Submerged Tenth

SHADOWS OF MEN--Jim Tully--Double- day, Doran ($2.50).

Jim Tully does not like to be called hard-boiled himself, but the people he writes about are not ladies' men. He continues to write about the hoboes he knew when he was one of them because he thinks it is good for men to know all their brothers and because not one writer in a hundred knows the idiom that he does.

In this book, two young bums, Blink Thomas and Author Tully, drift into "a scrawny town in a Western state." When they unhappily encounter a railroad detective, noted for his extreme lack of sympathy with bums, their troubles recommence. After eluding the detective they stumble into a "sapping day"--a roundup of hoboes by embattled farmers--are forced to run the gauntlet, finally escape to a deserted "jungle" and fall exhaustedly to sleep, only to wake in the arms of the police. A heartless judge gives them each 120 days in the county jail.

Here they find a motley gang. "Some had been sentenced and were serving jail terms; others awaited trial or removal to the penitentiary." Old Crow, the stool pigeon trusty, "as bitter as St. Paul, and meaner in heart than Calvin;" the boy from the South who had killed his father; Nitro Dugan, the roving yegg, who had presided at the hobo "kangaroo trial" and execution of One Lung Riley, the ex-bum who had turned railroad detective and knew too much; Brother Jonathon, glib medicine-show barker, pretentious charlatan, kindly man of the world; Hypo Sleigh, the dope fiend, under whose crazed imagination the world is like a nightmare under a magnifying glass; Dippy, the pyromaniac, to whom the lighting of a match is like a shot of whiskey; Eddie the pretty pervert, landed in jail because he has over-blackmailed the banker who supports him.

Two of them, Sailor Burren, Joe Elvin, are waiting to be hanged. Finally the 120 days are up: Blink and Tully are released, go their separate ways.

The last chapter of the book describes a hanging in San Quentin prison. Two of the onlookers, both big men, topple over in a faint while the prison doctor listens to the slowing beat of the hanged man's heart. The prisoner has left a letter for the Warden, protesting his innocence: on the margin he had scrawled: "This is true, so help me God. Just a few minutes to go."

The Author. Jim Tully, onetime transcontinental tramper (three times across), farm laborer, link heater, circus roustabout, chainmaker, prizefighter, newspaperman, tree surgeon, was born near St. Marys, Ohio, 1891, now lives in Hollywood, Calif. Other books: Emmett Lawler, Beggars of Life, Jarnegan, Life of Thomas H. Ince, Life of Charlie Chaplin, Circus Parade, Shanty Irish.

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