“My back trail from the first recollections has been checkered. My first memory from childhood, was a shanty on the Barbary coast, with the Pacific at high tide thundering against the cabin’s thin walls. The roar of the sea and the cry of the sea gulls were the chief sounds I heard, day after day. A creole nursed me at times and when I was four and a half years of age, she pointed out my parents to me. As I look back now, they caused me no emotion. My mother was of Aztec blood and my father, a Bedouin, mixed with southern Arab. So I was born of poor but dishonest parents.
    At the age of nine years, I found myself working on a spunge barge, as a roustabout. I was born for bad luck and it has pursued me all of my life. I was in hopes that the curse had lifted.
    Dropping into a gambling house on the Barbary coast one night, the god luck was with me. I just could not lose, and walked out of that gambling house with forty thousand dollars, and later, in a flourishing city under the stars and stripes, I purchased a modern hotel, eight stories high, having four hundred guest rooms. Just at this time, one of those mushroom laws slipped in to put money into the manufacturers’ pockets, was passed by the “all right” fellows. They made you tear down a perfectly good fire escape and install one not so good, in order that you could pass their inspection.
    The price of the one prescribed by law would have hurt my pocket book. In the midst of my difficulties, I was approached by a knight of the grip, who had a suavity that took me off my feet, and a line of talk that would make a brass monkey weep.
    He had a fire escape, recognized by the state laws that would cost just half of what the one I was considering, would cost. A drowning man will grasp at a straw, so I ordered the new system installed. Each guest room was equipped with a pair of rubber boots and each guest was instructed that in case of fire, he was to slip into the boots and jump out of the window.
    Oh that I could wipe from my memory the events of that horrible night! A convention for school teachers and another for trained nurses were being held in our city, filling all of our hotels to capacity. At two o’clock in the morning, a fire alarm sounded, causing confusion to reign in our hotel. Would that I could lay my hands on the scoundrel who put in that fire alarm! I tried to quiet the guests and was quite successful with the males, but my endeavors with the females were of no avail,—they were in their rooms, with the windows raised to the half sash, and no fire in sight! Within a few minutes, all had jumped! The manufacturers of those boots must have had a surplus of rubber, at least they put enough spring into their product to make them shock proof. I can make only a feeble attempt to describe the terrible scene which followed those flying leaps! There was a shower of white forms in the moonlight,— slender school ma’ams and plump ones, and nurses in all garbs. Lucifer with the fallen angels had nothing on me. Pandemonium reigned, fire engines and the whole fire department came to the rescue. There was an endless procession of passersby, including the board of health, the police force, ladies’ aid societies, the House of David, inmates of the Old People’s Home, Y. M. C. A., and last but not least, the Reveeting Society headed by their great leader.
          There was an excessive abundance of buoyancy in the rubber soles, which caused the flying forms to rise much higher than the roof garden of the hotel. Hour after hour passed, and still the forms hovered in the air ! The police were keeping a careful watch over me while a strong protest was made to the mayor by the gate keeper of the House of David, declaring that competition and infringement was being made on his patented, sacred organization.
    At ten o’clock, the next morning, the air was still filled with flying, female figures. Though my nature is hard, it filled me with frenzy and terrible anguish to see those flying forms slowly dying of starvation for lack of food and water. At five o’clock of the same day, the flying forms still cluttered the last rays of the sun. The cordon of police stood by and cast menacing looks in my direction. In desperation, I plunged into the hotel, seized my trusty blunderbuss, which had never failed me in my vicissitudes. Would I see those guests, who had entrusted themselves in my keeping, slowly starve?

    I can see them yet, with their anguished faces and tongues hanging out, crying for a drop of water to quench their terrible thirst. My decision was made ! Come what would, I must act, and with a sweep of my blunderbuss, finger on trigger I pulled. Twenty-six female forms lay on the pavement in death-like silence.
    A crushing blow on my head, semi-consciousness and the cries of the multitudes, and I felt myself being dragged through the streets to a loathesome cell. Weeks later, I was tried and sent to San Quinton prison to serve a fifteen year sentence in solitary confinement. Last fall, I was released, and wandered to the northern Wisconsin forests to spend the remainder of my life communing with nature.“
    As the man finished his story, his powerful head sank slowly to his breast. Mike Dutton, who was the first to reach his side, tried, with a quick movement to arouse the man, but to his surprise, found him lifeless. There was a dead silence, and every head was bowed in profound respect to the man who had never had a real chance in life.
    An owl in a dead hemlock, near the bunkhouse called lustily to a porcupine gnawing on a young balsam. The yip of a timber wolf, proclaimed “all’s well”, in the dense forest. A pall was thrown over the “deacon’s seat” for some nights to come.