"Bridget!" he shouted again. "Bridget Mahoney's Jim's here!"
There was a pause, the captain not seeming to understand the situation, but a cheer went up from the deportation officials on board and from some of the tender's crew who knew; and the cry ran along the decks:
[Illustration: WHERE THE WORKERS COME FROM. Family of German immigrants, passing through Ellis Island on their way to the Middle West. (_Courtesy of U.S. Immigration Station, Ellis Island._)]
Leaving New York the next day after his visit to the Immigration Station on Ellis Island, Hamilton stayed only a few hours in Washington to receive final instructions before proceeding to the southwestern part of Kentucky where his work as a population census-taker was to begin.
At the appointed place he found the supervisor awaiting him.
"I suppose you know," remarked his brother's friend, shaking hands, "that I've given you a fairly well scattered district to cover. You said you wanted to get a chance to see Kentucky as it really is, and this, together with your mountain experience, ought to give you variety enough."
"They told me in Washington that it was largely a negro district?" the boy said questioningly.
"It is about as much of a black district as any in Kentucky," was the reply, "but it isn't solid black by any means. Therein lies its interest. The negroes are of all varieties, from old-time slaves who have never left the plantation on which they were piccaninnies during the war, to progressive negroes owning fair-sized tracts of land, most of them still living in the one-room shacks that you see all over the country, but a few having bought what used to be the 'big house' in antebellum days."
"That's just exactly what I was after," Hamilton said with delight. "How do I cover it, sir? In the saddle?"
"You can drive, if you want to," the supervisor replied, "and if it wasn't for the agricultural schedules, I think it would be easier to do the work from a buggy. But with the field work to consider, and in a district as scattered as yours is, the saddle might work out better."
"I had been thinking of that," Hamilton said, "if a farmer was on the other side of a plowed patch, I'd have no way of getting to him in a buggy except by tying the horse and walking, while in the saddle I could easily take short cuts. And I imagine, in a countryside such as you say this is, I'll probably need to see every one on the place in order to get anything like accurate figures."