and stabbed him like a knife.  He sat perfectly motionless, silent, but gripping his hands tightly, while a storm gathered in his bosom and a flood heaped itself up behind his eyes.  And in the end he could bear it no more, but buried his face in his hands and burst into tears, to the alarm and amazement of his hosts.  Between the shame of this and his woe Jurgis could not stand it, and got up and rushed out into the rain.

He went on and on down the road, finally coming to a black woods, where he hid and wept as if his heart would break.  Ah, what agony was that, what despair, when the tomb of memory was rent open and the ghosts of his old life came forth to scourge him!  What terror to see what he had been and now could never be—­to see Ona and his child and his own dead self stretching out their arms to him, calling to him across a bottomless abyss—­and to know that they were gone from him forever, and he writhing and suffocating in the mire of his own vileness!

Chapter 23

Early in the fall Jurgis set out for Chicago again.  All the joy went out of tramping as soon as a man could not keep warm in the hay; and, like many thousands of others, he deluded himself with the hope that by coming early he could avoid the rush.  He brought fifteen dollars with him, hidden away in one of his shoes, a sum which had been saved from the saloon-keepers, not so much by his conscience, as by the fear which filled him at the thought of being out of work in the city in the winter time.

He traveled upon the railroad with several other men, hiding in freight cars at night, and liable to be thrown off at any time, regardless of the speed of the train.  When he reached the city he left the rest, for he had money and they did not, and he meant to save himself in this fight.  He would bring to it all the skill that practice had brought him, and he would stand, whoever fell.  On fair nights he would sleep in the park or on a truck or an empty barrel or box, and when it was rainy or cold he would stow himself upon a shelf in a ten-cent lodginghouse, or pay three cents for the privileges of a “squatter” in a tenement hallway.  He would eat at free lunches, five cents a meal, and never a cent more—­so he might keep alive for two months and more, and in that time he would surely find a job.  He would have to bid farewell to his summer cleanliness, of course, for he would come out of the first night’s lodging with his clothes alive with vermin.  There was no place in the city where he could wash even his face, unless he went down to the lake front—­and there it would soon be all ice.

First he went to the steel mill and the harvester works, and found that his places there had been filled long ago.  He was careful to keep away from the stockyards—­he was a single man now, he told himself, and he meant to stay one, to have his wages for his own when he got a job.  He began the long, weary round of factories and warehouses, tramping all day, from one end of the city to the other, finding everywhere from ten to a hundred men ahead of him.  He watched the newspapers, too—­but no longer was he to be taken in by smooth-spoken agents.  He had been told of all those tricks while “on the road.”