He walked rapidly from the place, and on the same day he decided to leave the city. He had herded with vagrants of the touring class. The methods of free transportation by means of freight-trains and free living, by means of beggary and small thievery in country towns, were no secret to him. He walked to the suburbs, and at nightfall he scrambled up the side of a coal-car in a train slowly moving westward. What hunger he suffered, what cold he endured, what bread he begged, what police station cells he passed nights in, what human scum he associated with, what thirst he quenched, and with what incredibly bad whiskey, are particulars not for this unobjectionable narrative, for do they not belong to low life? And who nowadays can tolerate low life in print unless it be redeemed by a rustic environment and a laboured exposition of clodhopper English and primitive expletives? Low life outside of a dialect story and a dreary village? Never! Mrs. Blake and the child lived in a fair degree of comfort upon the mother's wages, but often the mother shuddered at thought of what might happen should she ever lose her position at the photographer's. Consumption had its hold on Busted Blake when he arrived in the mining-town called Get-there City, in Kansas, one evening. Get-there City had not gotten there beyond a single straggling street of shanties. But it had acquired a saloon, although liquor-selling had already been forbidden in Kansas. Busted Blake, with ten cents in his clothes, entered the saloon and asked in an asthmatic voice for as much whiskey as that sum was good for. While awaiting a response, his eyes turned toward the only other persons in the saloon,--three burly, bearded miners of the conventional big-hatted, big-booted, and big-voiced type. Above their heads and against the wall was this sign, lettered roughly with charcoal, under a crudely drawn death's head: “Five thousand dollars will be paid by the undersigned to the widow of the sneaking hound that informs on this saloon. This is no meer bluf. P. GIBBS.” Blake, after a brief coughing fit, looked up at the man behind the bar,--a great thick-necked fellow with a mien of authority, and yet with a certain bluff honesty expressed about his eyes and lips. This man, whose air of proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other than P. Gibbs, had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had shown some small sign of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the attenuated vagrant. He set forth a bottle and glass. “Help yerself,” said P. Gibbs. While Blake was doing so, Mr. Gibbs went on: “Bad cough o' yourn. Y' mightn't guess it, but that same cough runs in my fam'ly. It took off a brother, but it skipped me.”