The Call of the Wild: Klondike Cannibals, Vol. 2 Read Online Free

crazy Dutch alcoholic, as well as carrying ice from a wagon on Saturday afternoons.
    When he turned fourteen he landed a job at Hickmott’s cannery, often working from six in the morning until nearly midnight. The thing was, he could slave away on the machines for fourteen hours a day and still have courage and strength aplenty to volunteer for the hard jobs. He often said that he worked longer hours than any workhorse or donkey in the city, and it was true.
    But all his hard work didn’t seem to get him anywhere. His mother took his earnings to help run the household, and still the family was just scraping by, just one accident or illness away from ruin and homelessness.
    When he was younger, part of him harbo ured fantasies of landing a humble job on the floor of some factory or office, and working his way up through the ranks, as the plucky young heroes did in rags-to-riches stories.
    In America, any man coul d raise himself up through hard work and clean living and become President. Or so the novels of Horatio Alger said.
    Exc ept that, by-and-large, Jack knew that these stories did little but torture the poor, tricking them into working ever harder for less. The harsh truth of things was that there were too many men looking for work, too few jobs, and that the rich had the police, the army, and the government on their side.
    It was necessary to keep people poor and desperate so that the dirtiest and hardest jobs would get done cheap. So that men with starched collars could lead easy lives.
    Jack had learned this lesson early. When he was sixteen he took a job shovelling coal at the San Leandro and Hayward’s Electric Railway power plant. He had approached the superintendent with an audacious plan: electricity was the New Thing, the key to the Modern Age. Everyone could see that. It was obvious that a smart young man like Jack could bet on a solid career in it. And so he’d asked for a job with the possibility of promotion. He’d like to be an electrician or even an engineer someday, he said.
    The su perintendent of the power plant smiled and said he needed more young men with Jack’s resolve and ambition. But, naturally, Jack would need to start at the bottom and work his way up. Jack was so taken in by the fantasy of promotion and advancement that he accepted thirty dollars a month—ten dollars less than he’d earned at the cannery—to shovel coal for twelve hours a day, seven days a week.
    This was his big chance to prove himself. Within two days the problems with his wrists started, and he’d taken to wearing thick leather splints to bolster them, even though they left terrible oozing blisters on his forearms.
    For a couple of weeks, Jack gave it his all.
    Finally a fireman at the plant had the courage to tell Jack he was doing the work of two men, who, before he’d arrived, had been paid forty dollars a month each for shovelling the coal Jack was now throwing for thirty.
    Jack was shocked. He was saving his bosses fifty dollars a month, and for what? His wrists had been repeatedly sprained from the crazy amount of shovelling he was doing everyday, to the point where he was worried about permanent disability. Worse yet, the fireman told Jack that one of the men he’d replaced, unable to support his wife and daughters, had hung himself.
    This set Jack thinking. W hat sort of lives did his bosses lead in exchange for all this misery? Were they thankful for their lot in life? For the cosmic luck that had landed them on top of the human scrapheap? No. They were the smallest men Jack had ever met, cold in their hearts, unlovable—even to themselves.
    They never felt the riches they owned, only the lack of those they had yet to acquire. It was for men like this that ninety-five percent of the human race was enslaved, doomed to life in a cage.
    Jack realized t hey would use him up like they had used up the men who had shovelled before him. Eventually his strength would falter, or he would have an accident, and