07.02.07. Back To The Wall

7. BACK TO THE WALL

"This time," said he, "I’ll show them." He arrived in town on Saturday, secured a place to board and room and being lonesome as he strolled down the street he entered a pool hall to pass the time. My dear young reader, let me urge you right here that if you are ever alone in a town or city, never go to the pool hall to find company for they are, generally speaking, patronized by the most shiftless "bunch" on earth.

Again he was with the wrong crowd and spent that first Saturday night and all day Sunday drinking and playing cards. just a boy in his teens, but drifting, drifting downward. Monday morning he entered school but his interest had been destroyed before he began. He had developed some skill at pool and there was a place where he could play without paying; therefore, he spent more time in the pool room than he did in the class room. Of course this could only bring trouble, his money was now gone and he was having to wash dishes in a restaurant for his board; his brothers had dropped him, his father could not write and his mother was the only one he ever heard from and she was broken hearted and this left him discouraged and fighting with his back to the wall. So when a chance opened for him to become night cook in the restaurant he gave up the fight, quit school, stopped writing home, and gave himself over to the current of the stream down which he was drifting.