Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might have picked up at second-hand book stores.... However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards seemed never to wear out. And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet ... he wanted to "put on dog," as the Indians say. He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines. I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step. He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a cheap room for a week. * * * * * Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California.... "Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him." They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,--had furnished them to me-- "I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you might get into trouble." Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now. * * * * * The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I would travel in that guise. * * * * * With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a much-abused school-copy of Caesar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and tooth-powder--and a cake of soap--all wrapped up in my army blankets, I set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum." Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity in me.... At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American economic conscience.... Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.