"Of course I never went around with him," said the clerk, in a deposition; "a porter that I had was the party that went around with him in the evening. I would hear what was going on, and I could judge about the size of Al's head when he came around in the morning."
With all Albert's faults he kept one dignity to the end which makes him tower above his seducers--the dignity of the laborer. A life's discipline in daily toil had made his whole fibre too honest to enjoy idleness, even at the rate of $1500 a year. He was free to come and go amid the gaudy joys of a great city, as irresponsible under the assumed name given him as if he wore the ring of Gyges. He had money for the asking, and boon companions. But the habit of a lifetime of honest, hard manual work was too deeply ingrained into the very substance of his nature for him to become a cheap American Faust, revelling in a pinchbeck paradise. This simple son of poverty had all his life handled only real things, and had at every point had the mind's native wantonness and riot checked by the hard surface which had calloused his hands, and the outer air which had cooled him as he worked. His were dreams of honest rest earned by honest work, and of family joys. The self-indulgence that was revealed by the "size of his head in the morning" was an animal exuberance that, as the result showed, did but stain the "rose-mesh of his flesh," and went no deeper. Albert could not stand the idleness of his Boston life. He went back to Rochester.
"What brings you here?" said his employer. "Go back."
After hanging around the office in Boston a few weeks longer, the workman's nature reasserted itself again. He went back again to Rochester. "I want something to do." "We have not got anything for you to do just now," he was told. "You are all right."[480]
Months of idleness were interrupted only by odd jobs, like superintending the digging of a ditch or the sinking of a salt-well. Time and again, though he was drawing his pay of $125 a month, he went, as he told the story in court, to repeat the plea for "something to do." Finally, the elder of the managers, who was in California, sent for him. He was to be made "an independent man," the new promise ran, but really, as the sequel showed, was, if possible, to be kept out of the way of too inquisitive juries and prosecuting attorneys. The wife, treated as a mere pawn in the game, protested vehemently. "I went down to the Vacuum Oil Company's office, and asked C. to give Al something else to do. I didn't want him to go to California. He said that there was not anything that he knew that he could do."