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 of something more in him, just a glimmering bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the hundred and forty miles.
But this was not rest.
It was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life.
At the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until Monday morning.
Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles, obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of still greater exertion.
At the end of three months he went down a third time to the village with Joe.
He forgot, and lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself-not by the drink, but by the work.
The drink was an effect, not a cause.
It followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day.
Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation.
The whiskey was wise.
It told secrets on itself.
He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.
"A telegram, Joe," he said. "Read it."
Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer.
But what he read seemed to sober him.
He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes and down his cheeks.
"You ain’t goin’ back on me, Mart?" he queried hopelessly.
Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the message to the telegraph office.
"Hold on," Joe muttered thickly. "Lemme think."
He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin’s arm around him and supporting him, while he thought.
"Make that two laundrymen," he said abruptly. "Here, lemme fix it."
"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.
"Same reason as you."
"But I’m going to sea.
You can’t do that."
"Nope," was the answer, "but I can hobo all right, all right."
Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-
"By God, I think you’re right!