12 A CALIFORNIA TRAMP. 



passengers' lives slid along. My companions were the lower 

 order of emigrants, foreign and domestic, and the deck hands 

 or " roustabouts." Many of the latter were desperadoes, whose 

 gashed faces showed the effects of personal encounters. My 

 sleeping places were on bundles of freight, and my provender 

 the rude fare I bought at the landings. My impression had 

 been that deck passage simply meant absence of state-room 

 and dining privileges, but I soon learned that the enjoyment 

 of the upper deck was fruit forbidden, and that the officer in 

 charge knew a steerage passenger by a sort of instinct as a 

 personage who was to be hustled down the gangway on sight. 

 So I perforce passed my time below, with one eye on my be- 

 longings, lest they should be stolen, and the other on the 

 scenery and surroundings generally. The shriek of the "cal- 

 liope;" the cough of the exhaust pipe, as that of an asthmatic 

 giant ; the escape of the angry steam ; the roar of the mud- 

 valves, when the sediment of the river water was forced from 

 the boilers; the cursing of the crew by the mate on duty; the 

 mutterings and low spoken threats of the former, and the sing- 

 song call of the leadsmen, as the treacherous channel was 

 sounded, I still seem to hear. In my vision are the unwashed 

 passengers ; the grimy stokers feeding the fires under the 

 high-strung boilers; the vile deck hands on duty, or eating 

 their fried bacon and hard tack, with their feet hanging over 

 the muddy water, into which they now and then dipped their 

 tincups for drink; the envied cabin passengers promenading 

 the upper deck and occasionally coming down to our purga- 

 tory to see the possibility of endurance; the mile-wide river 

 with its driftwood and caving banks, its shabby towns and 

 wood-yards; our wooding up at night in the glare of pine- 

 knots, when, like fiends in their glare, the aroused crew carried 

 armloads of billets on a run, under the occasional stimulus of 

 a kick or blow. All these sights and sounds are bright in my 

 memory now. I became so disgusted with my surroundings 



