"I was sick one day in the coal mine, deathly sick. The air at times was awful. I laid down just outside the car track. I thought I was going to die and felt distinctly pleased at the prospect. Some one reported me to the superintendent. He evidently knew the symptoms, for he came with a pail of water and soaked me where I lay, marked time, and went away. I laid there for three hours in a puddle of water and soft coal grime; then I went back to work. I know it was three hours because my time check was docked exactly that much. "When I was going to night school in Denver the day clerk, who'd got me the place, took half my tips, the only pay I received, to permit me to hold the place. It was the rule, I discovered, the under-dog penalty. "I said I never struck anything prospecting. I did. I struck a silver lead down in Arizona. While I was proving it a couple of other prospectors came along, dead broke--and out of provisions. I divided food with them, of course--it's the unwritten law--and they camped for the night. We had supper together. That was the last I knew. When I came to it was thirty-six hours later and I was a hundred miles away in a cheap hotel--without even my bill paid in advance. The record showed that claim was filed on the day I disappeared. The mine is paying a hundred dollars a day now. I never saw those two prospectors again. The present owner bought of them square. I don't hold it up against him. "I went to night school all one winter in San Francisco with a fellow named Stuart, another under dog like myself. We roomed together in a hall-bedroom to save expense and ate fifteen-cent dinners together at the same soup-house. He clerked in a little tobacco store daytimes. I was running an express elevator. We both saved a little money above what it cost to live. Things went on in this way for four months, until the end of the winter term. One morning when I woke up I found he'd gone. I also found that the little money I'd saved was gone. They went together. I never saw either again. "I had another friend once, I thought. It was after I'd decided to come here to the university. I was harvesting on a wheat ranch in Nebraska, making money to pay for my matriculation. He was a student too, he said, from New York State, and working for the same purpose. We worked there together all through harvest, boiled side by side in the same sun. One day he announced a telegram from home. His mother was dying. He was crazy almost because he hadn't nearly enough money to take him back at once. And there his mother was in New York State dying! I lent him all I had saved,--seventy odd dollars; and he gave me his note, insisted on doing so--though he hoped the Lord would strike him dead if he failed to return the loan within four days. I have that note yet. Perhaps the Lord did strike him dead. I don't know.