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Page 22
It isn't that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the
law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of
outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.
But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind -- and that is
what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else -- he knows
where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the
majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse
thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they
gamed their positions and immunity by turning state's evidence, by turning
traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. He
knows that some day -- unless he is shot first -- his Judas will set to
work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised instead of a
surpriser at a stick-up.
That is why the man who holds up trains picks his company with a thousand
times the care with which a careful girl chooses a sweetheart. That is
why he raises himself from his blanket of nights and listens to the tread
of every horse's hoofs on the distant road. That is why he broods
suspiciously for days upon a jesting remark or an unusual movement of a
tried comrade, or the broken mutterings of his closest friend, sleeping by
his side.
And it is one of the reasons why the train-robbing profession is not so
pleasant a one as either of its collateral branches -- politics or
cornering the market.
VI ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN
Do you know the time of the dogmen?
When the forefinger of twilight begins to smudge the clear-drawn lines of
the Big City there is inaugurated an hour devoted to one of the most
melancholy sights of urban life.
Out from the towering flat crags and apartment peaks of the cliff dwellers
of New York steals an army of beings that were once men, Even yet they go
upright upon two limbs and retain human form and speech; but you will
observe that they are behind animals in progress. Each of these beings
follows a dog, to which he is fastened by an artificial ligament.
These men are all victims to Circe. Not willingly do they become flunkeys
to Fido, bell boys to bull terriers, and toddlers after Towzer. Modern
Circe, instead of turning them into animals, has kindly left the
difference of a six-foot leash between them. Every one of those dogmen
has been either cajoled, bribed, or commanded by his own particular Circe
to take the dear household pet out for an airing.
By their faces and manner you can tell that the dogmen are bound in a
hopeless enchantment. Never will there come even a dog-catcher Ulysses to
remove the spell.
The faces of some are stonily set. They are past the commiseration, the
curiosity, or the jeers of their fellow-beings. Years of matrimony, of
continuous compulsory canine constitutionals, have made them callous.
They unwind their beasts from lamp posts, or the ensnared legs of profane
pedestrians, with the stolidity of mandarins manipulating the strings of
their kites.
Others, more recently reduced to the ranks of Rover's retinue, take their
medicine sulkily and fiercely. They play the dog on the end of their line
with the pleasure felt by the girl out fishing when she catches a
sea-robin on her hook. They glare at you threateningly if you look at
them, as if it would be their delight to let slip the dogs of war. These
are half-mutinous dogmen, not quite Circe-ized, and you will do well not
to kick their charges, should they sniff around your ankles.
Others of the tribe do not seem to feel so keenly. They are mostly
unfresh youths, with gold caps and drooping cigarettes, who do not
harmonize with their dogs. The animals they attend wear satin bows in
their collars; and the young men steer them so assiduously that you are
tempted to the theory that some personal advantage, contingent upon
satisfactory service, waits upon the execution of their duties.
The dogs thus personally conducted are of many varieties; but they are one
in fatness, in pampered, diseased vileness of temper, in insolent,
snarling capriciousness of behaviour. They tug at the leash fractiously,
they make leisurely nasal inventory of every door step, railing, and
post. They sit down to rest when they choose; they wheeze like the winner
of a Third Avenue beefsteak-eating contest; they blunder clumsily into
open cellars and coal holes; they lead the dogmen a merry dance.
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