Some of the small boys, however, who did not share in the booty grew
jealous and told my father what was doing. The result was that a
certain part of my body was sore for weeks afterwards. My feelings were
hurt, too, for I did not know at that time that I was doing anything
very bad. My father, indeed, accompanied the beating with a sermon,
telling me that I had not only broken God's law but had robbed those
that loved me. One of my brothers, who is now a policeman in the
city service, told me that I had taken my ticket for the gallows. The
brother I had robbed, who afterwards became a truckman, patted me on
the head and told me not to do it again. He was always a good fellow.
And yet they all seemed to like to have me play about the streets with
the other little boys, perhaps because the family was large, and there
was not much room in the house.
So I had to give up the till; but I hated to, for even at that age I
had begun to think that the world owed me a living! To get revenge I
used to hide in a charcoal shed and throw pebbles at my father as he
passed. I was indeed the typical bad boy, and the apple of my mother's
eye.
When I couldn't steal from the till any more, I used to take clothes
from my relatives and sell them for theatre money; or any other object
I thought I could make away with. I did not steal merely for theatre
money but partly for excitement too. I liked to run the risk of being
discovered. So I was up to any scheme the older boys proposed. Perhaps
if I had been raised in the wild West I should have made a good trapper
or cow-boy, instead of a thief. Or perhaps even birds' nests and fish
would have satisfied me, if they had been accessible.
One of my biggest exploits as a small boy was made when I was eight
years old. Tom's mother had a friend visiting her, whom Tom and I
thought we would rob. Tom, who was a big boy, and some of his friends,
put me through a hall bed-room window, and I made away with a box of
valuable jewelry. But it did me no good for the big boys sold it to a
woman who kept a second-hand store on Division Street, and I received
no part of the proceeds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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