n
charitable donations. Nor did he know that the Transcontinental was the
sole livelihood of the editor and the business manager, and that they
could wring their livelihood out of it only by moving to escape paying
rent and by never paying any bill they could evade. Nor could he have
guessed that the particular five dollars that belonged to him had been
appropriated by the business manager for the painting of his house in
Alameda, which painting he performed himself, on week-day afternoons,
because he could not afford to pay union wages and because the first scab
he had employed had had a ladder jerked out from under him and been sent
to the hospital with a broken collar-bone.

The ten dollars for which Martin had sold "Treasure Hunters" to the
Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been published,
as he had ascertained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no
word could he get from the editor. His letters were ignored. To satisfy
himself that they had been received, he registered several of them. It
was nothing less than robbery, he concluded--a cold-blooded steal; while
he starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of
which was the sole way of getting bread to eat.

Youth and Age was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his twenty-
one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business. With it went all
hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.

To cap the situation, "The Pot," which he looked upon as one of the best
things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting about
frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to The Billow, a society
weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to that
publication was that, having only to travel across the bay from Oakland,
a quick decision could be reached. Two weeks later he was overjoyed to
see, in the latest number on the news-stand, his story printed in full,
illustrated, and in the place of honor. He went home with leaping pulse,
wondering how much they would pay him for one of the best things he had
done. Also, the celerity with which it had been accepted and published
was a pleasant thought to him. That the editor had not informed him of
the acceptance made the surprise more complete. After waiting a week,
two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation conquered diffidence, and
he wrote to the editor of The Billow, suggesting that possibly through
some negligence of the busin