And then the police gathered them in and they vanished from our ken.

Sometimes I visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed across the bay to put on the felon's stripes.

And time and again I heard the one explanation "IF I HADN'T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN'T A-DONE IT." And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the most frightful things were done--things that shocked even my case-hardened soul.
The other phase of the death-road was that of the habitual drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent provocation.

When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out.

Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the circumstances, might just as easily have been his head.
So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a bad way of living.