Next to the mules, his torment was the "trapper-boys," and other
youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so
they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job--there seemed to their
minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending
mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and
Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed
little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of
English curse words and obscenities; the filthiness which their minds
had spawned was incredible to one born and raised in the sunlight. They
alleged obscenities of their mothers and their grandmothers; also of the
Virgin Mary, the one mythological character they had heard of. Poor
little creatures of the dark, their souls grimed and smutted even more
quickly and irrevocably than their faces!

Hal had been advised by his boss to inquire for board at "Reminitsky's."
He came up in the last car, at twilight, and was directed to a dimly
lighted building of corrugated iron, where upon inquiry he was met by a
stout Russian, who told him he could be taken care of for twenty-seven
dollars a month, this including a cot in a room with eight other single
men. After deducting a dollar and a half a month for his saloon-keepers,
fifty cents for the company clergyman and a dollar for the company
doctor, fifty cents a month for wash-house privileges and fifty cents
for a sick and accident benefit fund, he had fourteen dollars a month
with which to clothe himself, to found a family, to provide himself with
beer and tobacco, and to patronise the libraries and colleges endowed by
the philanthropic owners of coal mines.

Supper was nearly over at Reminitsky's when he arrived; the floor looked
like the scene of a cannibal picnic, and what food was left was cold. It