Harding had given
him, her son felt insulted. But Mickey figured a day on the basis of what
he had earned, what he had expended, what he must save to be ready when
the great surgeon came, and prepared exactly as he would have done for
himself and Peaches. On reaching the tenement and climbing until his legs
ached, Junior faced stifling heat, but Mickey opened the window and
started a draft by setting the door wide. While they ate supper, Mickey
talked unceasingly, but Junior was sulkily silent. He tried the fire-
escape, but one glance from the rickety affair, hung a mile above the
ground it seemed to him, was enough, so he climbed back in the window and
tossed on the bed.
Junior did his first real thinking that night. He was ravenous before
morning and aghast at what he was offered for breakfast. He was eager to
find work and he knew for what his first day's wage would go. In justice
to his own sense of honour and in justice to Junior, mere common fairness,
such as he would have wanted in like case, for the first few days Mickey
honestly and unceasingly hunted employment.
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