José — page 255: what you’re looking at

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

248 JOSE. The old man gazed down before him as if he were occupied with himself, then silently nodded. “IT might as well tell it,” he quietly began. “I have been a man who despised himself, but it is also true that I received my education among peo- ‘ple as disreputable as any'on the shores of the Mis- sissippi. My home was the street, my bed a corner in any old: river boat. If anything kept me from falling to a level of the lowest it was an inherent sensibility that came to me from my parents—that reproached me and would have made a better man of me but for the circumstances by which I was surrounded. But I lost my parents at a tender age, and all that I knew of myself was my Christian name. Then I fell into the keeping of a man,a devil in human form, who betrayed me into the commission of my first evil act, the nature of which I had not known before, but which kept me in bondage forever after like a slave in chains, and for fear of the discovery of my first transgression, - from thence onward rapidly sped me down a career of manifold crimes. <A family of Germans had landed in St. Louis—an aged grandmother and her children and grandchildren. Doubtless some sinis- ter plot menaced them for I was deputized a spy to watch their movements. For all that I was in igno- rance of what was going to take place, no kind of work had even appeared so odious to me as this. When I gazed into the faces of the Germans it was as if I were driving traffic with my own blood—but the noose was securely attached to me, and I could only obey. The aged grandmother died of the cholera, but she appeared to have taken secrets with her into the grave which should have to be exhumed, One stormy night I received orders to Ri m Eomichooks co