A Tramp's Scraps - free ebook by H. I. M. Self

A Tramp's Scraps

By H. I. M. Self To Anybody Anywhere Anytime C. C. Parker 220 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, California 1913...

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A, an Argentino, comes in to a pulperia and talks loudly to another native. B objects, laying his hand on A's arm, and asks him to make less noise. A steps back, putting his hand on his knife, and B throws him out of doors and shuts the door. Later A returns and he and B sit down to talk it over. A says that he is an Estanciero, with thirty thousand head of live stock and would have treated B well if he had come to his place; why had B thrown him out? B said: "Too much noise and knife." B had pu

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FIRE!

Five small wooden huts originally brought from England and later hauled forty miles or more across a camp on bullock-wagons to start a new colony next to Indian territory. Each hut is about eight feet square and they are a foot apart with the high grass cut off around about in case of prairie fires. Three men from one end hut have gone shooting deer or emus or whatever turns up, leaving a heap of powder-flasks, guns, saddles, and clothes in one corner of their shanty; blankets, etc., hanging out

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THE GHOST.

A lonely little old hut on the bank of a river in Illinois said to be haunted. Man went and slept there part of a night, cold, woke up covered with snow that had drifted in through holes in the roof. Went home, no ghost. Shooting duck on the way back got stuck in a slough. Another man turned up and took one end of the gun. Man in the mud's legs stayed on and he came out. If anyone don't believe this he has the legs still. Don't go after ghosts though; you may find one....

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IN A HOUSEBOAT.

On the Yangtze River, houseboats have a cabin with bunks, table, and a mast, that should go up and down so that you can get under bridges made of long blocks of stone; they also have a huge sail made of matting. You put your cook, coolies, and provisions aboard, get your passport, and are off through merchant ships, junks, men-of-war, sampans, etc., up the river, and through the pass where they saw the fire from Shanghai and got up in time to save the captain of a craft where the men had been ti

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ANIMALS.

A pulperia with the usual crowd evenings, Spanish Mayor domo excited because he says a big Argentino (a stranger in with a tropa of prairie schooners from Mendoza) drew a knife on his compradre, the Italian proprietor. Writer was close but saw no knife. Spaniard being a man in authority has always a lot of human jackals ready to take his part; he is not any good himself. Argentino run out of pulperia and beaten, etc., till insensible. Englishman comes up and finding another Spaniard (said to hav

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HUMATIAÁ.

In a little Paraguayan village where there is no hotel we find a shanty with a table on which are cold meat and pickles mostly; eat when you like, sleep when and where you can, and pay is exorbitant. Two of us slept on a table. We are here after jaguars. One found a hammock said to belong to the cook—don't know what became of him—this was slung over the table, all in the same room which opened on the main street. The old town was smashed in the last fight which was a plucky one and where the fel

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AT SEA.

Eleven days in the Bay of Biscay off Tencriffe. A nasty sea; seems to come everyway; knocks the ship one side and the other till she trembles like a live thing. Engines only strong enough to keep us off shore and we get out twice only to be driven back again. Life lines out; fiddles on the table; water washing about saloon and cabins; one lady, in a top berth, with her door swinging open and shut, wants to know when we are going to be drowned; and "to have her cabin mopped out." Another, who has

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A QUARREL IN CAMP.

Sunday afternoons here in camp there are horse races, bone game, monte, drinking, etc. At the pulperias, at a race today, two brothers quarrelled. One stands, knife in hand, talking to friends; the other twenty feet away, is held back by men all around him, who getting tired of persuasion begin to hammer him with their short whip stocks made of wood or iron covered with hide or silver, with a long flat rawhide thong. These rattle on his head like hail but he seems to feel nothing and see nothing

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THE WITCHING HOUR.

Night in a little house on the pampas edge we got some girls together and had a dance. The natives have gone home and men are sleeping all over the floor and on the table over which is a sack of hard biscuits, etc., slung to the rafters. Through the darkness and open door enters one of two tame guanacos (something like small fawn-colored camels), steps on a man who wakes with a shriek. One man on the table wakes up, tries to sit up in a hurry, and the bag of biscuits meets him and knocks him fla

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PERROCHINO.

Woman calling for help at the end of hallway. Man wanders over to see what is wrong. At the other end of the hall is a door and a crowd. Wanderer jumps in and helps to hold the door, asking next man what is going on. Perrochino, the strongest Italian in the colony, has got into trouble and is jammed in the doorway, unable to do anything, while one Spaniard beats his head with a chairleg. Head looks ugly and the man is raging. Wanderer gets the door open a bit and Perrochino slips out, his brothe

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SMALLPOX.

