nt for
more, not stopping to think that she had to eat, too, and that I had
given her but ten dollars when I left home; but she sent me money.

"Then there came a time when she could not send me anything; I could not
keep up my dues in the Union, so was expelled. After that I found it
hard to get passes. Lots of times I had to steal them, and finally--for
the first time in my life--I stole something to eat. Say, pardner, did
you ever get so hungry that the hunger cramped you like cholera morbus?"

"No."

"Then I reckon you've never stole, or what's worse, scabbed?"

"No."

"Well--I've done both, though this is the first time I've scabbed. As I
was sayin' I got down so low that I had to steal, and then I thought of
my wife, of how terrible it would be if she should have to steal, or
maybe worse, and the thought of it drove me almost crazy. She was a
pretty girl when I married her, an orphan only eighteen and I was
twenty-eight. I determined to go home at once, but before I could get
out of town I was arrested as a vag and sent up for sixty days. I
thought at that time that my punishment was great,--that the mental and
physical suffering that I endured in the workhouse was all that I could
stand,--but I've seen it beaten since. At last they told me that I could
go, but that I would be expected to shake the city of Chicago before the
sun rose on the following day, and I did. I hung myself up on the trucks
of a Pullman on the Lake Shore Limited and landed in Buffalo just before
dawn. As I hurried along the old familiar streets I noticed a crowd of
people standing by a narrow canal and stopped to see what the excitement
was. I saw them fish the limp and lifeless form of a woman out of the
muddy water and when the moonlight fell upon her face it startled me,
for it was so like her face. A moment later I got near enough to see
that the victim was a blonde, and my wife was brunette. Presently I came
to the house where we had lived, but it was closed and dark. I aroused a
number of the neighbors, but none of them knew where the little woman
had gone.

"'Shure,' said an old woman who was peddling milk, 'I don't know phere
she's at at all, at all. That big good-fur-nothin' man o' hern has gone
along and deserted of her an' broke the darlint's heart, so 'e 'as an'
the end uv it all will be that she'll be afther drownin' 'erself in the
canal beyant wan uv these foine nights.'

"All through the morning I searched the place fo