CHAPTER IV
In his new position father was forced to travel much, often leaving me to my own devices for weeks and sometimes months. I was put up at a small boarding house kept by a widow, who had two children. She was over-worked, sickly, and cranky. She had half a dozen boarders. Before he left, father gave me the money I had saved up, and told me to look about for a job.
There was nobody at the hotel that interested me. The widow was always whining and I kept away from her. Her children were too small for company, and I saw nothing of the other boarders except at mealtimes when they ate much and talked little.
The widow gave me a trunkful of books she had taken for a board bill. Among them I found a battered old volume of Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo,” on which I put in many nights. This sharpened my appetite for reading, and I went around secondhand bookstores, and got hold of the D’Artagnan tales and devoured them. Then “Les Misérables,” and on to the master, Dickens. The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I was miserable most of the time. As my money dwindled I resolved to find a job. I’d ask the landlady for advice.
I found her out in front, scrubbing the steps, red in the face and vicious looking. I told her I was thinking of going to work.
“Well, it’s about time you thought of that,” she snapped, “layin’ around here readin’ and eatin’ up your father’s money. You can get a job just like I did when my husband run off and left me with two brats on my hands. I just started out and asked for it at every place I come to till I got it, that’s all. And you can do it, too, if you got the gizzard.”
I left her and started my search. If there was a job in the city I determined to get it. I went through block after block, store after store, hour after hour. I got mostly “Noes” but some answered pleasantly, taking my name and address. I kept going until one morning I stopped in front of a cigar store—a dead-looking place, no customers. A man was reading a paper spread out on the counter. I went in and put my question to him. When he stood up I saw he was very tall and very thin. He looked sick. I had never seen an eye like his. It attracted me strangely. I could not have described it then, but I can now. It was a larcenous eye. He was very nice, asking many questions. How old was I? Did I ever work before? Where? I handed him Cy’s letter. He read it and asked me more questions. I have never answered so many questions since, except in a police station. At last he quit, and snapping himself together like a man coming out of a trance, he rapped his knuckles on the counter.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, kid. You come down here at nine o’clock every morning, open this joint up, and stay here till one o’clock. Then I come on and you go off till six in the evening. At six you come on and stay till ten, and call it a day. You can go to work right now. The sooner the better. In a week you will know the prices of the different things as well as I do, and I can leave you by yourself. Your wages will be three dollars a week and all the cigars you can smoke.”
“But I do not smoke.”
“Well, that’s your bad luck, kid, not mine. What do you say? Want to chance the job?”