Another vision comes to me.  It is a dark night.  My push is coming along the sidewalk in the suburbs.  Ahead of us, under an electric light, a man crosses the street diagonally.  There is something tentative and desultory in his walk.  The kids scent the game on the instant.  The man is drunk.  He blunders across the opposite sidewalk and is lost in the darkness as he takes a short-cut through a vacant lot.  No hunting cry is raised, but the pack flings itself forward in quick pursuit.  In the middle of the vacant lot it comes upon him.  But what is this?—­snarling and strange forms, small and dim and menacing, are between the pack and its prey.  It is another pack of road-kids, and in the hostile pause we learn that it is their meat, that they have been trailing it a dozen blocks and more and that we are butting in.  But it is the world primeval.  These wolves are baby wolves. (As a matter of fact, I don’t think one of them was over twelve or thirteen years of age.  I met some of them afterward, and learned that they had just arrived that day over the hill, and that they hailed from Denver and Salt Lake City.) Our pack flings forward.  The baby wolves squeal and screech and fight like little demons.  All about the drunken man rages the struggle for the possession of him.  Down he goes in the thick of it, and the combat rages over his body after the fashion of the Greeks and Trojans over the body and armor of a fallen hero.  Amid cries and tears and wailings the baby wolves are dispossessed, and my pack rolls the stiff.  But always I remember the poor stiff and his befuddled amazement at the abrupt eruption of battle in the vacant lot.  I see him now, dim in the darkness, titubating in stupid wonder, good-naturedly essaying the role of peacemaker in that multitudinous scrap the significance of which he did not understand, and the really hurt expression on his face when he, unoffending he, was clutched at by many hands and dragged down in the thick of the press.

“Bindle-stiffs” are favorite prey of the road-kids.  A bindle-stiff is a working tramp.  He takes his name from the roll of blankets he carries, which is known as a “bindle.”  Because he does work, a bindle-stiff is expected usually to have some small change about him, and it is after that small change that the road-kids go.  The best hunting-ground for bindle-stiffs is in the sheds, barns, lumber-yards, railroad-yards, etc., on the edges of a city, and the time for hunting is the night, when the bindle-stiff seeks these places to roll up in his blankets and sleep.

“Gay-cats” also come to grief at the hands of the road-kid.  In more familiar parlance, gay-cats are short-horns, chechaquos, new chums, or tenderfeet.  A gay-cat is a newcomer on The Road who is man-grown, or, at least, youth-grown.  A boy on The Road, on the other hand, no matter how green he is, is never a gay-cat; he is a road-kid or a “punk,” and if he travels with a “profesh,” he is known possessively as a “prushun.”