be dead easy. An' nothin' to do. Just think
of it, nothin' to do. I was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an' it
was beautiful. I wish I'd get sick again."

The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra "fancy starch" poured
in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They fought late each
night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even got in a
half hour's work before breakfast. Martin no longer took his cold baths.
Every moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd
of moments, herding them carefully, never losing one, counting them over
like a miser counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish
machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as once
having been one Martin Eden, a man.

But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The house
of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its shadowy
caretaker. He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, and
this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream? Sometimes, in
the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the heavy irons back and forth
over the white garments, it came to him that it was a dream. In a short
while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he would awake, in his
little room with the ink-stained table, and take up his writing where he
had left off the day before. Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the
awakening would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down
out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the
tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind blowing
through his flesh.

Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o'clock.

"Guess I'll go down an' get a glass of beer," Joe said, in the queer,
monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.

Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled his
wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe was
halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low over the
handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic strength,
his face set for seventy miles of road and grade and dust. He slept in
Oakland that night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles back. And on
Monday morning, weary, he began the new week's work, but he had kept
sober.

A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a
machine, with just a spark