemed to me an exorbitant sum for very poor service. It seemed to me that police matters on a railroad, on account of the negligence on the part of villages and towns, should be organized and given a standing, which, on account of our lackadaisical procedure against crime in this country, was justified. "You will find on our property a certain number of qualified policemen. Perhaps I should say 'patrolmen.' We do not use the word detective on this property. They are divided up according to divisions, and the moral deportment of the different communities in which they are placed. My idea has been to try to police our property just as a city is policed. "What I should like to have you do is to go over our property and see whether our police force has been successful in ridding our lines, and, to some extent, the communities which they touch, from tramp immigration. How do you feel about the matter?" Here was a problem which led right back into all that land of _Wanderlust_ which I supposed that I had given up in so far as it applied to tramp life. However, as so many well-known people say: "Beggars cannot be choosers," I undertook the job of finding out for the general manager exactly what the tramps had to say about his lines as protected by his police. Eighteen years before this interview, the general manager's lines, to my own knowledge, were so littered up with tramps, and tramp camps that the Fort Wayne road in particular then was known as an "easy" road to beat between Chicago and Pittsburg. It was as bad as the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which in those days was called "The Dope." These roads were ridden promiscuously by all kinds of men, women and children who did not pay fare. When they got into a box car they thought much nonsense. The things that were done and said among all these people at that time would make too scandalizing reading now. If there are slums in our cities, there are no greater slums anywhere in the world, barring no crime, passion, or idiosyncracy, than were found on the "Dope" and the Fort Wayne roads in my tramp days. I looked over the general manager's property. Dressed as a tramp, acting as a tramp, living and sleeping as a tramp, I surrounded his lines until I knew what the tramp world had to say about his railroad police idea. I found wherever I went, in Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Wheeling, or Pittsburg, that tramps said: "There are easier roads to beat than the Fort Wayne." It was hard work to go back into tramp life. I had some hard knocks, as regards storms and other misadventures in various places. Yet, with it all, it brought back to me a number of remembrances of earlier tramp days.