ry, Jurgis
could not stay angry. The poor fellow looked like a homeless ghost, with
his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling into his eyes;
he was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his appearance. His
muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft and flabby. He
had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him with delicacies.
It was better, he said, that he should not eat, it was a saving. About
the end of March he had got hold of Ona's bankbook, and learned that
there was only three dollars left to them in the world.

But perhaps the worst of the consequences of this long siege was that
they lost another member of their family; Brother Jonas disappeared. One
Saturday night he did not come home, and thereafter all their efforts to
get trace of him were futile. It was said by the boss at Durham's that
he had gotten his week's money and left there. That might not be true,
of course, for sometimes they would say that when a man had been killed;
it was the easiest way out of it for all concerned. When, for instance,
a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into
pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there was no use letting the
fact out and making his family unhappy. More probable, however, was
the theory that Jonas had deserted them, and gone on the road, seeking
happiness. He had been discontented for a long time, and not without
some cause. He paid good board, and was yet obliged to live in a family
where nobody had enough to eat. And Marija would keep giving them all
her money, and of course he could not but feel that he was called upon
to do the same. Then there were crying brats, and all sorts of misery;
a man would have had to be a good deal of a hero to stand it all without
grumbling, and Jonas was not in the least a hero--he was simply a
weatherbeaten old fellow who liked to have a good supper and sit in the
corner by the fire and smoke his pipe in peace before he went to bed.
Here there was not room by the fire, and through the winter the kitchen
had seldom been warm enough for comfort. So, with the springtime, what
was more likely than that the wild idea of escaping had come to him?
Two years he had been yoked like a horse to a half-ton truck in Durham's
dark cellars, with never a rest, save on Sundays and four holidays in
the year, and with never a word of thanks--only kicks and blows and
curses, such as no decent dog would have stood. And now