Finally, they roused themselves and went to work. The experience of the two, for a time at least, was very similar. Tom first stopped in a dry-goods house, and asked whether they could give him anything to do. A short "No" was the reply, and the proprietor instantly turned his back upon him. Then he tried a drug-store, where he was treated in the same manner. In a hat and cap store, the rotund clerk tried to chaff him, but he didn't make much of a success of it. In answer to his question, the clerk replied that he didn't need a boy just then, but when he did he would send his carriage around to the Metropolitan for him.
When Tom timidly introduced his errand to an old gentleman in spectacles, as he sat at his desk in a large shipping-office, the old fellow exclaimed in an awed voice,--
"Great Heavens, no! I don't want to hire any boy."
And so it went, hour after hour, until the future, which had looked so beautiful in the morning, gradually became overcast with clouds, and the poor lad was forced to stop and rest from sheer weariness.
He kept it up bravely till night, when he started on his return to his lodgings. He found on inquiry that he was several miles distant, his wanderings having covered more ground than he supposed. He had made over thirty applications, and in no instance had he received one grain of encouragement. In more than one case he had been insulted and ordered from the store, followed by the intimation that he was some runaway or thief.
No wonder that Tom felt discouraged and depressed in spirits as he rode homeward in the street-car. He was so wearied that he dropped down in one corner, where he soon fell asleep, not waking until he had gone fully two miles beyond the point where he should have left the vehicle. This sleep so mixed him up that it was nearly ten o'clock when he reached his hotel, as we may call it.
He was hopeful that Jim would have a better story to tell; but to his amazement, he found that his friend, despite the lateness of the hour, had not yet come back. A shiver of alarm passed over Tom, for he was certain that some dreadful evil had befallen him.
Most likely he had been waylaid and killed in some of the hundred different ways which the police reports show are adopted by the assassins of New York in disposing of their victims.
Chapter X.
Tom's anxiety for his comrade drove all thought of sleep from his eyes for the time; and he sat long in the hot, smoky air of the room down-stairs, in the hope that Jim would come.