We decided to go up to Pocatello and kill the month around Salt Chunk Mary’s, where we would be safe and welcome, and where they could borrow enough money to live on until the time came to go after the four thousand. After a night’s ride we were welcomed by Mary, who spread the customary feed of beans and salt pork before us. She inquired anxiously about “Foot-and-a-Half George.” She seemed to know every bum on the road of any consequence.

Johnnie put in his time down in the jungle drinking with the bums. Sanc and I either watched the fine six-foot Indians that stalked about the town looking scornfully at their white inferiors, or the tinhorn gamblers who skinned the railroad men on pay days and each other afterward.

Pay day was coming on and the town took on a busy aspect. Small-money gamblers appeared with their women companions. “Brass peddlers,” bums who sold imitation gold jewelry, principally rings, appeared on the streets with their ninety-cents-a-dozen gold hoops made in Wichita, Kansas, and “dropped” them to the Indian squaws and railroad laborers for any price from one dollar up. Other bums had bundles of pants and shoes planted in the jungle, the proceeds of a boxcar burglary on the Oregon Short Line. These articles were peddled openly about the railroad shops and to trainmen in the yards. A band of yeggs on their way to Great Falls and then to the Canadian side stopped off to thresh out their “soup” in the jungle.