Black, Jack, 1871-1932; Criminals -- Canada -- Biography; Criminals -- United States -- Biography
The hunt started from there. Blanket stiffs looking for work were
brought in, questioned, locked up for a day or two, and let go. The
trains were searched up and down the line. Bums were brought in, got
their ten days, but the burglars escaped and in a week the hue and cry
was over. It was almost three weeks before the burglars showed up at
Ogden. They were nervous and irritable, complaining that the jail had
got uncomfortably filled up the last few days they were there. They got
lousy from the blanket stiffs. The constable was sore about the burglary
and wouldn’t square them for a ride into Salt Lake as he had done for
me, and they had to pay their fare out of the town. Their money was
almost gone, and there, in that little burg, was four thousand dollars
that couldn’t be touched for at least a month, and somebody was liable
to “steal” it on them. I got nervous, too.
We decided to go up to Pocatello and kill the month around Salt Chunk
Mary’s, where we would be safe and welcome, and where they could borrow
enough money to live on until the time came to go after the four
thousand. After a night’s ride we were welcomed by Mary, who spread the
customary feed of beans and salt pork before us. She inquired anxiously
about “Foot-and-a-half George.” She seemed to know every bum on the road
of any consequence.
Johnnie put in his time down in the jungle drinking with the bums. Sanc
and I either watched the fine six-foot Indians that stalked about the
town looking scornfully at their white inferiors, or the tinhorn
gamblers who skinned the railroad men on pay days and each other
afterward.
Pay day was coming on and the town took on a busy aspect. Small-money
gamblers appeared with their women companions. “Brass peddlers,” bums
who sold imitation gold jewelry, principally rings, appeared on the
streets with their ninety-cents-a-dozen gold “hoops” made in Wichita,
Kansas, and “dropped” them to the Indian squaws and railroad laborers
for any price from one dollar up. Other bums had bundles of pants and
shoes planted in the jungle, the proceeds of a boxcar burglary on the
Oregon Short Line. These articles were peddled openly about the
railroad shops and to trainmen in the yards. A band of yeggs on their
way to Great Falls and then to the “Canadian side” stopped off to
thresh out their “soup” in the jungle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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