By the train which bore me away from Springville I went only far enough
to put me safely beyond the possibility of stumbling upon any of the
places where I had hitherto sought work; though as to that, I had
little hope of escaping the relentless blacklister who had been set
upon me.
About midnight I had a talk with the flagman in the smoking-car,
calling myself a laborer looking for a job and asking about the
prospects in the region through which we were passing. I was told that
there were swamp lands in the next county, and that the contractors who
were installing systems of under-draining had been advertising for men.
Accordingly, the next morning found me in the new field, with one set
of difficulties outpaced for the moment only to make room for another.
The first man I tackled was the foreman of a ditching crew, and he
looked me over with a cold and contemptuous eye.
"Show yer hands!" he rasped, and when I held them out, palms upward:
"On yer way, Misther Counter-hopper; 'tis wor-rkin'min we're hirin'
here this day--not anny lily-fingered dudes!"
So it was, in a disheartening number of instances; on a railroad
grading force in an adjoining county, on city buildings where I asked
to be taken as an unskilled helper, with a sewer contractor in another
city, as a shoveler in a village brick-yard. Finally I landed a job as
a stacker in a lumberyard; and now I found another of the day-laborer
difficulties lying in wait for me. At the time of my commitment for
trial I was in good physical condition. But the three years in prison
had made me soft and flabby, a handicap which liberty--with a string
tied to it--had done little to remove; and four hard days of the
stacking, in which two of us were handling two-by-ten eighteen-foot
joists to the top of a pile twelve feet high, finished me.
The boss grinned understandingly when he gave me my time-check for the
four days.
"I thought you wouldn't last very long at the stacking," he commented;
"that's a man's job." Then: "Got any head for figures?"