“Don’t you get very tired?”
There was a pause which made more marked the honesty of his response.
“Why, I don’t never pay much attention whether I get tired or not.”
“You have an hour at noon?”
Here he brushed the cloth cap onto the back of his head, and sent a long, wet, black line from his mouth to the floor.
“Well,” he said (it was the man who spoke, his arms akimbo, his body warped in the long tussle for existence), “they aim to give us an hour, but we don’t never get more’n twenty-five minutes. We all live right up there.” He nodded toward the square of houses clustered around the mud-puddle on the brink of the slovenly hillside. Then the bobbins began to revolve slowly, and the boy started back to his work.
“You can’t loaf much,” he explained, “when the machine’s a runnin’.”
Up and down he plied on his monotonous beat—lone little figure....
Evidently waiting to join in the conversation, a small boy, I noticed, was standing beside me. His dark eyes sparkled merrily in his colorless face; he was dirty and covered with lint.