The whipping was finished, and the woman, no longer screaming, went back to her seat in the wagon.  Nor did the other women come to her—­just then.  They were afraid.  But they came afterward, when a decent interval had elapsed.  The man put the whip away and rejoined us, flinging himself down on the other side of me.  He was breathing hard from his exertions.  He wiped the sweat from his eyes on his coat-sleeve, and looked challengingly at me.  I returned his look carelessly; what he had done was no concern of mine.  I did not go away abruptly.  I lay there half an hour longer, which, under the circumstances, was tact and etiquette.  I rolled cigarettes from tobacco I borrowed from them, and when I slipped down the bank to the railroad, I was equipped with the necessary information for catching the next freight bound south.

Well, and what of it?  It was a page out of life, that’s all; and there are many pages worse, far worse, that I have seen.  I have sometimes held forth (facetiously, so my listeners believed) that the chief distinguishing trait between man and the other animals is that man is the only animal that maltreats the females of his kind.  It is something of which no wolf nor cowardly coyote is ever guilty.  It is something that even the dog, degenerated by domestication, will not do.  The dog still retains the wild instinct in this matter, while man has lost most of his wild instincts—­at least, most of the good ones.

Worse pages of life than what I have described?  Read the reports on child labor in the United States,—­east, west, north, and south, it doesn’t matter where,—­and know that all of us, profit-mongers that we are, are typesetters and printers of worse pages of life than that mere page of wife-beating on the Susquehanna.

I went down the grade a hundred yards to where the footing beside the track was good.  Here I could catch my freight as it pulled slowly up the hill, and here I found half a dozen hoboes waiting for the same purpose.  Several were playing seven-up with an old pack of cards.  I took a hand.  A coon began to shuffle the deck.  He was fat, and young, and moon-faced.  He beamed with good-nature.  It fairly oozed from him.  As he dealt the first card to me, he paused and said:—­

“Say, Bo, ain’t I done seen you befo’?”

“You sure have,” I answered.  “An’ you didn’t have those same duds on, either.”

He was puzzled.

“D’ye remember Buffalo?” I queried.

Then he knew me, and with laughter and ejaculation hailed me as a comrade; for at Buffalo his clothes had been striped while he did his bit of time in the Erie County Penitentiary.  For that matter, my clothes had been likewise striped, for I had been doing my bit of time, too.

The game proceeded, and I learned the stake for which we played.  Down the bank toward the river descended a steep and narrow path that led to a spring some twenty-five feet beneath.  We played on the edge of the bank.  The man who was “stuck” had to take a small condensed-milk can, and with it carry water to the winners.