Jack Black

“ At twenty-five I was an expert house burglar, a nighttime prowler, carefully choosing only the best homes—homes of the wealthy, careless, insured people. I “made” them in the small hours of the night, always under arms.
At thirty I was a respected member of the “yegg” brotherhood, a thief of which little is known. He is silent, secretive, wary; forever traveling, always a night “worker.” He shuns the bright lights, seldom straying far from his kind, never coming to the surface. Circulating through space with his always-ready automatic, the yegg rules the underworld of criminals. ”

“ What do those reporters expect of a man? Do they want [288] him to shoot everybody in sight, cut the dog’s throat, carry out everything valuable, and burn the house down? Can’t they understand that the burglar’s first thought is the loot and his second thought is to get out of the house as quietly and quickly as possible without harming people when they wake up on him? And what madness for the householder to try to corner a burglar in the dark, prepared to resist capture but not to kill for loot. ”

“ Scholars, quoting Greek and Latin poets, lawyers dissecting Blackstone, writers with greasy rolls of manuscript fraternized with broken bums from the road, sailors too old for the sea, and scrapped mechanics from the factories—all under the lash of alcohol. They sat in groups at the tables drinking the wine, alcohol in its cheapest and deadliest form, from every conceivable kind of vessel: tin cans, pewter mugs, beer glasses, steins, and cracked soup bowls—anything unbreakable that the boss could buy from a junkman. ”

“ Dogs, young or old, are the bane of the burglar’s life. A dog inside a house where people are sleeping prohibits burglary, and the smaller he is, the louder he prohibits. So far as we could see, the place looked made to order for us. House burglars customarily work single-handed. Two men prowling about in a house in the dark are apt to get confused if any one wakes up, and shoot each other. It has happened.
“I wish this stool-pigeon moon wasn’t so bright to-night, kid,” said Smiler as we waited in the shrubbery for our people to put out lights and retire. ”

“ The police station was on one corner of Market Square, one of the busiest corners in the city. Hundreds of people were there daily, selling their produce. Their time was about evenly divided between serving their customers and watching the patrol wagon spewing its loads of humanity into the city prison. It seemed to me they were all there as we were unloaded and hurried through a solid lane of them into the police station. Madam Singleton was there before us, and with her was a tall, sharp-looking man, gray and about fifty. I never found out who he was, but he looked like a lawyer. ”

“ A noise on the stairs or in the hall of a boarding house doesn’t mean much.
You go upstairs quickly and find a light in the hall. You put it out; not by pushing the button, but by unscrewing the globe a little. You are an expert; you don’t want any light; you don’t want any one to get a look at you in a lighted hallway. You prefer darkened rooms, because in the dark you have the best of the situation.
You find his door; more luck, it’s not locked! You must be careful with this chap; he is a bad sleeper, thin, nervous, “touchy,” an incessant smoker and a heavy coffee drinker. ”

“ He is too old to learn a trade, too old and broken from doing time to tackle hard labor. Nobody will give him work. He has the prison horrors, and turns to cheap larcenies and spends the balance of his life doing short sentences in small jails.
In rare instances the broken thief finds friends, sympathetic, understanding, and ready to help him. Strong and kindly hands at his elbows ease him over the hard spots and direct him to some useful place in the world. Some understand such kindness and respond by breasting the current and battling upstream with their best strokes ”

“ I had learned the lesson of violence in prison, and I believed that I lived in a world of violence, had to use violence, and use it first. I had no more thought of right or wrong than a wolf that prowls the prairie. I hunted because I was hunted myself, and I showed no consideration for anybody or anything because I knew I would receive none.
[385] “I was a habitual criminal. I had formed the criminal habit. Habit is the strongest thing in life, and criminals such as I have described obey the impulse to commit a crime almost subconsciously. ”

“ It would have been a good deal harder to quit if I hadn’t had that fear of the jail always before me. That took my mind off the opium. The worst hold the drug gets on a man is the mental hold. It becomes a mental habit. A man has to keep a hard grip on his mind; he has to want to quit, first, and keep wanting to quit all the time, then he can do it.
I could stick the daytime out. I found something to do; I read, or ate, or walked around the room. I did not dare go out in the daytime, for fear I would be recognized by the police or by some stool pigeon. ”

