It was the holiday rush that was over, the girls said in answer to Marija’s inquiries; after that there was always a slack.  Sometimes the factory would start up on half time after a while, but there was no telling—­it had been known to stay closed until way into the summer.  The prospects were bad at present, for truckmen who worked in the storerooms said that these were piled up to the ceilings, so that the firm could not have found room for another week’s output of cans.  And they had turned off three-quarters of these men, which was a still worse sign, since it meant that there were no orders to be filled.  It was all a swindle, can-painting, said the girls—­you were crazy with delight because you were making twelve or fourteen dollars a week, and saving half of it; but you had to spend it all keeping alive while you were out, and so your pay was really only half what you thought.

Marija came home, and because she was a person who could not rest without danger of explosion, they first had a great house cleaning, and then she set out to search Packingtown for a job to fill up the gap.  As nearly all the canning establishments were shut down, and all the girls hunting work, it will be readily understood that Marija did not find any.  Then she took to trying the stores and saloons, and when this failed she even traveled over into the far-distant regions near the lake front, where lived the rich people in great palaces, and begged there for some sort of work that could be done by a person who did not know English.

The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness.  The big packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours.  They had always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at seven o’clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come over the chutes.  That would often be ten or eleven o’clock, which was bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack season, they would perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon.  And so they would have to loaf around, in a place where the thermometer might be twenty degrees below zero!  At first one would see them running about, or skylarking with each other, trying to keep warm; but before the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted, and, when the cattle finally came, so near frozen that to move was an agony.  And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the merciless “speeding-up” would begin!