, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one
more misery for the rest of their days.

Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where he
worked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breath all
day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man's
cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when it hardly ever
stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place. Then, too, a
still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked in a place where
his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not long before they had
eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to break out on his feet,
and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his blood was bad, or
there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it,
and learned that it was a regular thing--it was the saltpeter. Every one
felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for
that sort of work. The sores would never heal--in the end his toes would
drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would not quit; he saw the
suffering of his family, and he remembered what it had cost him to get
a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and coughing,
until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap, like the
One-Horse Shay. They carried him to a dry place and laid him on the
floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor old man
was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the end, he
never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and cough, day
and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a time when there
was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke through--which
was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one night he had
a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his mouth. The
family, wild with terror, sent for a doctor, and paid half a dollar to
be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the doctor did not
say this so that the old man could hear, for he was still clinging to
the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be better, and could go
back to his job. The company had sent word to him that they would keep
it for him--or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the men to come one
Sunday afternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas continued to believe
it, while three more hemorrhages came; and then at last one morning they
found him stiff and cold. Things were no