“Thomas Pollock, sir.”
“Miss Miller, just make a note of this, please. Thomas Pollock enters our employ Monday. Wages, two and a half a week. Enter him on the pay-roll. Thank you. By the way, son, you’d better have a pair of overalls here to slip on. There’ll be dirty jobs, I guess, and there’s no use spoiling your clothes. Good day.”
It was not yet two o’clock when Tom passed out of Cummings and Wright’s and his train did not leave until after four. That gave him a good two hours in which to seek a room within the limit of the two dollars which he was to actually receive. He had scant expectation of being able to persuade Uncle Israel to make good that fifty cents a week to him. Israel Bowles was considered a hard man around Derry, and, it seemed, his reputation had even spread to the city. Tom didn’t for a moment doubt that Uncle Israel really did honestly owe that sixty-odd dollars to the hardware house. Uncle Israel, however, probably had what seemed to him a perfectly legitimate reason for not paying it. And, as the indebtedness had remained for six years, Tom didn’t believe that Uncle Israel would agree to paying it off through him. Still, it would do no harm to ask, he told himself as he set off down Main Street.
Tom’s mother had died when he was a baby, and his father when he was nine years old. They had lived in Plaistow, a small Ohio town about a hundred miles from Derry. Before Tom, who was the only child, had been born his parents had had several homes, as he had learned from Uncle Israel. Uncle Israel called Tom’s father a “ne’er-do-well” and a “gallivanter.” Tom for a long time didn’t know what a “gallivanter” was, but he always resented the term as applied to his father. His parents, like Uncle Israel, who was his mother’s brother, had come originally from New Hampshire. When Tom’s father died, leaving little in the way of earthly goods, Uncle Israel had promptly claimed the boy and taken him to Derry. On the whole, Uncle Israel had been kind to Tom. The lad had had to work hard during the six years on the farm, had had to rise early and, often enough, go late to bed, since his schooling had been more or less intermittent, and it had been only by studying in the evenings that he had been able to keep up with his class in the little country schoolhouse. Tom couldn’t doubt that Uncle Israel was fond of him, even if displays of affection had been few. And Tom was honestly fond of Uncle Israel. He knew better than perhaps anyone else that, hard as his uncle seemed, there were some soft places, after all. But Tom didn’t deceive himself with false hopes about the fifty cents a week!
Main Street crossed the railroad tracks between the station and the freight houses. Parallel to the railroad ran Locust Street, lined on one side with small stores and lodging-houses affected by railroad employés. It was not an attractive part of the town, and the smoke from the engines and the dust raised by the wagons and drays that passed on their way to the freight houses made the fronts of the cheap, unlovely buildings dingy and dirty. But Tom knew he had no right to expect a great deal for two dollars and so began his search philosophically. There were plenty of rooms for rent in those three blocks, but most of them, after his own neat and clean little bedroom at the farm, turned him away in disgust. But at length he found what seemed to answer his purpose. It was a back room in a lodging-house even smaller and meaner-looking than usual, but it was clean and, within its limits, attractive. And the price was better than he had dared hope for. He could have it, said the stout Irishwoman who pantingly conducted him up the flight of steep, uncarpeted stairs, for a dollar and seventy-five cents a week, payable in advance. From the one small window there was a not unattractive view of a diminutive back-yard, which held a prosperous-looking elm tree, and the rear of a livery stable which, being only one story in height, allowed him to look over its flat tar-and-gravel roof to the more distant roofs and spires and trees of Amesville. Tom took the room, paid down fifty cents as earnest money, and agreed to pay the balance Monday morning. His landlady’s name, as she told him on the way downstairs, was Cleary, and her husband worked in the roundhouse. She referred to him as a “hostler,” but Tom didn’t see how a hostler could be employed about engines. He didn’t question her statement, however. She seemed a good-hearted, respectable woman. She had six other lodgers, she informed him, “all illigint tinants,” and proceeded to supply him with the life history of each. Two small children crept bashfully through the door of a back room and stared unblinkingly at Tom until their mother discovered their presence and sent them scurrying out of sight. “Me two youngest,” she explained proudly. “I’ve three more. One do be working for Miller and Tappen, drives a delivery cart, he does, and the next two do be in school. They’re good kiddies, the whole lot of ’em.”
Tom finally dragged himself away and crossed over to the station to kill time until his train left, on the whole very well satisfied with the results of his day’s industry.
[CHAPTER III]
UNCLE ISRAEL SAYS “NO”
Derry lay twenty-two miles to the west of Amesville and it required almost an hour for the branch line train to reach the little settlement. Tom descended from the car amidst the clatter of empty milk-cans being put off on the platform of the small station. Uncle Israel Bowles’s farm lay nearly a mile away, and Tom, whose feet were sore from the unaccustomed tramping of city pavements, looked about for a lift. But of the two buggies and one farm wagon in sight none was bound his way, and so he crossed to the dusty road that led northward and set out through the warm, still end of a September day. There was no hurry and so he went slowly, limping a little now and then, and thinking busily of the new life to begin on Monday. He wondered whether he would get on satisfactorily with Cummings and Wright, whether the lessons at high school would prove terribly hard, whether he would find any friends amongst the boys there. And finally, with an uneasy sensation, he wondered how long the small amount of money he had saved up during the past two years would last him in Amesville. What experience he had had of city prices for food alarmed him when he thought of satisfying that very healthy appetite of his! Well, he would just have to do the best he could, and if doing the best he could meant going hungry sometimes he’d go hungry! At all events, that money had to last him until next summer, when, either through some more advantageous arrangement with Cummings and Wright or by hiring himself again to one of the neighbouring farmers, he could once more put himself in funds. These reflections and resolves brought him in sight of the farm, and the next moment the joyful barking of Star, his collie dog, announced his advent. Star came leaping and bounding through the gate and down the road to meet him.