I left her and started my search. If there was a job in the city I determined to get it. I went through block after block, store after store, hour after hour. I got mostly “Noes” but some answered pleasantly, taking my name and address. I kept going until one morning I stopped in front of a cigar store—a dead-looking place, no customers. A man was reading a paper spread out on the counter. I went in and put my question to him. When he stood up I saw he was very tall and very thin. He looked sick. I had never seen an eye like his. It attracted me strangely. I could not have described it then, but I can now. It was a larcenous eye. He was very nice, asking many questions. How old was I? Did I ever work before? Where? I handed him Cy’s letter. He read it and asked me more questions. I have never answered so many questions since, except in a police station. At last he quit, and snapping himself together like a man coming out of a trance, he rapped his knuckles on the counter. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, kid. You come down here at nine o’clock every morning, open this joint up, and stay here till one o’clock. Then I come on and you go off till six in the evening. At six you come on and stay till ten, and call it a day. You can go to work right now. The sooner the better. In a week you will know the prices of the different things as well as I do, and I can leave you by yourself. Your wages will be three dollars a week and all the cigars you can smoke.” “But I do not smoke.” “Well, that’s your bad luck, kid, not mine. What do you say? Want to chance the job?” I got right in behind the counter and he showed me the different cigars, cigarettes, and tobaccos, and told me their prices. In a week I knew all about the “store” and had learned to serve the few customers that came in, and to make change properly. I further learned that the store was but a “front” or blind for a poker game and dice games in the back room, and that I was a part of the “front.” My business was to sweep the place out in the morning, stand behind the counter in case any one wanted a cigar, and to keep an eye out for “new coppers on the beat” in the evening. The job was interesting. I soon came to know the poker players, crap shooters, and dice sharks who brought their victims into the back room to “clean” them. I often spent my afternoons in the back room watching the games and learning the life.