Smallpox came our way; seemed to take a piece about a quarter of a mile wide. Many died. Woman very ill and man went for Priest. Rainy and windy night and the little lamp the man carried in front of the Priest, who was saying prayers, kept blowing out and having to be lit again. The atmosphere of the room was awful for the Priest. Antonia and two men. Antonia was confessed and died. The others cleared and next day the man got a Spanish carpenter (Tapia) and boards and sixteen old kerosene cans f

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"MAY GOOD DIGESTION WAIT ON APPETITE."

We had run out of meat and were living on a few hard biscuits and oranges for two days in our boat on a big river in South America; but today we ran up a creek to Corientes and found any quantity at fifty cents the aroba (25 pounds); so we took some to the creek mouth and Maria cooked it while we sat round with our hunting knives. Don't use plates and things; when cooked you cut a piece off, lay hold with your mouth and cut off your mouthful avoiding your nose. Cooking is done by sticking an iro

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BUG HUNTING.

In Java you are (or were) only allowed to drive around the island. You get a permit, from the Dutch, but are not to go into the interior far from the landing place where there is the biggest banyan tree in the world, it is said; a village could be put away in the arches. There are also numbers of fighting cocks, a very fine cocoanut grove; and lots of other fruits, bananas, plantains, etc. The ship doctor, who was a collector of insects, and I got away seven miles or so over small hills and thro

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EVELINA.

A tormento generally begins with dust; then wind, then rain; the two last fight furiously till the rain comes down solid, with now and then blasts of wind through it. One usually sees them coming and shuts everything that will shut. Huts are sent flying sometimes. I've seen the roof of a house taken off, and a man get to a house on his hands and knees. Oh, yes; she blows; and the rain! In one a man, his peon, and woman, start out to get three favorite horses picketted two hundred yards away. Man

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SHOOTING IN ILLINOIS.

" The days that are no more. " The way you used to catch the wily muskrat years ago on the Calumet River was to set a tooth trap in the water, in one of his runs in summer; in winter you could skate or walk to their houses, built of reeds, three feet high, and dome shaped, and spear them with a three-foot spear on a pole. The skins, taken off and dried by being stretched on willow twigs, were worth seventeen cents a piece. Big ducks sold for two and a half to three dollars a dozen to the dealers

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AFTER OSTRICHES.

On the South American pampas you ride one horse and lead your fastest when you are after ostriches. The birds raise their wings and sail before the wind at an awful pace and if you do not get up to one soon after he starts you might as well give up. When you get near you change horses, and, taking your bolas (three balls as big as pigeon eggs of lead or brass, on a plaited rawhide thong) from around your middle, begin to swing them around in your right hand keeping your finger hooked through the

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A WHITLOW.

Pain! oh yes! Fourteen days in and out of bed alone in a shanty, forty miles from town. Whitlow they call it; an Indian woman advised a piece of willow burned and the powder mixed with the yolk of an egg in the shell; no good. Animals to feed, water to draw, etc., when one is so scared of one's own finger that one breaks a demijohn up and cuts a hole in the wicker cover in which to slip one's hand in bed. Not much to eat and one gets weaker, but has sense enough not to stay too long in a room wi

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BUCHATON.

Three houses now in this colony, joining Indian Territory. Mine was first; then a Frenchman came and used my well and corral, etc., till he got settled half a mile away; and another is being put up for a store. One foggy night, or morning rather (1 A. M.), some one woke me, rapping on the door. As I was alone and one did not expect people, or open the door after dark without knowing what is on the other side, I asked and a woman's voice answered; opened and there was Buchaton's wife with two sma

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FEVER.

In China and some other places one has a fever getting acclimated. One in Shanghai left man pretty weak when the usual plague of boils broke out. Then there was less rest for the wicked than ever, and he balanced himself on a boil and thought about Job. The doctor says that the man is better and that this is a crisis he wanted (man wishes doctor had it). But man does get well after many dawns, watching the bats come home to roost in the round tiles used in the roofs here. Then cats come along th

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TO SLEEP, TO SLEEP.

We did not know this morning if we would stay the night and went out for a walk. While away twenty-seven geological students arrived and took everything and more in the shape of beds; so here we are in a big attic of a little house on top of the Grinsel Pass in Switzerland. The room is the cheese room surrounded by shelves on which immense gruyere cheeses are drying—all kinds of makeshift beds on the floor and for washing little basins and wine bottles on a bench; lovely! Went to bed midnight an

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HALF THE WORLD DON'T KNOW HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES OR DIES.

