“Never again a hobo.”

He paused, and, as he went on again, his voice gathered strength and huskiness as it affirmed his will.

“Never again a hobo.  I’m going to get a job.  You’d better do the same.  Nights like this make rheumatism.”

He wrung my hand.

“Good-by, Bo,” said he.

“Good-by, Bo,” said I.

The next we were swallowed up from each other by the mist.  It was our final passing.  But here’s to you, Mr. Swede, wherever you are.  I hope you got that job.

ROAD-KIDS AND GAY-CATS

Every once in a while, in newspapers, magazines, and biographical dictionaries, I run upon sketches of my life, wherein, delicately phrased, I learn that it was in order to study sociology that I became a tramp.  This is very nice and thoughtful of the biographers, but it is inaccurate.  I became a tramp—­well, because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest.  Sociology was merely incidental; it came afterward, in the same manner that a wet skin follows a ducking.  I went on “The Road” because I couldn’t keep away from it; because I hadn’t the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was so made that I couldn’t work all my life on “one same shift”; because—­well, just because it was easier to than not to.

It happened in my own town, in Oakland, when I was sixteen.  At that time I had attained a dizzy reputation in my chosen circle of adventurers, by whom I was known as the Prince of the Oyster Pirates.  It is true, those immediately outside my circle, such as honest bay-sailors, longshoremen, yachtsmen, and the legal owners of the oysters, called me “tough,” “hoodlum,” “smoudge,” “thief,” “robber,” and various other not nice things—­all of which was complimentary and but served to increase the dizziness of the high place in which I sat.  At that time I had not read “Paradise Lost,” and later, when I read Milton’s “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” I was fully convinced that great minds run in the same channels.

It was at this time that the fortuitous concatenation of events sent me upon my first adventure on The Road.  It happened that there was nothing doing in oysters just then; that at Benicia, forty miles away, I had some blankets I wanted to get; and that at Port Costa, several miles from Benicia, a stolen boat lay at anchor in charge of the constable.  Now this boat was owned by a friend of mine, by name Dinny McCrea.  It had been stolen and left at Port Costa by Whiskey Bob, another friend of mine. (Poor Whiskey Bob!  Only last winter his body was picked up on the beach shot full of holes by nobody knows whom.) I had come down from “up river” some time before, and reported to Dinny McCrea the whereabouts of his boat; and Dinny McCrea had promptly offered ten dollars to me if I should bring it down to Oakland to him.