ll one's hands are lumps of bleeding flesh. Peer lived
through it all, thinking now and then, when he could think at all, how
the grand gentlefolk had driven him out to this life because he was
impertinent enough to exist. And when the fourteen weeks were past, and
the Lofoten boats stood into the fjord again on a mild spring day, it
was easy for Peer to reckon out his earnings, which were just nothing at
all. He had had to borrow money for his outfit and food, and he would be
lucky if his boy's share was enough to cover what he owed.

A few weeks later a boy stood by the yard gate of an engineering works
in the town just as the bell was ringing and the men came streaming out,
and asked for Klaus Brock.

"Hullo, Peer--that you? Been to Lofoten and made your fortune?"

The two boys stood a moment taking stock of one another: Klaus
grimy-faced and in working-clothes--Peer weather-beaten and tanned by
storm and spray.

The manager of the factory was Klaus's uncle, and the same afternoon his
nephew came into the office with a new hand wanting to be taken on as
apprentice. He had done some smithy work before, he said; and he was
taken on forthwith, at a wage of twopence an hour.

"And what's your name?"

"Peer--er"--the rest stuck in his throat.

"Holm," put in Klaus.

"Peer Holm? Very well, that'll do."

The two boys went out with a feeling of having done something rather
daring. And anyway, if trouble should come along, there would be two of
them now to tackle it.

Chapter V

In a narrow alley off Sea Street lived Gorseth the job-master, with a
household consisting of a lean and skinny wife, two half-starved horses,
and a few ramshackle flies and sledges. The job-master himself was a
hulking toper with red nose and beery-yellow eyes, who spent his nights
in drinking and got home in the small hours of the morning when his wife
was just about getting up. All through the morning she went about the
place scolding and storming at him for a drunken ne'er-do-well, while
Gorseth himself lay comfortably snoring.

When Peer arrived on the scene with his box on his shoulder, Gorseth was
on his knees in the yard, greasing a pair of leather carriage-aprons,
while his wife, sunken-lipped and fierce-eyed, stood in the kitchen
doorway, abusing him for a profligate, a swine, and the scum of the
earth. Gorseth lay there on all-fours, with the sun shining on his bald
head, smearing on the grease; but every now and then h