I decided to leave Birmingham as soon as my stomach had got
used to regular meals and my pocket knew what real money felt
like again.

The dry years had ended and once more the northern farms were
yielding mammoth crops. But the country was so sick that it
couldn't sit up and eat as it ought to. So the farmers were
selling their crops at steadily falling prices. This drove some
of them frantic. They couldn't pay interest on their mortgaged
farms, and they were seeking to find "the way out" by issuing
paper money, or money from some cheap metal with which they could
repudiate their debts. Banks could not collect their loans,
merchants could not get money for their goods, manufacturers were
swamped by their pay-rolls and had to discharge their men. Coxey
was raising a great army of idle men to march on Washington and
demand that the government should feed and clothe the people.

All my savings had long since gone, and from the high life in
the Pie Boarding-House I had descended to my days of bread and
water. All men were in a common misery. If a hobo managed to get
a steak and cook it in the bushes by the railroad track, the
smell of it would draw a score of hungry men into the circle of
his firelight. It was a trying time, and it took all the
fortitude I had to look hopefully forward toward a day when
things would begin picking up and the wheels of industry would
whirl again. The idle men who had camped by the railroads had
drunk their water from, and cooked their mulligan stews in,
tomato cans. The tin can had become the badge of hoboing. The tin