“H-h-how much—?” he finally croaked, feeling that he must. Business.
“I’ll give you $80 a month to begin with,” said the manager with a touch of magnificence. “If you make good, I’ll give you a hundred.”
“And my keep?” whispered Eugene.
“Sure!” said the manager. “That’s thrown in.”
Eugene reeled away with his valise, and with a head full of exploding rockets.
These months, although filled with terror and hunger, must be passed in rapid summary with bare mention of the men and actions that a lost boy knew. They belong to a story of escape and wandering—valuable here to indicate the initiation to the voyage this life will make. They are a prelude to exile, and into their nightmare chaos no other purpose may be read than the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.
Eugene worked upon the Flying Field for a month. Three times a day he rode around the field to check the numbers of two dozen gangs who were engaged in the work of grading, levelling, blasting from the spongy earth the ragged stumps of trees and filling interminably, ceaselessly, like the weary and fruitless labor of a nightmare, the marshy earth-craters, which drank their shovelled toil without end. The gangs were of all races and conditions: Portugee niggers, ebony-black, faithful and childlike, who welcomed him with great toothy grins, each pointing to his big white pin, on which was printed his number, crying out in strange outlandish voices, “feefety-nine, nine-net-ty seex,” and so on; Bowery bums, in greasy serge and battered derbies, toying distastefully with pick-handles that shredded their dirty uncalloused palms—their hard evil faces, with their smudge of beard, were like things corrupt, green-yellow, that grow under barrels. And there were also drawling fishermen from the Virginia coast, huge gorilla niggers from Georgia and the lower South, Italians, Swedes, Irishmen—part of the huge compost of America.
He came to know them and their overseers—tough reckless men, gray— haired and lustful, full of swift action and coarse humor.
