“Yes, sir, Mas’ Wayne, you can do that, but you-all can’ make me eat no supper. That’s somethin’ you can’ do.”
“If you can’t do as I tell you you’ll have to get out. You think just because you’re up North here you can do as you please. Well, I’ll show you. Are you going to obey me?”
“Please, sir, Mas’ Wayne, I’m goin’ to do everythin’ just like you tell me, savin’ that! I jus’ can’ go an’ eat anythin’ ’less you come along. I’m powerful sorry, hones’ to goodness, Mas’ Wayne, but you can see how ’tis.”
Wayne muttered something that sounded far from complimentary, and relapsed into dignified silence. The white stars came out one by one and the chill of evening made itself felt. Sam tired of pretending and begged to be taken up by Wayne, but Wayne brushed his paws aside. June sat motionless on his end of the old wheelbarrow and made no sound. Now, when you haven’t had anything to eat since early morning and have tramped miles over city pavements pride is all very well but it doesn’t butter any parsnips. Besides, Wayne realised just as clearly as you or I, or almost as clearly, that he was making a mountain of a molehill and that if he wasn’t so tired and discouraged he wouldn’t have hesitated to share June’s earnings. But pride, even false pride, is always stubborn, and it was well toward dark before Wayne shrugged his shoulders impatiently and jumped up from his seat.
“Oh, come on then, you stubborn mule,” he muttered. “If you won’t eat without me I reckon I’ll have to go along.”
He stalked off into the twilight and June and Sam followed, the former with a little shuffling caper unseen of Wayne and the latter with an ecstatic bark.
In the morning, when they had again breakfasted none too grandly, at the lunch-wagon, they were once more reduced to penury. Not only that, but both boys were discovering that forty or fifty cents a day, while sufficient to keep them from starvation, was not enough to satisfy two healthy appetites. Neither made mention of his discovery, but Wayne, again encouraged by food and rest, told himself resolutely that today must end the matter, that he would find something to do before he returned to the little shed, and June as resolutely determined to try harder and earn more money. What Sam’s thoughts were I don’t know. Sam didn’t seem to care much what happened so long as he could be with Wayne.
But all the good resolutions in the world and all the grim determination sometimes fail, and again Fortune turned a deaf ear to Wayne’s petitions. The nearest he came to landing a place was when a foreman at a rambling old factory at the far end of the town offered him a job packing spools if he could produce a union card. Wayne not only couldn’t produce such a thing but didn’t know what it was until the foreman impatiently explained, assuring him that there was no use in his seeking work in the factories unless he first became a member of a union. This was something of an exaggeration, as Wayne ultimately learned, but for the present it was sufficient to just about double his load of discouragement. He confined his efforts to shops and places of retail business after that but had no luck, and returned to the shed when the street lights began to appear, hungry and tired and ready to give up, to find that Fate was not yet through with him for that day.
For once June had fared almost as sadly as Wayne and only a solitary ten-cent piece was the result of his efforts. June was apologetic and would have recited his experiences at length, but Wayne didn’t have the heart to listen. “It doesn’t matter, June,” he said listlessly. “It wasn’t your fault. At that, you made ten cents more than I did. I reckon there’s only one thing to do now.”