* * * * *

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.

I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my Caesar.

Once or twice, sheriffs who were bent on arresting me because I had no visible means of support, let me go, because it awed them to find a tramp reading Shakespeare....

“It’s a shame, a clever lad like you bein’ a bum!”

* * * * *

Tramps, though anti-social in the larger aspects of society (as, for that matter, all special classes are, from millionaires down—­or up), are more than usually companionable among themselves.  I never lived and moved with a better-hearted group of people.

By “jungle” camp-fires—­("the jungles,” any tramp rendezvous located just outside the city limits, to be beyond police jurisdiction), in jails, on freights ...  I found a feeling of sincere companionship ... a companionship that without ostentation and as a matter of course, shared the last cent the last meal ... when every cent was the last cent, every meal the last meal ... the rest depending on luck and Providence....