“When I was going to night school in Denver the day clerk, who’d got me the place, took half my tips, the only pay I received, to permit me to hold the place. It was the rule, I discovered, the under-dog penalty.
“I said I never struck anything prospecting. I did. I struck a silver lead down in Arizona. While I was proving it a couple of other prospectors came along, dead broke—and out of provisions. I divided food with them, of course—it’s the unwritten law—and they camped for the night. We had supper together. That was the last I knew. When I came to it was thirty-six hours later and I was a hundred miles away in a cheap hotel—without even my bill paid in advance. The record showed that claim was filed on the day I disappeared. The mine is paying a hundred dollars a day now. I never saw those two prospectors again. The present owner bought of them square. I don’t hold it up against him.
“I went to night school all one winter in San Francisco with a fellow named Stuart, another under dog like myself. We roomed together in 265 a hall-bedroom to save expense and ate fifteen-cent dinners together at the same soup-house. He clerked in a little tobacco store daytimes. I was running an express elevator. We both saved a little money above what it cost to live. Things went on in this way for four months, until the end of the winter term. One morning when I woke up I found he’d gone. I also found that the little money I’d saved was gone. They went together. I never saw either again.
“I had another friend once, I thought. It was after I’d decided to come here to the university. I was harvesting on a wheat ranch in Nebraska, making money to pay for my matriculation. He was a student too, he said, from New York State, and working for the same purpose. We worked there together all through harvest, boiled side by side in the same sun. One day he announced a telegram from home. His mother was dying. He was crazy almost because he hadn’t nearly enough money to take him back at once. And there his mother was in New York State dying! I lent him all I had saved,—seventy odd dollars; and he gave me his note, insisted on doing so—though he hoped the Lord would strike him dead if he failed to return the loan within four days. I 266 have that note yet. Perhaps the Lord did strike him dead. I don’t know.
“It was nearly September by this time and harvest was over, my job with it, of course; so I started on east afoot, tramping it. I wasn’t a particularly handsome specimen, but still I was clean, and I never asked for a meal without offering to work for it. Yet in the three hundred miles I covered before school opened I had four farmers’ wives call the dog,—I recorded the number; and I only slept under a roof two nights.
“Even after I came here, after—Elice, don’t! I’m a brute to have done this! From the bottom of my soul I beg your pardon.”
The girl was weeping repressedly, her face buried in her hands, her whole body tense.
“Elice, please don’t! I’m ashamed. I only wanted you to understand; and now—I’m simply ashamed.”
“You needn’t be at all.” As suddenly as it had come the storm abated, under compulsion. “I wanted to know several things very much; and now I think I do know them. At least I don’t wonder any more—why.” She stood up decisively, disdaining to dry her eyes.
“But we mustn’t stop to chatter any more 267 now,” she digressed preventingly. “You made me forget all about time, and cooks should never forget that. It’s nearly sundown and father—he’ll have been hungry for two hours.”