One was a big, husky chap with rugged, honest features and the true brown eyes of a Collie. His story interested me greatly.
Born among collieries, he was driven to work as a breaker boy at a very early age by the wretched poverty of his parents. After several years of deadening toil at a time when he should have been in school, he drifted away to join the great army of migratory workers. He worked on a threshing machine while the harvest was in progress, and at its close what little money he had been able to save was consumed while searching for another job. Perhaps he got work with pick and shovel in some construction gang, but the contractor’s system of low wages, high board bills, charges for physician’s care—which most do not receive—and the like, kept him destitute. He called at an employment office, where he paid two dollars for a job, was worked just long enough to pay for transportation, board and monthly fees, then discharged without wages, his employer and the agent dividing up the original fee. From coast to coast he wandered, sweating in the dust and heat of summer through long hours of racking labor, in order to escape starvation in the idle months of winter.
His eyes grew dark and wistful as he shyly confessed his one love affair. He had secured employment in a little lumber mill and made such a good impression on the boss, who was also the owner, that he was taken to board in his own home. Here the poor fellow got his first idea of what home life might mean. He fell in love with the daughter of the house, who seemed to reciprocate, but before they could enter into any formal engagement the lumber trust put the mill out of business, ruining the owner, who was forced to leave that part of the country.
Try as he would, the young man could secure no steady employment and marriage without such foundation was out of the question.
“I saw enough of getting married on nothing when I was a boy,” he concluded. “Wages are set for single men, I reckon. And after a bit a fellow can’t earn a living for his family, so the wife and kiddies have to rustle out and work. Easy enough for them to get a job,” he added bitterly. “Many a time I’ve seen kids doing work that I’d been glad to get. But they can beat a man all out at working cheap. They got to work cheap or starve. I may be a good-for-nothing bundle stiff, but I’ve never got so low as to live off the work of little children.”