A small hut made of reeds, lost in an immense swamp—the home of a girl and an old gaucho. Man gone; don't know when or where, leaving the girl stripped and tied with a piece of a lasso to a post in the hut, stabbed and dead. She was quite young and rather pretty—poor thing. At another place found the German girl who cooked for the S——s, stripped and tied down in the prairie just outside the village. Three natives (horseback of course) caught her and carried her off and staceared her. (I don't kn

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HARD TIMES—AGAIN.

A man (in California) lying in bed dying; wife ill in bed in the next room watching him through the open door; third and last room divided by sheets into two, one-half with stove in it, the other used by anyone including seven children all under nine years old. No money. The man died; money was collected and he was buried; and family sent back to Europe. S. P. railway made a reduction on fares; train was to leave at 10 p.m., telegram to say it would be 11 p.m. The woman, children, and man waited

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"THERE WAS A SHIP QUOTH HE."

Coming down the Plata River in the "Cisne" steamer a fellow passenger asked us to help him when we landed. We said we would. Well, it was very dark and raining; we landed under a wharf, arrangement on the other side of which was a ten-foot steep and slippery mud-bank on top of which were one or two wheel carts made with a pole with a hole in the far end. The carter slips a rawhide fast to his horse's cinch, through the pole hole and makes fast, he (riding the horse) can then pull, or if he wants

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HEALTH AND APPETITE.

Sitting in a little park in Los Angeles some one sat down on the other end of the bench. Seeing a dilapidated pair of boots that did not match I went on reading. After a while the stillness was broken by: "Got ten cents pardner?" "What do you want ten cents for?" said I. "Well, pardner, I'm here from Milwaukee, was in the lumber trade there and got six dollars a day, my brother has a big place there; he sent me some money yesterday, I got broke, an' I went on a tear an' spent it all, an' my mout

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KNUCKLE-DUSTING.

Coming up from Aspinwall to New York, a second-class passenger came into the first-class saloon and a big steward objected. Man did not like it and when the steward swore at him, he struck the steward (much the biggest man) and knocked him down; the steward said the man used a knife; no one had seen a knife but over the Steward's heart was a little tear in his white duck. Captain took a hand, and steward, who had had a bad record was put in irons. Other man turned out to be an artist; had been t

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WANDERERS.

Making a fire after a long day in the boat and not thinking there was anyone else for miles; rather there was not, as the nearest place is the line between two states where a number of "bad men" have settled. When the soldiers from one state come for any of them (if they ever do) the men can step over the line. Well, we were getting wood and one of us came out of the night with a fellow walking behind, knife in hand (such a foolish thing; why not in front?) A canoe slid out of the fog with two m

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"THE WEARY PLOUGHBOY."

"The weary ploughboy homeward bound," and not knowing one day from another here we were ploughing with bullocks when a man riding by said: "Thought you English did not work Sundays." My brother was wild; he threw the ear ropes down and wanted to know "If he'd lived all these years and traveled all these miles to plough Sundays with adjectived bullocks in a condemned country!" Bullocks are trying. The Reverend—looking out of the train at Frayle Muerto saw an Englishman swearing wonderfully at his

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A QUARREL—CANDELARIA.

Swede playing billiards with an Italian in a cafe full of Italians; they quarrelled and the Swede used his cue and the Italian a small knife, as the manager came in the Swede went down and some men bolted. Manager locked the doors with thirty or forty inside but the man had gone. Three of us went through houses where men were sleeping and then a mile into camp to a house where two Italians and a big dog lived; knocked; man appeared behind dog in doorway. H told him to call off his dog; would not

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FIRE AGAIN.

A cold night on this big river though we are getting south now after our thousand miles in our little boat; so we got ashore and supped on grebe which reminded one of red herrings. Found a little grass hut built by a woodcutter possibly, and three of us snuggled up on the floor, just big enough, with a candle and part of a book. Heaven knows where the man got it. Well, we went to sleep and the bookman knocked the candle over and the fire ran up the hut luckily one of us woke and put it out and t

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TWO FALLS AND A COW.

Chasing a little cow bareback and riding loosely she made a quick turn and the mare stuck to her just where we had worn a track bringing the adobes for houses. Man's head struck the track and a native woman carried the remains into a house and doctored him. Another time, sitting on a blanket strapped around a tall black beast with a back like the roof of a church, and leading a mare, dogs came and scared the mare, man held but the rope was only around the mare's neck and, as she was faster than

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REAL GHOSTS.

Did you ever keep house for friends gone away? If you have not, don't do it, the place is full of ghosts of live people, this is quite unfair. No well conducted live person should have a ghost; but there they are, and their feet go hither and thither making no sound, and their mouths eat at meals though the food never gets less, and they talk to you and to each other. You know what they say though there is no sound, and you get no answer if you speak to them. One does not really object to it; th

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ON THE SAN RAFAEL RANCH.

