That night he walked the streets until the morning, wondering what now he was to do to fight the wolf away.  The morning of the next day towards ten o’clock he was on Kearney Street, still walking, still tramping the streets, since there was nothing else for him to do.  By and by he paused on a corner near a music store, finding a momentary amusement in watching two or three men loading a piano upon a dray.  Already half its weight was supported by the dray’s backboard.  One of the men, a big mulatto, almost hidden under the mass of glistening rosewood, was guiding its course, while the other two heaved and tugged in the rear.  Something in the street frightened the horses and they shied abruptly.  The end of the piano was twitched sharply from the backboard.  There was a cry, the mulatto staggered and fell with the falling piano, and its weight dropped squarely upon his thigh, which broke with a resounding crack.

An hour later McTeague had found his job.  The music store engaged him as handler at six dollars a week.  McTeague’s enormous strength, useless all his life, stood him in good stead at last.

He slept in a tiny back room opening from the storeroom of the music store.  He was in some sense a watchman as well as handler, and went the rounds of the store twice every night.  His room was a box of a place that reeked with odors of stale tobacco smoke.  The former occupant had papered the walls with newspapers and had pasted up figures cut out from the posters of some Kiralfy ballet, very gaudy.  By the one window, chittering all day in its little gilt prison, hung the canary bird, a tiny atom of life that McTeague still clung to with a strange obstinacy.

McTeague drank a good deal of whiskey in these days, but the only effect it had upon him was to increase the viciousness and bad temper that had developed in him since the beginning of his misfortunes.  He terrorized his fellow-handlers, powerful men though they were.  For a gruff word, for an awkward movement in lading the pianos, for a surly look or a muttered oath, the dentist’s elbow would crook and his hand contract to a mallet-like fist.  As often as not the blow followed, colossal in its force, swift as the leap of the piston from its cylinder.

His hatred of Trina increased from day to day.  He’d make her dance yet.  Wait only till he got his hands upon her.  She’d let him starve, would she?  She’d turn him out of doors while she hid her five thousand dollars in the bottom of her trunk.  Aha, he would see about that some day.  She couldn’t make small of him.  Ah, no.  She’d dance all right—­all right.  McTeague was not an imaginative man by nature, but he would lie awake nights, his clumsy wits galloping and frisking under the lash of the alcohol, and fancy himself thrashing his wife, till a sudden frenzy of rage would overcome him, and he would shake all over, rolling upon the bed and biting the mattress.

On a certain day, about a week after Christmas of that year, McTeague was on one of the top floors of the music store, where the second-hand instruments were kept, helping to move about and rearrange some old pianos.  As he passed by one of the counters he paused abruptly, his eye caught by an object that was strangely familiar.