hanging over him
his debt to Arthur and the support of his grandmother. The first did not
particularly disturb him, for he knew that Arthur would wait any length
of time, while the latter seemed but a trifle to a strong, robust young
man. Mrs. Crawford was naturally very economical, and could make one
dollar go further than most people could two; so that very little
sufficed for their daily wants when Jerrie was away.

'I must earn money somehow,' Harold thought, 'and must seek work where I
can do the best, even if it is from Peterkin.'

So, swallowing his pride, he went to Peterkin's office and asked for
work. Once before, when a boy of eighteen, and sorely pressed, he had
done the same thing, and met with a rebuff from the foreman, who said to
him gruffly:

'No, sir; we don't want no more boys; leastwise, gentlemen boys. We've
had enough of 'em. Try t'other furnace. Mr. Warner is allus takin' all
kinds of trash, out of pity, and if he says "No," go to his wife; she'll
get you in.'

But the Warner factory, where Harold had once worked, was full of boys,
whom the kind-hearted employer, or his wife, or both, had taken in, and
there was no place for Harold. So he waited awhile until Jerrie needed a
new dress and his grandmother a bonnet, and then he tried Peterkin
again, and this time with success.

'Yes, take him,' Peterkin said to his foreman, 'take him, and put him to
the emery wheel; that's the place for such upstarts; that'll take the
starch out of him double quick. He's a bad egg, he is, and proud as
Lucifer. I don't suppose he'd touch my Bill or my Ann'Lizy with a
ten-foot pole. Put him to the wheel. Bad egg! bad egg!'

For some moat unaccountable reason, old Peterkin had a bitter prejudice
against the boy, on whose account he had once been turned from the Tracy
house; and though he had forgiven the Tracys, and would now have voted
for Frank for Congressman if he had the chance, he still cherished his
animosity against Harold, designating him as an upstart and a bad egg,
who was to be put to the wheel. So Harold was 'put to the wheel' until
he got a bit of steel in his eye, and his hands were blistered. But he
did not mind the latter so much, because Jerrie cried over them at night
and kissed them in the morning, and bathed them in cosmoline, and called
Peterkin a mean old thing, and offered to go herself to the wheel.

But to this Harold only laughed. He could stand it, he said, and a
dollar a day was not