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SHOWMAN
carry only emigrants— they were just the cheapest way of traveling west, used by everybody who was short of cash. Likewise the peanut-butcher didn't sell just peanuts—he was a general store on two legs. Readingmatter, groceries, hardware, notions, tobacco, candy, bedding for the hard wooden boards from seat to seat that the passengers slept on— everything but yard-goods. For the customers in the sleeping-cars the butcher stocked guide-books, expensive and thoroughly useless souvenirs such as fancy little boxes full of mineral specimens, and anything else people with money would be expected to bite at. You could work off an awful lot of that kind of junk on prosperous drunks and the prices you charged were as much as you dared ask over and above the company's bookkeeping price. The difference went into your pocket.
It was a good job and the butcher was a big figure on the train. When you got off at the end of the run in some small town and went strutting round the streets with your little cap on the side of your head, people nudged each other and whispered who you were and how much money you made. At the height of my game, I was selling $400 a week at a 20% commission, which figures out to something.
The job wanted cockiness, a loud voice, presence of mind, and a sense of the dramatic, all of which I had acquired on the Bowery. My methods were all my own. I'd come bursting into the car with my stock-in-trade, strike an Old Bowery attitude and get the attention of
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