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Updated: May 4, 2025
Some of the plingers amongst this riff-raff must have recognized their mate, and thinking that the trouble was merely a case of a street beggar insulting a citizen, and noting that this one wore the hated uniform of a railroad man every tough's sworn enemy they made common cause and the next moment Joe saw a heavy beer bottle descending upon his head, then all was darkness.
One of the road kids in the den of the plingers, who was known by the name of "Danny" because of his neat appearance and superior intelligence, attracted Jim's attention and gave a fair average example of the parentage of the rest.
This last reason was hardly to be feared, for as in this gang's case, they invariably have their headquarters in the building above a slum saloon, whose proprietor would and could not be in business very long unless he knew how to protect his lodgers against police interference, as a gang's quarters needed to be raided only one time, and ever after all plingers in the land would give this unsafe "dump," as tramps call this class of hangout, a wide berth, as this raid sufficiently proved to them that this slum saloon was not properly "protected."
These plingers, knitted together by the common knowledge that of all human vultures they are the most despised, had only shrugs for the unfortunate man, and when one of them, tiring of his repeated pleadings, condescended to hand him a mite of consolation, all the information he cared to impart was contained in the rejoinder that "Kansas Shorty had jumped the city."
I hope that you will be able to make a first-class road kid of him." To which coarse remarks Kansas Shorty laughingly replied: "Never fret, Nevada Bill, I have trained many a road kid into good plingers."
"The Wages of Sin is Death." "Look here, friends," remarked one of the men seated at the table, who was dressed in the height of fashion, and later proved to be the leader of the others, after he had greeted Slippery and had for a brief moment gazed at Joe, "Slippery has brought a road kid along with him, no doubt intending to imitate the ways of the accursed plingers and add another tramp to those who already hobo about the country."
Nevada Bill then told him where a gang of plingers had their headquarters, and as Kansas Shorty seemed to be acquainted with most of them whose monickers Nevada Bill repeated to him, he decided to pay this gang a visit.
His endeavor in this line caused much ridicule among his fellow railroad men and those who had stopped to listen to tramps and especially to plingers, whom Joe's unselfish work had deprived of victims and who denounced him as a "Stool Pigeon", as a "Spotter" and whatever other venomous attribute their black souls could hurl at him, in an attempt to damage his well earned reputation as a benefactor to humanity, who in spite of many threats of bodily injury, by pointing to the seriousness of the road kid evil, proved to the world its intimate connection with the never lessening, nay, ever increasing, numbers of thieving and murdering vagrants.
When supper time approached and while upon their way back to the plingers' quarters, after they had left the business section, John handed his crutches to Jim to carry, and told the astounded lad, who supposed John had actually been crippled, that limping with crutches was a "most tiresome job."
Then the other plingers sent down to the slum saloon for a new supply of beer and "whiskey", and while they took care not to make noise enough to awaken the new recruit to the army of professional beggars, they drank to Kansas Shorty's health and congratulated him upon the successful culmination of the first step necessary to make a good-for-nothing parasite of society out of a respectable boy.
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