three men in my party were not
drinkers. Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and
disgracefully when with other men. In my personal medicine chest was a
quart of whisky. I never drew the cork till six months afterward, in a
lonely camp, where, without anaesthetics, a doctor was compelled to
operate on a man. The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between
them and then proceeded to the operation.

Back in California a year later, recovering from scurvy, I found that my
father was dead and that I was the head and the sole bread-winner of a
household. When I state that I had passed coal on a steamship from
Behring Sea to British Columbia, and travelled in the steerage from there
to San Francisco, it will be understood that I brought nothing back from
the Klondike but my scurvy.

Times were hard. Work of any sort was difficult to get. And work of any
sort was what I had to take, for I was still an unskilled labourer. I
had no thought of career. That was over and done with. I had to find
food for two mouths beside my own and keep a roof over our heads--yes,
and buy a winter suit, my one suit being decidedly summery. I had to get
some sort of work immediately. After that, when I had caught my breath,
I might think about my future.

Unskilled labour is the first to feel the slackness of hard times, and I
had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman. With my new
responsibilities I didn't dare go to sea, and I failed to find a job at
laundrying. I failed to find a job at anything. I had my name down in
five employment bureaux. I advertised in three newspapers. I sought out
the few friends I knew who might be able to get me work; but they were
either uninterested or unable to find anything for me.

The situation was desperate. I pawned my watch, my bicycle, and a
mackintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had left
to me. It was and is my sole legacy in this world. It had cost fifteen
dollars, and the pawnbroker let me have two dollars on it. And--oh,
yes--a water-front comrade of earlier years drifted along one day with a
dress suit wrapped in newspapers. He could give no adequate explanation
of how he had come to possess it, nor did I press for an explanation. I
wanted the suit myself. No; not to wear. I traded him a lot of rubbish
which, being unpawnable, was useless to me. He peddled the rubbish for
several dollars, while I pledged the dress-suit with my pa