“And your father and mother?”
“Both dead. Mother was never very strong, and the fight was too hard for her. After the other children died, she sort of lost her—her courage, I guess. That left only father and two children; and Alice wasn’t big enough to do much. That’s how I learned to cook and wash dishes.”
“Then your father died?”
“He was killed—in the steel works. It was an open-hearth furnace, and he was on the puddler’s gang. There was a loose board in the run-way, and the hand-rail was broken. The men had complained, time and again, but nothing was done. One day father slipped.” He stopped abruptly, and when he spoke again it was to say, “Do you wonder that things have made sort of an anarchist of me, Larry?”
“Huh!” said Larry, “you’re not much of an anarchist.”
“Not the long-haired kind, maybe. But I’ve got to stay on my own side of the fence. There’s a horrible lot of injustice in this old world, Larry.”
“Sure there is,” Larry agreed. Then, to keep Purdick from running off on one of his bitter streaks: “Where is your sister now, Purdy?”
“She’s in Elsmere. You know they have a sort of an apprentice course there; a girl can work in the kitchen and have certain hours in the Domestic Economy classes. And that’s another thing: Allie’s been having just about as hard a time as I had before you took me in. You never said there were any strings tied to that scholarship money. There weren’t any, were there?”
“Not a single string.”