Chapter XVIII

CHAPTER XVIII

Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to
the washer.

"I say," he began.

"Don't talk to me," Martin snarled.

"I'm sorry, Joe," he said at noon, when they knocked off for
dinner.

Tears came into the other's eyes.

"That's all right, old man," he said. "We're in hell, an' we can't
help ourselves. An', you know, I kind of like you a whole lot.
That's what made it - hurt. I cottoned to you from the first."

Martin shook his hand.

"Let's quit," Joe suggested. "Let's chuck it, an' go hoboin'. I
ain't never tried it, but it must be dead easy. An' nothin' to do.
Just think of it, nothin' to do. I was sick once, typhoid, in the
hospital, an' it was beautiful. I wish I'd get sick again."

The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra "fancy starch"
poured in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They
fought late each night under the electric lights, bolted their
meals, and even got in a half hour's work before breakfast. Martin
no longer took his cold baths. Every moment was drive, drive,
drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments, herding them
carefully, never losing one, counting them over like a miser
counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish
machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as
once having been one Martin Eden, a man.

But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The
house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its
shadowy caretaker. He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were
both shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a
dream? Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the
heavy irons back and forth over the white garments, it came to him
that it was a dream. In a short while, or maybe after a thousand
years or so, he would awake, in his little room with the ink-
stained table, and take up his writing where he had left off the
day before. Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening
would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down out
of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the
tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind
blowing through his flesh.

Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o'clock.

"Guess I'll go down an' get a glass of beer," Joe said, in the
queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.

Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled
his wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the
bearings. Joe was halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed
by, bending low over the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-
six