I now pulled my hat down from the back of my head and wore it properly. I straightened up, kept my hands out of my pockets, walked with a quick step, and assumed a confident, positive manner. I even began to think about a mustache, bristly, cut down like the gray man’s. I must have a gray suit, gray hat, gloves, and a leather trunk. A big problem for a boy with no income.
I determined to earn some money and looked about for after-school work. After my father, I thought the saloon man, Cy, was the wisest man in our town. For some reason which I never could figure out, I did not submit the matter to my father, but went to the saloon man. Maybe it was because he was easier to talk to. We went over the situation carefully. There was no job in sight that either of us could think of. At last Cy said, “Well, if you’re so crazy about a job, I’ll make one for you.”
Cy was a bachelor, and lived in a single room in the hotel. He opened and closed his bar, did all the work, was always drinking, but no one ever saw him drunk.
“You can come in here in the morning before school and clean the place up. Sweeping out ain’t no man’s job, anyway, and I’m tired of it. You can wash up the glasses and dust up around the bar. In the afternoon when you come home from school, you can be around in case there’s any errands. At night you can look after the pool table, collect for the games, and see that they don’t steal the balls. You can serve the drinks when there’s a card game, and bring a new deck when some sore loser tears the old one up.”
I was so grateful to Cy that I gave him my very best “thank you.” Here was a chance to get on in life, to have my own money, and be independent and mix around with men—to learn something of the world. I was so taken with this notion that I hunted up the broom, which was worn down to the strings, and began sweeping out the barroom. There were no customers in the place. Cy stood by, his hat on one side of his head, a big cigar in the opposite side of his mouth, hands in pockets, and eyed me thoughtfully. When I had the place about half swept out, Cy came over and took the broom out of my hands. He turned it about, examined it carefully. “Johnnie, I think you’re on the square with me, and I’m going to be on the up and up with you. You go to the store and get yourself a new broom.”
I did that, and swept the place all over again. Having started to work without my father’s permission I decided to say nothing till I got well settled in my job. I had a feeling that he might veto the whole thing if I told him at the start, but if I waited a while and had a few dollars saved up he might let me continue.
Father knew Cy very well. On rare occasions he went into the bar and had a drink and a talk with him.
I worked faithfully, early and late. At the end of the week, in the afternoon when there was no customer about, Cy mysteriously beckoned me into his “office,” a small closet of a room at one end of the bar. It was simply furnished—a table, a chair, a large spittoon, one picture on the wall opposite the desk. A picture of the mighty John L. Sullivan in fighting pose. Cy seated himself at the table, put on a pair of glasses, and drew out a small notebook. He looked carefully about the room. Seeing the door of his office open, he told me to close it.
To me Cy had always been much of a mystery. He had been “out West”—to Leadville, Deadwood, and San Francisco. He owned the latest pattern of repeating rifle and a couple of “forty-fives.” He played poker. I thought I was now to be initiated into some of the secret activities of his life. Maybe he would ask me to do something dangerous. Well, whatever it was, I would do it. He wrote something in the notebook, then took three silver dollars out of his pocket and put them in my hand, carefully, without clinking them.
“Johnnie, this is pay day.”