the private car of some itinerant
millionnaire. The train started as I made the platform, and I headed
for the aforesaid millionnaire with the porter one jump behind and
reaching for me. It was a dead heat, for I reached the millionnaire at
the same instant that the porter reached me. I had no time for
formalities. "Gimme a quarter to eat on," I blurted out. And as I
live, that millionnaire dipped into his pocket and gave me ... just
... precisely ... a quarter. It is my conviction that he was so
flabbergasted that he obeyed automatically, and it has been a matter
of keen regret ever since, on my part, that I didn't ask him for a
dollar. I know that I'd have got it. I swung off the platform of that
private car with the porter manoeuvring to kick me in the face. He
missed me. One is at a terrible disadvantage when trying to swing off
the lowest step of a car and not break his neck on the right of way,
with, at the same time, an irate Ethiopian on the platform above
trying to land him in the face with a number eleven. But I got the
quarter! I got it!

But to return to the woman to whom I so shamelessly lied. It was in
the evening of my last day in Reno. I had been out to the race-track
watching the ponies run, and had missed my dinner (_i.e._ the mid-day
meal). I was hungry, and, furthermore, a committee of public safety
had just been organized to rid the town of just such hungry mortals as
I. Already a lot of my brother hoboes had been gathered in by John
Law, and I could hear the sunny valleys of California calling to me
over the cold crests of the Sierras. Two acts remained for me to
perform before I shook the dust of Reno from my feet. One was to catch
the blind baggage on the westbound overland that night. The other was
first to get something to eat. Even youth will hesitate at an
all-night ride, on an empty stomach, outside a train that is tearing
the atmosphere through the snow-sheds, tunnels, and eternal snows of
heaven-aspiring mountains.

But that something to eat was a hard proposition. I was "turned down"
at a dozen houses. Sometimes I received insulting remarks and was
informed of the barred domicile that should be mine if I had my just
deserts. The worst of it was that such assertions were only too true.
That was why I was pulling west that night. John Law was abroad in the
town, seeking eagerly for the hungry and homeless, for by such was his
barred domicile tenanted.

At other houses the doors were sl