On this money, four dollars and a half, Graves lived for a week, meanwhile hunting another job. He could do nothing except manual labor, for he was not properly clothed for any clerical employment. He walked along the entire river front, seeking work on the wharves as a stevedore, but no one could work there who was not a member of the Longshoremen’s Union, and no one could be a member of the Longshoremen’s Union who did not work there; so this plan failed. He visited employment bureaus, but these demanded fees and deposits. Graves read the want advertisements in the newspapers, but none of these availed him; each prospective employer demanded references which Graves could not give.
The snow-storm brought him a prosperity as fleeting as the snow itself; he went into the residence district--where as yet he had not had the heart to go because of memories that haunted it--and cleaned the sidewalks of the well-to-do. After a day or so, the sidewalks of the well-to-do were all cleaned,--that is, the sidewalks of those who respected the laws sufficiently to have their sidewalks cleaned. Then the rain came, and Graves tramped the slushy streets. His prison-made shoes were as pervious to water as paper, of which substance, indeed, they were made; he contracted a cold, and his cough grew rapidly worse. He had no place to sleep. He spent a night in each of the two lodging-houses in the city, then he "flopped" on the floor of a police station. In this place he became infested with vermin, though this was no new experience to him after eleven months in the cells of the penitentiary. Meanwhile, he had little to eat. Once or twice, he visited hotel kitchens and the chefs gave him scraps from the table; then he did what for days he had been dreading--he tried to beg. After allowing twenty people to go by, he found the courage to hold out his hand to the twenty-first; the man passed without noticing him; a dozen others did likewise. Then a policeman saw him and arrested him on a charge of vagrancy. At the police station the officers, recognizing his prison clothes, held him for three days as a suspicious character. Then he was arraigned before Bostwick, who scowled and told him he would give him twenty-four hours in which to leave the city.