rattle on the street.
Parenthetically, these contents are invariably returned to their owners.
The riverman's object is fun, not robbery.

And if rip-roaring, swashbuckling, drunken glory is what he is after,
he gets it. The only trouble is, that a whole winter's hard work goes in
two or three weeks. The only redeeming feature is, that he is never, in
or out of his cups, afraid of anything that walks the earth.

A man comes out of the woods or off the drive with two or three hundred
dollars, which he is only too anxious to throw away by the double
handful. It follows naturally that a crew of sharpers are on hand to
find out who gets it. They are a hard lot. Bold, unprincipled men, they
too are afraid of nothing; not even a drunken lumber-jack, which is one
of the dangerous wild animals of the American fauna. Their business is
to relieve the man of his money as soon as possible. They are experts at
their business.

The towns of Bay City and Saginaw alone in 1878 supported over fourteen
hundred tough characters. Block after block was devoted entirely to
saloons. In a radius of three hundred feet from the famous old Catacombs
could be numbered forty saloons, where drinks were sold by from three
to ten "pretty waiter girls." When the boys struck town, the proprietors
and waitresses stood in their doorways to welcome them.

"Why, Jack!" one would cry, "when did you drift in? Tickled to death to
see you! Come in an' have a drink. That your chum? Come in, old man, and
have a drink. Never mind the pay; that's all right."

And after the first drink, Jack, of course, had to treat, and then the
chum.

Or if Jack resisted temptation and walked resolutely on, one of the
girls would remark audibly to another.

"He ain't no lumber-jack! You can see that easy 'nuff! He's jest off th'
hay-trail!"

Ten to one that brought him, for the woodsman is above all things proud
and jealous of his craft.

In the center of this whirlpool of iniquity stood the Catacombs as the
hub from which lesser spokes in the wheel radiated. Any old logger of
the Saginaw Valley can tell you of the Catacombs, just as any old logger
of any other valley will tell you of the "Pen," the "White Row," the
"Water Streets" of Alpena, Port Huron, Ludington, Muskegon, and a dozen
other lumber towns.

The Catacombs was a three-story building. In the basement were vile,
ill-smelling, ill-lighted dens, small, isolated, dangerous. The shanty
boy with a small stake,