Once on a time there was a ranch with a church on it amongst other things. There was also a winery, and a man for whom the manager tried to find work that he could do, having got down to weeding which was not a success, he gave him the winemaker's shanty in which to sleep close to the winery which he was to see was safe; and Sundays he was to sweep the church by 11 o'clock. The manager had been doing this when he took the flowers down formerly, coming down the first Sunday that the man was to ha

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EXPRESS CHARGES.

In the pineries (Illinois), where there was shooting, a man got lost, they are twelve miles through timber, ridges, and sloughs covered with green moss that closes over you if you don't mind your ways. This man luckily came across a solitary railroad track and as he had been out a good while and was seven miles from home he sat down to smoke and think about things. Then the handcar came along, three men; so the shootster, who knew many of the men, got on and worked his passage leaving his spanie

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COTTON PACKING.

In Shanghai it was against the law to pack cotton at night but it was done, one night, in a big go-down, a lot of Chinese on a platform ten feet above the floor were running round a capstan as if getting up anchor, only their thing works downwards, around, around to their eternal chant of ha ho, ha, hao o ha. Two fell over the edge. Now there were pigs of lead piled up below and their skulls cracked like eggs. The other fellows did not seem to care much and in the morning carried the bodies off

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MAN OVERBOARD.

Aboard a ship where there were a lot of young men passengers, and jumping back and forth over open hatches, diving from the yardarm, catching sharks, and revolver practice at men-of-war hawks, molly hawks, cape pigeons, catching albatross with a hook and line, etc., were among the amusements, some of us met at about 11 A. M. to breakfast in a cabin the owner of which had a hamper of cakes and two boxes of Partaga and Regalia Brittanica cigars, these men amongst whom were a T— and two M's—had bee

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"THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET."

If you do not know what baldearing is and are short of amusement, tie the end of a well rope to your cinch and then walk your horse away eighty feet or so till your bucket comes up full, if you like to and have a trough along side, arrange it so that bucket catches and tilts at the top so as to let the water into the trough, or 'troff' as I suppose it will be spelled later. Then walk your horse back and down goes your bucket. The first time one man tried, as he turned he let the rope touch the h

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A DOG'S TALE.

Lx, who was one of the Prince of Wales shooting party around about Chicago (F. W. was there also), had one of the dogs they shot over with him. He was a liver colored pointer named Grouse, and one of the most cantankerous beasts in temper I ever saw. Once he growled at Mark (A No. 1 bullterrier owned by my brother). Mark was the quietest dog unless he was bothered. He went for Grouse who jumped away so quickly that Mark only reached his tail. It healed all right but left a lump and we thought L—

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ARDEN.

Leaving el Toro after about a ten mile drive over two ranges of small mountains, through wild flowers, grain, cotton wood, and live oak trees and by a creek, a fine drive but not for wild horses, you wind past the home farm and turn sharply to your right over a bridge with a swing gate, to find yourself suddenly amongst big lawns and live oaks, great beds of roses and flowers, shrubbery, and a little lake and glass houses. At the back of this eight acres or more is a natural terrace one hundred

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HORSES.

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse." One man who was nervous wanted to drive forty miles across camp to Rosario, Santa Fé, and one of us who was not nervous said he would drive the pair of greys; one had been in harness twice and the other not at all; but the trap and harness were strong. So when the driver went to start and found them loading chains and ironware in case there was a runaway, he had it out again; there are no fences or ditches and all there was to do if they did runaway wa

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SUDDEN DEATH.

In Los Angeles on Main street a hack drove along and one man directed another's attention to two girls in it. They were very pretty but like many others, had their faces covered with white powder, these were Mexicans. They drove across to Rose and Ferguson's stable (Rose shot himself later) and then down Commercial street and Los Angeles street to a hotel with a man (I— F) they picked up at the stables. One of the first two men was passing as the hack stopped and made a grab for the girl, who go

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THIEVES.

Staying in a house full of things for friends who were away once there was a burglary. I never knew till a day or two after. Well, the things were mostly recovered; it was an old servant and his partner who did it. When we looked around there was an outside adobe store room that would not open and a locksmith said that the door was not locked. After some gymnastics we found through an extremely dusty window that there was something against the door. The crafty George had jammed a crowbar into th

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BRIEF AUTHORITY.

Once upon a time a man, call him P.o1, was Marshal at a big picnic and cavorted around in a gorgeous scarf, riding an ancient but fiery untamed Mexican bronco, blanco I mean, which had lots of action, particularly forward. This man had been yarning with another, call him P.o2, who had also been in the golden South Americas and who, being in that frivolous state of mind, often found in travelers, insisted on climbing up behind P.o1 whenever he got a chance, and inciting the blanco till the action

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