inking three cups of coffee for breakfast, he now drank one.
Saxon boiled this coffee an atrocious length of time, and she paid
twenty cents a pound for it.

The blight of hard times was on all the neighborhood. The families
not involved in one strike were touched by some other strike or by the
cessation of work in some dependent trade. Many single young men who
were lodgers had drifted away, thus increasing the house rent of the
families which had sheltered them.

"Gott!" said the butcher to Saxon. "We working class all suffer
together. My wife she cannot get her teeth fixed now. Pretty soon I go
smash broke maybe."

Once, when Billy was preparing to pawn his watch, Saxon suggested his
borrowing the money from Billy Murphy.

"I was plannin' that," Billy answered, "only I can't now. I didn't tell
you what happened Tuesday night at the Sporting Life Club. You remember
that squarehead Champion of the United States Navy? Bill was matched
with him, an' it was sure easy money. Bill had 'm goin' south by the
end of the sixth round, an' at the seventh went in to finish 'm. And
then--just his luck, for his trade's idle now--he snaps his right
forearm. Of course the squarehead comes back at 'm on the jump, an' it's
good night for Bill. Gee! Us Mohegans are gettin' our bad luck handed to
us in chunks these days."

"Don't!" Saxon cried, shuddering involuntarily.

"What?" Billy asked with open mouth of surprise.

"Don't say that word again. Bert was always saying it."

"Oh, Mohegans. All right, I won't. You ain't superstitions, are you?"

"No; but just the same there's too much truth in the word for me to
like it. Sometimes it seems as though he was right. Times have changed.
They've changed even since I was a little girl. We crossed the plains
and opened up this country, and now we're losing even the chance to work
for a living in it. And it's not my fault, it's not your fault. We've
got to live well or bad just by luck, it seems. There's no other way to
explain it."

"It beats me," Billy concurred. "Look at the way I worked last year.
Never missed a day. I'd want to never miss a day this year, an' here
I haven't done a tap for weeks an' weeks an' weeks. Say! Who runs this
country anyway?"

Saxon had stopped the morning paper, but frequently Maggie Donahue's
boy, who served a Tribune route, tossed an "extra" on her steps. From
its editorials Saxon gleaned that organized labor was trying to run the
country and that it