ut she would not, for she loved
Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America,
where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and
the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless--they would
live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country
where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis
figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were
where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and
marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor,
a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did
not have to pay out his money to rascally officials--he might do as he
pleased, and count himself as good as any other man. So America was a
place of which lovers and young people dreamed. If one could only manage
to get the price of a passage, he could count his troubles at an end.

It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and
meantime Jurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and
tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work
upon a railroad in Smolensk. This was a fearful experience, with filth
and bad food and cruelty and overwork; but Jurgis stood it and came out
in fine trim, and with eighty rubles sewed up in his coat. He did not
drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona; and for the
rest, he was a quiet, steady man, who did what he was told to, did not
lose his temper often, and when he did lose it made the offender anxious
that he should not lose it again. When they paid him off he dodged the
company gamblers and dramshops, and so they tried to kill him; but he
escaped, and tramped it home, working at odd jobs, and sleeping always
with one eye open.

So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last
moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona's.
Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer
of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that
it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up and
nearly murdered the man, and then come away.

There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children--and
Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time on the passage;
there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got
them into a trap with some offic