We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and ordinary as the brick
walls and stone curbs of their environment. They had been born to the
sight of the spike line, and all their brief days they had seen it.
At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution,
and the previous night's "doss," were taken with lightning-like rapidity
by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man's
thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting
into my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?" "No, sir," I lied, as
lied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the cellar, I
looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to the
language it might be called "bread." By its weight and hardness it
certainly must have been unleavened.
The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand. Then I stumbled on
to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men. The place
smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices from out
of the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the infernal
regions.
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