nine o’clock
`` John told me last summer when I was home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules , '' he would add , looking at the youth challengingly . The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil . Living amid the roar and bustle of Chicago 's vast west side , it still turned with hungry heart toward the place of corn and of steers , and wished that work for Jake , its mainstay , could be found in that paradise . Jake Pergrin , a bald-headed man with a paunch , stubby iron-grey moustache , and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn , worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night , going to bed at nine o'clock , and until that hour wandering , whistling , from room to room through the house , in a pair of worn carpet slippers , or sitting in his room practising on a violin . On Saturday evening , the habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him , he came home with his pay in his pocket , settled with the two sisters for the week 's living , sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed , and then disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town . Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared , with empty pockets , unsteady step , blood-shot eyes , and a noisy attempt at self-possessed unconcern , to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability . The man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall .