After a few minutes I crawled over to it, and, pulling myself up, stretched out, more dead than alive. If people can be corrected by cruelty I would have left that cell a saint.

St. Louis Frank, in another part of the jail, got a worse beating than I did.

Our friends outside were busy. At ten o’clock next morning James Hamilton Lewis, affectionately called “Jim Ham,” later United States senator from Illinois, then an ambitious fighting young lawyer who never laid down on a client, came to see us. At two that afternoon he had us out on a writ, free.

From that day on St. Louis Frank smiled no more. He became snarly, short spoken, and ugly. We got our money and parted. He went out on the road “bull simple,” simple on the subject of shooting policemen. The stories told about him are almost unbelievable. Years later I saw him in the San Francisco county jail where he was waiting trial for the murder of a police officer in Valencia Street. The day he went to San Quentin where he was hanged, he sang out to me: “So long, Blacky. If I could have got Corbett I wouldn’t care.”

All Corbett’s beating did for me was to make me a little more careful. I got a boat to San Francisco, not knowing just what to do, but with a notion of killing time till old Foot-and-a-Half George finished his time in Utah, and meeting him. I dug up the hotel keys Sanc and I had planted and experimented a little in hotel prowling. I hadn’t the sure touch that came in later years with experience, and didn’t do much good.