There had been an analogous change in the range of employment sought. All idea of a mercantile post had been at last abandoned, and he was in for any honest living to which his hands could help him.
It was when he had broken his last five-dollar note that he made once more the rounds of the doubtful offices which offer work. A photograph-coloring establishment was his final choice. He paid the fee of two dollars, received the instructions, which were very simple, purchased for a dollar a box of materials, accepted half a dozen photographs to begin upon, and then went to his room with his mind made up to succeed at the work if there was any success in it.
With utmost patience and care he practised upon the pictures. Difficulties in the process arose against which he had not been warned. He went for further instructions and was given them willingly. After nearly three days of almost constant industry he finished the six photographs. These were to yield him a dollar and a half, and he took them with a sense of achievement to the office. His employer examined them and good-naturedly pointed out certain defects which he was asked to remedy. The remedy seemed simple, but he saw at a glance that, in reality, it would require his undoing practically all his work and performing it over again, at a great risk of ruining the photographs in the attempt.
He thought that he saw an escape from that, so he proposed to his employer that the alterations should be made at the establishment; that he himself should be paid nothing for the first work, but that he should be given a second lot of pictures to color. The man agreed instantly, and handed to him a fresh package containing half a dozen photographs. These he carried back to his room. When he undid the wrapper he found that he had been given a job which would require at least a week to finish. Each photograph was unlike the others. Besides one or two more or less difficult human figures in each, there were elaborate backgrounds of draperies and rustic benches and potted plants. He took the package back and asked for something simpler—more within his power as a beginner. His employer explained to him cheerfully that he had nothing else just then, but that he was sure of easier work for him by the time that he had finished this.
The poor fellow walked out into the street knowing that he had been swindled out of three dollars and three days’ hard work, and that penniless now, he must take up the search again, and that there was no redress for him.
Several times after this I saw him and I pressed upon him each time the plan of returning to his former home in northern Indiana, or striking out anywhere into the open country, where his intelligence and his former experience would stand him in good stead, and where he would probably not have to look long for a job. This was keenly distasteful to him, for it would be a tacit acknowledgment of defeat, and the man was not without courage and pluck. I met him last one early morning after his first night as a lodger in a station-house. His eyes were starting from his head, and he wore the wild, hunted look which I had watched with alarm in Clark. He would scarcely stop to talk. He was off for the open country and his former home.
Before many days had passed Clark and I began to lose the sense of being recruits in the army of the unemployed. We soon acquired the feeling of veterans, and with it a certain naturalness as of long habit. It is not a little strange how swift this adjustment is. We fell into some of the ways of the other men with an ease which seemed to imply a long antecedent wont. This was after Clark had despaired of work in a foundry, and had reached the level of willingness to sweep a crossing for a living, if only he could get the job.
One of the habits which came most readily to us was to join the crowds which stand in the early morning about the gates of large productive institutions. Sometimes a superintendent finds himself short-handed of common labor in a permanent department of the work or for an emergency, and he sends a foreman out to the gates to secure the needed men. This happens very rarely, if I may judge from our experience; and yet, upon so slender a chance as this, hundreds of men stand each day in the market-places for labor, waiting hopefully for some husbandman in want of workers.
Clark and I soon made a considerable round. One morning we were at the gates of the Exposition grounds, another at the Stock-yards, and then at various factory gates on the West Side.