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I'll attend to your business myself to-morrow, and then I 'll publish the whole thing in the paper and everybody will read it and know that you are all right again. But you must remember one thing, Johnson, I said. 'You must remember that as you are an Indian the Legislature can't do this for you more than once. If you were a white man you could have as many drunks repealed as you wanted.
In a prohibition town where I lived you could drink all you wanted by belonging to a "club" or winking at the druggist. And in another city where Sunday closing was strictly enforced, a minister told me with painful surprise that the Monday police blotter showed less drunks and more wife-beaters. We pass a law against race-track gambling and add to the profits from faro.
I doubt if I even thought once about a drink. Often, of course, the talk in the forecastle turned on drink, and the men told of their more exciting or humorous drunks, remembering such passages more keenly, with greater delight, than all the other passages of their adventurous lives. In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis. He was a broken skipper.
Now the politicians were too wise to leave the town filled with drunks from the water-front of Oakland. When train time came, there was a round-up of the saloons. Already I was feeling the impact of the whisky. Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon, and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade.
The carnival, the Mardi Gras, the fete, the fiesta, of an election. Election Day, when each aristocrat became only a man, and each man an aristocrat, free of all society's artificially conceived, caste-perpetuating rituals and taboos. Carnival! The day was young, but already the streets were thick with revelers, with dancers, with drunks.
"How!" he grunted, and, pausing impressively drew himself up and tapped his inflated chest, "Minne-tronk-ske-wan! . . . great man! me " And then Redmond nearly choked, as Many Drunks, with intense gravity, proudly conferred upon himself the most objectionable title that exists in four words of the English language rounding that same off with a majestic "Wah! wah!"
When the prisoners were told next morning the decision of Chief Justice Bolster to try each prisoner separately and in closed court, they all protested against such proceedings. But guards took the women by force to a private room. "The Matron, who was terrified," said Miss Morey, "shouted to the guards, `You don't handle the drunks that way.
"Aw, let up," Kent advised him, through a crack in the wall. "Want to know where you are? Well, you're in Hawley's ice house; you know it's a fine place for drunks to sober up in; it's awful popular for that purpose. Aw, you can't do any business kicking that's been tried lots of times. This is sure well built, for an ice house. No, I can't let you out. Couldn't possibly, you know.
There were the leading lights of the school, including the president of the Senior class, the chairman of the Junior promenade, two halfbacks, the pitcher on the baseball team and the president of the Y. M. C. A., all on the works for ten days, along with as choice an assortment of plain drunks and fancy resters as you could find in ninety miles of mainline railroad.
Corporal Prag yet further improved the occasion, earning Dam's heartfelt blessing. "Don't you fergit it, Trooper Maffewson. I'm yore sooperier orficer. 'Ung indeed! You look after yer own farver an' don' pass remarks on yer betters. Why! You boozin' waster, I shall be Regimental Sargen' Majer when you're a bloomin' discharged private wiv an 'undred 'drunks' in red on yer Defaulter's Sheet.
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