THE BATTALION.
5
in the evenings, and the men and women lounge around the
restaurants to smoke opium and drink beer. Mr. Adams
said that very few of the men had wives.
About six o’clock things began to wake up again and
get noisy once more. Everybody goes up town and has
a good time,the working class go around to the saloons
and spend what they ha.ve made that day. There are on the
average, about ten men murdered each week in Chinatown.
There are a great many secret clubs and organizations under
the saloons and other places of business. E ch house has a
basement that is filled with trap doors, so that if anyone is in
a tight place, he can easily escape if he knows how they are
worked.
About seven o’clock Mr. Adams and I started out to
have some fun. Mr. Adams was not married and he enjoyed
the sport as much as myself, if not more, because I was
scared half to death, and he wasn’t. It seemed to me as if
there was a theater in the back of every restaurant, and the
musicians would have made a sick man laugh. I guess
most of the girls danced real well, because everbody seemed
pleased after each performance, and we went to at least fif
teen. We had a gay time until about eleven o’clock, when
we decided to go back to civilization. The streets were not
as crowded now as they had been earlier in the evening. We
were just about out of town when we came across a restau
rant that was still holding shows, and we thought we would
see one more; so we went in, and had not been in there over
a couple of minutes when something happened and the crowd