A fire burned cheerfully in the jungle camp, and beside the fire lolled a cheerful-seeming
though horrible-appearing man. This was a hobo jungle, pitched in a thin strip of woods
that lay between a railroad embankment and the bank of a river. But no hobo was the
man. So deep-sunk was he in the social abyss that a proper hobo would not sit by the
same fire with him. A gay-cat, who is an ignorant new-comer on the "Road," might sit
with such as he, but only long enough to learn better. Even low down bindle-stiffs and
stew-bums, after a once-over, would have passed this man by. A genuine hobo, a couple
of punks, or a bunch of tender-yeared road- kids might have gone through his rags for
any stray pennies or nickels and kicked him out into the darkness. Even an alki-stiff
would have reckoned himself immeasurably superior.
For this man was that hybrid of tramp-land, an alki-stiff that has degenerated into a stew-
bum, with so little self-respect that he will never "boil-up," and with so little pride that he
will eat out of a garbage can. He was truly horrible-appearing. He might have been sixty
years of age; he might have been ninety. His garments might have been discarded by a
rag-picker. Beside him, an unrolled bundle showed itself as consisting of a ragged
overcoat and containing an empty and smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and
battered condensed milk can, some dog-meat partly wrapped in brown paper and
evidently begged from some butcher-shop, a carrot that had been run over in the street by
a wagon-wheel, three greenish- cankered and decayed potatoes, and a sugar-bun with a
mouthful bitten from it and rescued from the gutter, as was made patent by the gutter-filth
that still encrusted it.
A prodigious growth of whiskers, greyish-dirty and untrimmed for years, sprouted from
his face. This hirsute growth should have been white, but the season was summer and it
had not been exposed to a rain-shower for some time. What was visible of the face
looked as if at some period it had stopped a hand-grenade. The nose was so variously
malformed in its healed brokenness that there was no bridge, while one nostril, the size of
a pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward to the sky.
One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty, bulged to the verge of popping out, and as
if from senility wept copiously and continuously. The other eye, scarcely larger than a
squirrel's and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar of a bone-
crushed eyebrow. And he had but one arm.
Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild degree, was depicted sensuous pleasure as he
lethargically scratched his ribs with his one hand. He pawed over his food-scraps,
debated, then drew a twelve-ounce druggist bottle from his inside coat-pocket. The bottle
was full of a colourless liquid, the contemplation of which made his little eye burn
brighter and quickened his movements. Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down
the short path to the river, and returned with the can filled with not-nice river water. In
the condensed milk can he mixed one part of water with two parts of fluid from the
bottle. This colourless fluid was druggist's alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as
"alki."
