If I knew more of composition and writing and talking I might do justice to Mary, the fence, and friend of bums and thieves.

It’s an injustice to the memory of Mary, or, as she was lovingly called by the bums, “Salt Chunk Mary,” to try to crowd her into a few paragraphs or even a chapter. She should have a book.

“Did you eat yet?” was the first thing you heard after entering her house. “I have a pot of beans on the stove and a fine chunk of salt pork in them.” She invariably produced the beans and “fine chunk of salt pork” and always ate as heartily of them as any of her famished guests.

Her principal business was selling wine, women, and song to the railroad men and gamblers. She ruled her half dozen girls with a heavy hand. Her house on the outskirts of the town was a dingy, old two-story frame building with a couple of rooms added to one side of it where she lived and received her friends from the road.