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186
THE COUNTRY BOY

bay and the closer we got to San Francisco, the faster the train ran; and as the conductor came through and gave each of us a ferry ticket to cross the bay from Oakland to San Francisco, I saw that I had spent the last cent of change father gave me,—that I had made it just a dead heat.

Aside from the twenty-dollar gold piece in my undershirt, I was completely out.

I wanted to get to the Murphy Building, in which building we had some friends living. A drummer put me on a car as it stood on the turn-table at the foot of Market Street. As this car rolled off the turn-table, I saw what a peculiar position I was in financially. When the conductor came for the fare, I told him that I had come from Oregon, that my father thought he gave me enough change to last until I got to San Francisco, but that he hadn’t. That on my back, sewed in my underclothes, I had a twenty-dollar gold piece. That if he would let me off at the Murphy Building, I would get some change there, and pay him when his car came back. But he said gruffly: “I haven’t the slightest doubt, after a look of your valise, that you have money