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Show wanted to see a birth certificate, and I won't be sixteen till November twentieth." Karl was talking fast in his eagerness to impress Jame. "So then I thought how you sneaked into a man's job before you were sixteen, and I tried First Sterling. They didn't say anything about a birth certificate, just told me to report today." "That's swell," Jame said. "Anyway, you look sixteen. You're darn near six feet tall. Keep growing for a couple years, and you'll be as big as me...if you put on about fifty pounds." Jame grinned and punched Karl's arm with his big fist. Same old Jame, Karl thought. Same, Jame -- that makes a rhyme. I could make up a song about that. "So you're not going back to school, then?" Jame asked as they started down the hill together. "Nope. What's the point of going to school, now that I have a man's job." The words filled him with pride and excitement all over again. He was going to be a working man. Not a schoolboy any longer. Of course, Karl could have quit school at fourteen, if his parents had let him, to take one of the safer "boy" jobs in the mill, but those jobs paid hardly anything. His best friend Andy Stulak had a "boy" job, and earned only five dollars for a seven-day week. The "man" jobs paid better, but because they were more dangerous, they were forbidden to anyone under sixteen. Jame remarked, "You sure picked a dumb day to start in the mill. Two holidays a year we're supposed to get off, Christmas and today, the Fourth of July. But Firth Sterling's got a big backlog |