Chapter XVIII - Page 2

gear with rhythmic strength, his face set for seventy miles of
road and grade and dust. He slept in Oakland that night, and on
Sunday covered the seventy miles back. And on Monday morning,
weary, he began the new week's work, but he had kept sober.

A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled
as a machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a
glimmering bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to
scorch off the hundred and forty miles. But this was not rest. It
was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering
bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life. At
the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to
resist, he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life
and found life until Monday morning.

Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty
miles, obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the
numbness of still greater exertion. At the end of three months he
went down a third time to the village with Joe. He forgot, and
lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast
he was making of himself - not by the drink, but by the work. The
drink was an effect, not a cause. It followed inevitably upon the
work, as the night follows upon the day. Not by becoming a toil-
beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey
whispered to him, and he nodded approbation. The whiskey was wise.
It told secrets on itself.

He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and
while they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and
scribbled.

"A telegram, Joe," he said. "Read it."

Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read
seemed to sober him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears
oozing into his eyes and down his cheeks.

"You ain't goin' back on me, Mart?" he queried hopelessly.

Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the
message to the telegraph office.

"Hold on," Joe muttered thickly. "Lemme think."

He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin's arm
around him and supporting him, while he thought.

"Make that two laundrymen," he said abruptly. "Here, lemme fix
it."

"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.

"Same reason as you."

"But I'm going to sea. You can't do that."

"Nope," was the answer, "but I can hobo all right, all right."

Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-

"By God, I think you're right! Better a hobo than a beast of toil.
Why, man, you'll live. And that's more than you ever did before."

"I was in hospital, once," Joe corrected. "It was