When there was no game, the sharks sat around practicing their tricks and bewailing their bad luck. Sometimes a poker player would show me how to “shuffle up a hand,” or cut the cards at a given place or “go out” with a hand. The dice shakers and crap shooters showed me their favorite “shots.” I was an apt scholar, absorbing everything like a young sponge. “Tex,” my boss (if he had any other name I never heard it), admonished me never to gamble. “Lay away from it, kid; it’s a tough racket. Look at me and my gatherings of forty years. I ain’t got a white quarter to my name; if it was rainin’ soup I couldn’t buy myself a tin spoon, and I’ve got a string of debts longer than a widow’s clothesline.” Next door to the cigar store there was a small milk depot kept by a man and his wife. I used to go in every day for a glass of milk, and got acquainted with them. He delivered milk around his routes and the wife minded the shop. He was forever complaining about not being able to collect his money from “them women.” “Them women” were women who kept “parlor houses” in the Tenderloin district a few blocks from his milk store. They were good pay, but he could not get away from his work at the right hour to find them. One day he told me he would pay me well if I would take the bills and go to the places and stay till I got the money. Here was a chance to earn more money, and I grabbed it. I went in and asked Tex, my boss, when would be the best time to call at those places to collect the milk bills. If Tex had not gathered much of worldly goods in his forty years, he had at least learned something of the habits of “them women.” “I’ll tell you,” he said. “If you go in the morning you’ll find them asleep; in the afternoon they are out riding or shopping; and at night they will be either too busy or too drunk. Take my advice and go about five o’clock in the evening and you will catch them at dinner, or breakfast, or whatever they call it.” I followed Tex’s advice that evening and collected three bills out of five. The milkman was pleased with my enterprise and gave me a dollar. Thereafter I collected his bills in the Tenderloin. I visited certain places weekly and was paid promptly. The women I met were nice to me, and I saw nothing of the other side of their lives. I worked faithfully at my two jobs, saved my money, and began looking in the store windows for my gray suit and gray hat. My work kept me so busy that I did not read much. Thoughts of travel and adventure were in the back of my mind, but that could wait. I was young; I must have money first. My two old, rusty pistols, almost forgotten now, lay neglected in the bottom of my little valise.