The hard work, the long hours, and Billy’s youth unaccustomed to labor left him at night little more than a log to roll into bed, sleep heavily, and go dully off in the morning to another day of digging. It was no wonder that the strange situation of being engaged to marry a young woman and already entered upon his life obligation of providing her home, and yet not knowing where she was, did not weigh upon him as much as he had thought it would.
But as he became hardened to his labor, her problem grew more obtrusive, and he longed to hear from her. He puzzled over the one, the only letter he had received, trying by many readings to understand it, but it revealed less and less meaning. That she had received a letter purporting to be from him instructing her to take the money from his club fund, go away, and not write for four weeks, and even then not reveal her location,—this he gathered. But how she came by such a letter which he had never written, how she could be deceived in the writing, how she got the desk drawer open,—these and many other questions would have become unendurable had he not been so engrossed with his new life.
Through the papers he had seen that her father had failed in business, that Mr. Alvin Short was the chief creditor, and that the home had been sold. It also transpired that Mr. Fisher’s business record was not one of which any son-in-law could be proud.
Billy could never recover from his disgust at the camp feeding where the dirty crew bolted better food than they were accustomed to in silent haste, and yet complained. It was some time before the well-bred boy could mentally detach himself and imagine he was in his own home; but he partly accomplished this feat at last, and ate with better appetite.
He found one among them, an American whose better upbringing had somewhat survived the tramping that had gone with the bottle. He was now “doing his yearly stunt” at work, he said, putting by enough to keep him out of “the poor house, or the chain gang, or whatever is the fashion for the gentry of the road in the town I strike next Winter.”
At one corner of the table they ate together, and sometimes talked a little, while the rest fed. But he was a philosopher, and Billy learned from him many things that set him thinking. “Billy, a man must fight and wait,” the man broke out suddenly one day, “before he can fight and win.” They were lying under a madroño tree, resting after the midday meal.
“You’ll have to switch on the light; I don’t get a glimmer,” Billy replied lazily.
“Anybody can fight, when he has to; even a dog does; but few of us have the grit to fight and hold on. You’re just beginning life, my boy; hold on.”
“I mean to do that.”
“Not to this! It is a dog’s life—to slave for another man, feed, sleep, wake, and do it all over again. I shall not do it much longer. But you—don’t form the quitting habit; hold, and all the time search for something better. Then your fight tells. See?”