“ I have none of those, but I have a job, I have two suits of clothes, I have two furnished rooms in a flat. I have as many friends as I can be loyal to. I am fifty years old, and so healthy that when I hear my friends holding forth about their ailments I feel ashamed of myself. I would not turn time backward and be young again, neither do I wish to reach the century mark and possible senility. ”

“ After waiting for a couple of weeks for the hue and cry to subside, he stowed me away in a sleeper one night at Richmond on a northbound train with a ticket to Vancouver, B.C.
County constables and town whittlers beat up the jungles, searched box cars and brakebeams; city dicks explored the hop joints and hangouts for me and the reward offered, but I traveled safely as a first-class passenger on a first-class train.
No police officer who knows his business would think of looking in a Pullman sleeper or diner for a fugitive hop fiend yegg with a twenty-five-year sentence hanging on him. ”

“ Back in the middle of his room he puts a fat hand in his capacious pants pocket and comes up with a small roll of paper money. He unrolls the bills, looking at them with a mysterious smile on his fat face. You don’t understand his smile and wonder if he is thinking how he cheated somebody in a poker game; he looks like a gambler.
The roll interests you, the outside one is what you call a “salmon belly.” It is a yellowback—a big bill. The fat man now gets a chair and places it directly in front of his window, but instead of sitting down he stands up on it unsteadily. ”

“ I discovered that the finest quality of morphine may be obtained from lettuce and proved it in the prison garden by extracting it and eating it. I read up on sleeping and dreaming and learned just what kind of noise is most apt to wake a sleeping person; just when he sleeps the deepest and at what hour of the night his courage is at its lowest ebb. I can sit in a hotel lobby to-day and pick out the sound sleeper, the medium sleeper, and light sleeper. ”

“ My experience with house burglary in the small hours of the night left me a nervous wreck and an opium smoker. Almost every house prowler turns to booze or drugs. Reader, I’ll ask you if you wouldn’t take a jolt of booze or hop after an experience such as this?
You are a burglar; you have put in a week “tabbing up” a residence. You decide to “make” it; it looks all right; no children, you haven’t seen a dog. The night [284] arrives. You jump into the yard. It’s two o’clock. You look the house over. Every door and window fastened, not even an open coalhole, no porch to go up. ”

“ Along in the afternoon, after one of the many stops, I heard a scrambling above and a young fellow about my own age dropped lightly down beside me. I had been in the car so long that the half light was enough. I saw he was ragged and frightfully dirty, road dirt—coal smoke, cinders, ashes, grease. His coat, too large for the thin frame, was full of holes and its lining hung in tatters. His trousers were greasy and full of hot-cinder holes. His calico shirt was open in front, his skin was dirty. ”

“ The police are not chumps, kid; they are just lazy, that’s all. If they worked as thoroughly at their business as I do at mine, I don’t know what would happen. They are human, and take the easy way. Somebody whispers to a dick. He whispers to me, and we go down to the jail, where he locks me up ‘on suspicion.’ The next morning he and his partner come to my cell, knock me down, walk up and down on my wishbone for a few minutes, and ask me if I am ready to snitch on myself and all my friends. ”

“ Something might be done for the generation that is coming up. It seems to me there’s the place to start—but what to do, I don’t know.
I am sure of but one thing—I failed as a thief, and at that I am luckier than most of them. I quit with my health and liberty. What price larceny, burglary, and robbery? Half my thirty years in the underworld was spent in prison. Say I handled $50,000 in the fifteen years I was outside; that’s about nine dollars a day. How much of that went to lawyers, fixers, bondsmen, and other places? Then count in the years in prison—suffering, hardship, privation. ”

“ I will call him “Spokane,” the monoger he was known by among his associates. He had been in San Francisco for years and was familiar with an underworld that I had seen very little of. Most of my life had been spent on the road or roughing it in out-of-the-way places, broken by a few months now and then in city slums. He introduced me into the elegant hop joints where we smoked [339] daily, into the hangouts of polished bunko men and clever pickpockets, into the gilded cafés and other exclusive and refined places of entertainment. ”

“ There was an aspect of the Canadian-prison experience less commendable than its order and its providing the prisoners with a good library, its wholesome and on the whole human management so glaringly in contrast with the American prisons pictured in this story—and that was flogging. In these days of a return to medieval punishments for criminals, advocated by many leading citizens, it is well to realize how devastating to Black were his two experiences of brutal force—flogging in Canada, the strait-jacket in Folsom. They made him—and many others—inhuman wild beasts ready for murder or suicide. ”