“Well, I’ve been employing a man as a porter, and he drinks. I’ve discharged him seven times now, and I’ve about made up my mind that’s enough. Would you be a porter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s hard work. You’ll have to clean floors and wash spittoons and fill lamps and handle trunks—”
“I’m willing, sir.”
“All right. I’ll pay you thirty a month and board, and you can begin now, if you feel like it. You can put on the other fellow’s rig.”
And so Jurgis fell to work, and toiled like a Trojan till night. Then he went and told Elzbieta, and also, late as it was, he paid a visit to Ostrinski to let him know of his good fortune. Here he received a great surprise, for when he was describing the location of the hotel Ostrinski interrupted suddenly, “Not Hinds’s!”
“Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s the name.”
To which the other replied, “Then you’ve got the best boss in Chicago—he’s a state organizer of our party, and one of our best-known speakers!”
So the next morning Jurgis went to his employer and told him; and the man seized him by the hand and shook it. “By Jove!” he cried, “that lets me out. I didn’t sleep all last night because I had discharged a good Socialist!”
So, after that, Jurgis was known to his “boss” as “Comrade Jurgis,” and in return he was expected to call him “Comrade Hinds.” “Tommy” Hinds, as he was known to his intimates, was a squat little man, with broad shoulders and a florid face, decorated with gray side whiskers. He was the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the liveliest—inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all day and all night. He was a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and would keep a meeting in an uproar; when once he got really waked up, the torrent of his eloquence could be compared with nothing save Niagara.