Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 November 1901 — PROFESSIONAL DEAD BEAT. [ARTICLE]

PROFESSIONAL DEAD BEAT.

Harry Daniel, the Decatur Journal Man, Describes Him. When a man goes into a place of business and turns a tear-stained face toward the kind proprietor and tells him that his wife has the croup and that his children won’t be able t.o squeal much longer, and then asks for a little fine cut chewing tobacco, and some side meat, and some smoking tobacco, and some sugar, and some plug tobacco, and some coffee, he generally gets them, says Harry Daniel, the gifted editor of the Decatur Journal. He can’t pay for them and wouldn’t if he could, and in fact never intends to, but he gets them just the same. He is a man whose conscience has long ago dried up and gone to seed, and so don’t hurt him any to tell a lie. But if he had been too proud to tell a lie, and had waited till the dark of the moon and had then crawled in at the back window of the same store and helped himself to what he felt be needed, he would have been punished for it. He would have been yanked before the relentless bar of jnstice and told under the third stanza of the 126th onapter of the revised statutes he had been found guilty of larceny in the 18th degree which was punishable by 30 days with the sheriff. The man who gets his plunder through the aid of the down-cast eye and the nervous voice may have Borne little annoyance in trying to keep on the opposite side of the street from his creditor, but that is all. Bub the man who goes in and ties up his own bundles and does his own delivering is forever branded as an outlaw and a criminal. The man who steals is bad enough, but the fellow who beats is worse. The dead beat is a cross between the all around liar, the thief, the ingrate and the skunk.