I had been dallying with the opium pipe almost daily for a year, yet I had no trouble when I gave it up⁠—just a few restless days and nights and I forgot it. I gave this no thought then, but later when I saw an opium smoker doubled up with cramps and pleading for hop, and learned he had been on the pipe only three months, I got interested and began thinking it over and observing.

My observations and experience have convinced me that the drug habit, like most of our other habits, is largely mental. In another chapter I shall submit a few facts in support of this opinion.

Kansas City had nothing of interest for me now, and I left it, never to return. A cheap excursion ticket took me back west to the town of Los Angeles, where I finished the winter, fraternizing with the bums and yeggs from the road, polishing up old acquaintances, and gathering gossip from the four quarters of the underworld.

Spring came. For me that meant moving, and while I was trying to decide where to go I made by chance the acquaintance of a coal miner who had worked in a small mine in one of the middle-west provinces of Canada. In the course of our talks I learned by asking a few casual questions that the mine worked between thirty and forty men; that it was on a short branch road off the Canadian Pacific; that the payoff was in cash, on or about the first of every month, and that the money was shipped by express from the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The fact that the payroll had to be held one night at the point where it was transferred to the branch road into the mine interested me. I knew the place, and that there was little or no police protection. There were four or five thousand dollars that had to lie somewhere in a small town overnight, practically unprotected. The two thousand miles I would have to travel meant nothing. If the thing couldn’t be handled, I would still be in the midst of fertile fields where I could make a living without taking tough chances against wised-up city police and the busy stool pigeon.