were lying in
plain sight and were valuable enough to tempt a weak-willed person. I
sounded an alarm and stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the room
until Mrs. Hubbard returned and counted her valuables.

She found them all there and thanked me for guarding them. She said
it was by an oversight that she had gone away without locking up her
treasures. She asked me how she should reward me. I told her that I
was already rewarded, for I had guarded her jewels in order to protect
myself from being suspected of their theft and so kangarooed into a
slave-camp.

But in spite of all my precautions, I landed there after all. The gang
down at the flop house was dazzled by an employment agent, who offered
to ship them out into the rice country to work on the levee for a dollar
a day and cakes. The men were wild for a square meal and the feel of a
dollar in their jeans. So they all shipped out to the river levee and I
went along with the gang.

As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps
the desperate iron workers were singing:

"We'll work a hundred days,
And we'll get a hundred dollars,
And then go North,
And all be rich and happy!"

When we reached the dyke-building camp I learned how ignorant I really
was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and
familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten
years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging
an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water
carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a
Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of
the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and
make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet
he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't
do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was
there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule
team and a scraper. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and
there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.

I put the lines over my head, said "Go 'long" as I had heard other
muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the scraper, I scooped up a
slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But
getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest pa