permitted me to get no more out of my work than all the rest got.
So they decided that I was to have a fifteen-cent bed each night
instead of a five-cent flop with the rest of them. And I was
assigned to the royal suite of that flop house, which consisted
of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.

At this time they were holding "kangaroo" court in the New
Orleans jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and
sentenced and shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man
tried was convicted. And there were plenty of camp bosses ready
to "buy" every vagrant the officers could run in. My bunch down
at the flop house was in deadly terror of being "kangarooed" and
sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.

One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs.
Hubbard from Pittsburgh, I found no one in the apartment and Mrs.
Hubbard's pearls and other jewels lying on the dresser.
Immediately I was terrified with thought of the kangaroo court. I
knew that the jewels were valued at several thousands of dollars.
If I went away some one else might come into the room and
possibly steal the jewels, for they were lying in plain sight and
were valuable enough to tempt a weak-willed person. I sounded an
alarm and stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the room
until Mrs. Hubbard returned and counted her valuables.

She found them all there and thanked me for guarding them. She
said it was by an oversight that she had gone away without
locking up her treasures. She asked me how she should reward me.
I told her that I was already rewarded, for I had guarded her
jewels in order to protect myself from being suspected of their