Her principal business was selling wine, women, and song to the railroad men and gamblers. She ruled her half dozen “girls” with a heavy hand. Her house on the outskirts of the town was a dingy, old two-story frame building with a couple of rooms added to one side of it where she lived and received her friends from the road. Smiler knew her and we were welcome. The feed of beans and salt pork was spread for us. She locked the door and, while we ate, this most unusual woman estimated the value of our loot, spread out on one end of the oilcloth-covered kitchen table where we sat. Salt Chunk Mary put no acids on the watches, nor pried into the works. She “hefted” the yellow ones with a practiced hand and glanced but once at the white ones. I surveyed her as I ate. She was about forty years of age, hard-faced and heavy-handed. Her hair was the color of a sunburned brick, and her small blue eyes glinted like ice under a March sun. She could say “no” quicker than any woman I ever knew, and none of them ever meant “yes.” She went into the adjoining room and returned with a roll of bills. “Four hundred dollars, Smiler.” “Good! Give us small bills, Mary.” He divided the money equally between us and we got up to go. “Let’s go in and buy a few bottles of beer for the girls, kid, just by the way of no harm.” “No, don’t drag that kid in there—and here’s something else, listen,” said this plain, blunt woman to Smiler. “I guess that kid is all right or he wouldn’t be with you. If I’m grabbed with this junk I’ll rot in jail before I put the finger on you, and if either of you gets grabbed (she was looking at me), and thinks he can get a light jolt by turning me in, he’s wrong. I’ll throw it in the river, and he can rot in jail.” We got a room to rest up, and before going to sleep decided that Salt Lake was too small for us. San Francisco was better. Smiler had never been there, and was as anxious to see it as I. Buying tickets was throwing money away. So we “beat it” down to Ogden and over the Southern Pacific, riding the front end of passenger trains at night, making long jumps, avoiding bums’ camps, paying for our meals, and stealing nothing. We got into Sacramento without mishap, rested up a couple of days, and journeyed along toward “the city.” We got “ditched” off our train at Port Costa, and crawled into a hay car for the night. There were a couple of bums in the car already, and more came in later and flopped. Early next morning we were aroused by a pounding on the side of the car. “Come on out of there!” shouted a man with his head in the door, “yez are all pinched.” We hit the ground, eight of us in all, young and old, large and small. Two men were outside, carrying shortened billiard cues. “March!” one of them ordered.