because of his poor old father, who was wandering some~
where in the yards begging for a chance to earn his
bread. Old Antanas had been a worker ever since he
was a child; he had run away from home when he was
twelve, because his father beat him for trying to learn to
read. And he was a faithful man, too; he was a man you
might leave alone for a month, if only you had made him
understand what you wanted him to do in the meantime.
And now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and
with no more place in the world than a sick dog. He
had his home, as it happened, and someone who would
care for him if he never got a job; but his son could
not help thinking, suppose this had not been the case.
Antanas Rudkus had been into every building in Pack~
ingtown by this time, and into nearly every room; he
had stood mornings among the crowd of applicants till
the very policemen had come to know his face and to tell
him to go home and give it up. He had been likewise to
all the stores and saloons for a mile about, begging for
some little thing to do; and everywhere they had ordered
him out, sometimes with curses, and not once even stop~
ping to ask him a question.

So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of
Jurgis's faith in things as they are. The crack was wide
while Dede Antanas was hunting a job -- and it was yet
wider when he finally got it. For one evening the old
man came home in a great state of excitement, with the
tale that he had been approached by a man in one of
the corridors of the pickle-rooms of Durham's, and asked
what he would pay to get a job. He had not known
what to make of this at first; but the man had gone on
with matter-of-fact frankness to say that he could get
him a job, provided that he were willing to pay one-third
of his wages for it. Was he a boss? Antanas had asked;
to which the man had replied that that was nobody's busi~
ness, but that he could do what he said.

Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he
sought one of them and asked what this meant. The
friend, who was named Tamoszius Kuszleika, was a sharp

[[69]]

p068 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p069w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p070

v?