et on the street took
me into a store and bought me a new pair of shoes. I hid them
successfully for a week. One day he caught me with them on--and pawned
them.

"The old farmer the charity folks traded me to was a Lutheran. Every
morning after breakfast he read prayers. He never missed a day. Then
he'd send me out with one of his sons,--a grown-up man of
twenty-two,--and if I didn't do exactly as much work as the son I went
hungry until I got it done if it took half the night. He also had a
willow sapling he relied upon when hunger didn't prove effective. He'd
pray before he used that too,--pray with one hand gripping my neckband so
I couldn't get away. I earned a dollar a day--one single solitary
dollar--when I was logging oak in the Ozarks. Day after day when we were
on the haul I used to strap myself fast to the load to keep from going to
sleep and rolling off under the wheels. I got so dead tired that I fell
asleep walking, when I did that to keep awake. You won't believe it, but
it's true. I've done it more than once.

"I was sick one day in the coal mine, deathly sick. The air at times was
awful. I laid down just outside the car track. I thought I was going to
die and felt distinctly pleased at the prospect. Some one reported me to
the superintendent. He evidently knew the symptoms, for he came with a
pail of water and soaked me where I lay, marked time, and went away. I
laid there for three hours in a puddle of water and soft coal grime;
then I went back to work. I know it was three hours because my time check
was docked exactly that much.

"When I was going to night school in Denver the day clerk, who'd got me
the place, took half my tips, the only pay I received, to permit me to
hold the place. It was the rule, I discovered, the under-dog penalty.

"I said I never struck anything prospecting. I did. I struck a silver
lead down in Arizona. While I was proving it a couple of other
prospectors came along, dead broke--and out of provisions. I divided food
with them, of course--it's the unwritten law--and they camped for the
night. We had supper together. That was the last I knew. When I came to
it was thirty-six hours later and I was a hundred miles away in a cheap
hotel--without even my bill paid in advance. The record showed that claim
was filed on the day I disappeared. The mine is paying a hundred dollars
a day now. I never saw those two prospectors again. The present owner
bought of them square. I don't h