Judge — May 4, 1918 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

in a hotel in Los Angeles. I was in a room on the sixteenth floor. I heard them coming up the fire escape. I looked out of the window on the other side of the room, and I could have jumped twenty feet and landed on the roof of a_ twelve-story building on the other side of the alley and crawled down a skylight three blocks away, but some- how I had the impulse to walk out of my room and go down in the elevator, and I did. I walked out the front door of the hotel and saw the police running around on top of all the buildings in the neighborhood. One of them was climbing a flagpole, thousands of feet above the street. It is that way with all my escapes. I positively abhor them—all of them. The four times that I have fallen over precipices (twice in a Ford racer, and twice on horseback) I have narrowly escaped death. I was never in the hospital less than five months. I always try to shake off the horse or the Ford (like a bed cover) and stagger to a nearby spring for complete revivification, but preci- pices put me out cold. It is always nauseating to me, and I get tangled up in the steering gear, with my hands all bent in under me and my head covered up so that my face doesn’t show at all, and, usually, with my feet sticking upin theair. Beautiful women shun me when I fall off of cliffs. It is usually some rheumatic old farmer who picks me up. Dravon by Carvert Sart Why, Mp. Herold, you are shot 2 If only I could be wounded and not know it for a couple of weeks— One night a man who was, at that time, par- ticularly obnoxious to me, was lighting a cigarette in an alcove in a ’dobe hut across the street from my hotel. I had a Maxim silencer on my _ revolver and thought it would be good sport to shoot the match out of his hand. It was one of the darkest nights I ever saw, and it was the opportunity of my lifetime. I shot. I hit a wooden pump thirty- five feet to the right of my enemy. I found the bul- let there the next morning. I am perhaps one of the hardest drinkers who ever dashed a glass of whiskey into his throat. I drink maliciously. Yet one of the saddest things in my life is my incapacity for strong drink. I remember one night in Mexico when I was particularly troubled about things. I had killed a banker, and things looked very bad for me. The next morning I must explain to his widowed mother. Just before the Crossbones Bar closed for the night I bought a gallon and a half of their most potent whiskey and asked permission of the bar- tender to stand at the bar and drink all night, so that dawn would find me there at the bar with bowed head and an empty whiskey bottle at my finger tips—repentant, clear headed, in fine fettle to meet the banker’s mother and makean explanation. But the clock struck twelve- thirty, one, one-thirty—and that is the last. I remember. I fell sound asleep, and slept right through my appoint- ment with the banker’s mother and never did see her. Why, Sol ams wonder C= on Herold Her Weppinc Vein