Page:A La California.djvu/352

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298
A CRUISE ON THE BARBARY COAST.

go through the premises. The rooms where the lodgers at 25 cents a night are stowed away are fitted with bunks, like the forecastle of a vessel, and each lodger has a narrow straw mattress, a pair of blankets—perhaps dirty sheets as well—and a pulu pillow. The dozen bunking thus in one room have not money or valuables enough, all put together, to pay any one of the number for the trouble of going through the pockets of the rest, and they can rest in peace until evening comes again, when they emerge on the streets once more, to resume their pursuit of plunder. When one of these fellows makes a raise by "rolling a drunk" (i. e., taking the valuables from the pockets of a drunken man on the sidewalk), "cracking a crib," or "jay hawking a Webfoot" (robbing a green Oregonian), he will take a single bed at 37½ cents in the next room, which is a little better furnished, and has two or three bedsteads in place of the bunks; and, should his luck be extraordinarily good, and a fat pigeon fall in his way and get plucked, he will probably go one degree further, and invest 50 cents in a room with one double-bed, and invite one of the frail females from the dance-cellar near at hand, or some one of the numerous deadfalls in the vicinity, to share his wealth with him. But for 50 cents a night a man could get a good bed at a second or third class lodging-house in a decent locality. Yes, but you forget that the patrons of such establishments as we are now in are all known to the police, and could not get admitted anywhere else, except in disguise, and then only for a short time, if they had any amount of