That day they ate nothing, but in the evening they marvelously succeeded in smuggling themselves on a steamer bound for New Orleans, and in the prospect of getting away they forgot that they were hungry. One of the crew, with whom they struck up an acquaintance on the dock, seemed impressed by the sincerity with which they swore they would pay him if he would make it possible for them to return to where they could once more work. He agreed to help them conditionally; that is, he would get them on board and stow them away, if he could do it without too much risk to himself. The attendant conditions had to be just right; sometimes it was easy enough and sometimes it couldn’t be done at all. In their case the right conditions were unexpectedly furnished in the fraction of a second that it takes a cable to snap and drop a large piece of locomotive from the main deck on a dozen barrels of apples in the hold below. In the uproar that followed and continued for five or six minutes, the only cool and competent person was the new friend of Hayward and Lansing. He had been waiting for something of the kind to happen, and he took instant advantage of it. While everyone else was screaming Spanish oaths and peering into the hatchway at the ruins, he hustled the two on board and hid them. An hour and a half later, Hayward, dazed and suffocated, was dragged out by the feet and kicked down the gang plank. Lansing did not reappear. From the dock, Hayward watched the vessel become first a black speck and then a suggestion of low-lying smoke in the dusk. He was all at once horribly alone and lonely, but it did not occur to him to feel resentful. Lansing’s luck had been good; his own had been bad. That was all there was to it. He was glad someone had been lucky. That night he went back to the lodging house and slept in the bed--it was the last bed he ever slept in--and as he had no money, he in the morning gave the _patron_ his razor. Then began for him an existence, the absolute hopelessness of which appalled and crushed him. At first a ship to New York had seemed to him the only solution of his predicament; then the idea of a ship to anywhere had become a vision of paradise; now he saw that ships were an impossibility. As the season advanced the officers became more and more vigilant. A shabby, unshaven young man could not go within speaking distance of a ship. He made the rounds of the hotels and asked for work--any kind of work--but there was none. He tried to get employment as a laborer on the dock, but the foreman, who spoke English, laughed and asked him why he wished to commit suicide.