One day I was taking the editor of this book through the Bowery, pointing out to him some of my old resorts, when I met an old pal of mine, who gave me the glad hand. We had a drink, and I, who was feeling good, started in to jolly him a little. He had told me about an old pal of ours who had just fallen for a book and was confined in a Brooklyn jail. I took out a piece of "copy" paper and took the address, intending to pay a visit to him, for everybody wants sympathy. What a look went over that grafter's face! I saw him glance quickly at the editor and then at me, and I knew then he had taken alarm, and probably thought we were Pinkerton men, or something as bad. I tried to carry it off with a laugh, for the place was full of thieves, and told him I would get him a job on a newspaper. He answered hastily that he had a good job in the pool-room and was on the level. He started in to try to square it with my companion by saying that he "adored a man who had a job." A little while afterwards he added that he hated anybody who would graft after he had got an honest job. Then, to wind up his little game of squaring himself, he ended by declaring that he had recently obtained a very good position.
That was one of the incidents that queered me with the more intelligent thieves. He spread the news, and whenever I meet one of that gang on the Bowery I get the cold shoulder, a gun is so mighty quick to grow suspicious. A grafter who follows the business for years is a study in psychology, and his two most prominent characteristics are fear and suspicion. If some stool-pigeon tips him off to the police, and he is sent to stir, he invariably suspects the wrong person. He tells his friends in stir that "Al done him," and pretty soon poor Al, who may be an honest thief, is put down as a rat. If Al goes to stir very often the result is a cutting match between the two.
There are many convicts in prison who lie awake at night concocting stories about other persons, accusing them of the vilest of actions. If the prisoner can get hold of a Sunday newspaper he invariably reads the society news very carefully. He can tell more about the Four Hundred than the swells will ever know about themselves; and he tells very little good of them. Such stories are fabricated in prison and repeated out of it.