“Will you go to bed?”
“I'll go to bed, all right.”
He had found things rather more difficult after that. Two women, both ill and refusing to acknowledge it, and the prospect of Dan's being called out by the union. Try as he would, he could not introduce any habit of thrift into the family. Dan's money came and went, and on Saturday nights there was not only nothing left, but often a deficit. Dan, skillfully worked upon outside, began to develop a grievance, also, and on his rare evenings at home or at the table he would voice his wrongs.
“It's just hand to mouth all the time,” he would grumble. “A fellow working for the Cardews never gets ahead. What chance has he got, anyhow? It takes all he can get to live.”
Willy Cameron began to see that the trouble was not with Dan, but with his women folks. And Dan was one of thousands. His wages went for food, too much food, food spoiled in cooking. There were men, with able women behind them, making less than Dan and saving money.
“Keep some of it out and bank it,” he suggested, but Dan sneered.
“And have a store bill a mile long! You know mother as well as I do. She means well, but she's a fool with money.”
He counted his hours from the time he entered the mill until he left it, but he revealed once that there were long idle periods when the heating was going on, when he and the other men of the furnace crew sat and waited, doing nothing.
“But I'm there, all right,” he said. “I'm not playing golf or riding in my automobile. I'm on the job.”
“Well,” said Willy Cameron, “I'm on the job about eleven hours a day, and I wear out more shoe leather than trouser seats at that. But it doesn't seem to hurt me.”