He found an unexpected state of affairs—­for the girl’s father had died, and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis’ heart leaped as he realized that now the prize was within his reach.  There was Elzbieta Lukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona’s stepmother, and there were her six children, of all ages.  There was also her brother Jonas, a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm.  They were people of great consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the woods; Ona knew how to read, and knew many other things that he did not know, and now the farm had been sold, and the whole family was adrift—­all they owned in the world being about seven hundred rubles which is half as many dollars.  They would have had three times that, but it had gone to court, and the judge had decided against them, and it had cost the balance to get him to change his decision.

Ona might have married and left them, but 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.