.dt A Day With a Tramp, By Walter A. Wyckoff--A\
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A DAY WITH A TRAMP
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<xxl>A DAY WITH A
TRAMP</xxl>

<xl>AND OTHER DAYS</xl>


BY

<l>WALTER A. WYCKOFF</l>

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF “THE WORKERS”


<l>NEW YORK</l>
<xl>CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</xl>
1901
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<sc>Copyright, 1901, by</sc>
<l>CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</l>

<sc>Published September, 1901</sc>


<s>TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK</s>
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PREFACE
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The following narratives, like those published
in the series of  “The Workers,” East
and West, are drawn from notes taken during
an expedition made ten years ago. In the
summer of 1891 I began an experiment of
earning my living as a day laborer and continued
it until, in the course of eighteen
months, I had worked my way from Connecticut
to California.

In justice to the narratives it should be
explained that they are submitted simply for
what they are, the casual observations of a
student almost fresh from college whose interest
in life led him to undertake a work for
which he had no scientific training.
.rj
W. A. W.

<sc>Princeton</sc>, October, 1901.
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CONTENTS
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.ta h:35 r:5
    |  <xs>PAGE</xs>
<sc>A Day with a Tramp</sc> |     #1:ch01#
<sc>With Iowa Farmers</sc>  |     #41:ch02#
<sc>A Section-Hand on the Union Pacific Railway</sc>   |    #91:ch03#
“<sc>A Burro-Puncher</sc>”   |     #127:ch04#
<sc>Incidents of the Slums</sc>  |    #163:ch05#
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<xl>A DAY WITH A TRAMP</xl>
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A DAY WITH A TRAMP
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He was an American of Irish stock; his
name was Farrell; he was two-and-twenty,
a little more than six feet high, and
as straight as an arrow. We met on the line
of the Rock Island Railway just west of
Morris, Ill.

But first, I should like to explain that in
the course of eighteen months’ experience as
a wandering wage-earner, drifting from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, this was the only day
that I spent in company with a tramp.

It was in the character of a workingman and
not as a tramp, that I began, in the summer
of 1891, a casual experiment, by which I
hoped to gain some personal acquaintance with
the conditions of life of unskilled laborers in
America. Having no skill, I could count on
employment only in the rudest forms of labor,
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and I maintained consistently the character of
a laborer—a very indifferent one, I am bound
to own—yet finding it possible everywhere to
live by the work of my hands.

I did tramp, it is true, walking in all some
twenty-five hundred miles of the distance from
Connecticut to California; but I did it from
set purpose, discovering that in this way I
could get a better knowledge of the people and
the country and of opportunities for work,
than if I should spend my savings in car-fare
from place to place. It cost me nothing to
walk, and I not infrequently covered two hundred
miles in the course of a week, but it generally
proved that, in actual cash from the savings
of my last job, I was out quite as much as
I should have been had I ridden the distance.
This was because it was often necessary to pay
for food and lodging by the way, an odd job
not always being procurable, and the people
being far readier to give a meal than to take
the trouble of providing work in payment for
it. I could little blame them, and I soon
began to make use of the wayside inns, trusting
for contact with people more to chance
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acquaintance and the admirable opportunities
that came with every event of employment,
when my savings were gone.

<i>Tramp</i> is a misnomer, I fancy, as descriptive
of the mode of motion of the members of
the professionally idle class which in our vernacular
we call <i>hoboes</i>. The tramp rarely
tramps; he “beats his way” on the railroads.

Everyone knows of the very thorough-going
and valuable work that Mr. Josiah Flynt has
done in learning the vagrant world, not only
of America, but of England, and widely over
the Continent as well, and the light that he
has let in upon the habits of life and of thought
of the fraternity, and its common speech and
symbols, and whence its recruits come, and
why, and how it occupies a world midway
between lawlessness and honest toil, lacking
the criminal wit for the one and the will power
for the other.

That the hobo, in going from place to place,
makes little use of the highways, I can freely
testify, so far as my limited experience goes.
His name was legion among the unemployed
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in Chicago, and he flocked about railway
centres, but he was a rare bird along the
country roads where work was plentiful.

It is easy to recount individually all that I
met: a lusty Yankee beggar who hailed me
as a brother one blistering July day, not far
from the Connecticut border, when I was
making for Garrisons; a cynical wraith, who
rose, seemingly, from the dust of the road, in
the warm twilight of a September evening, in
eastern Pennsylvania and scoffed at my hope
of finding work in Sweet Valley; a threadbare,
white-haired German with a truly fine reserve
and courtesy, who so far warmed to me, when
we met in the frosty air of late November, on
the bare, level stretch of a country road between
Cleveland and Sandusky, as to tell me
that he had walked from Texas, and was on
his way to the home of friends near Boston;
then Farrell, in central Illinois; and finally, a
blear-eyed, shaggy knave, trudging the sleepers
of the Union Pacific in western Nebraska,
his rags bound together and bound on with
strings, and a rollicking quality in his cracked
voice, who must have had difficulty in avoiding
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work among the short-handed gangs of
navvies along the line.

All this is by way of fruitless explanation
that I myself was not a tramp, but a workman,
living by day’s labor; a fruitless explanation,
because a reputation once established is
difficult to dislodge. I have grown accustomed
to references to my “tramp days,” even
among those who knew my purpose best, and I
had no sooner returned to my university than
I found that to its members I was already
known as “Weary,” in which alliterative appellation
I saw the frankest allusion to a supposed
identification with the “Weary Willies”
of our “comic” prints. And having
incurred the name, I may as well lay bare
the one day that I tramped with a tramp.

I am not without misgivings in speaking
of Farrell as a tramp. He had held a steady
job some weeks before, and our day together
ended as we shall see; but if I was a hobo, so
was he, and although clearly not of the strictest
sect, and perhaps of no true sect at all, yet
let us grant that, for the time, we both were
tramps.
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The line of a railway was an unusual course,
for I much preferred the country roads as
offering better walking, and far more hope of
meeting the people that I wished to know.
Heavy rains, however, had made the roads
almost impassable on foot, and I was walking
the sleepers from necessity.

The spring of 1892 had been uncommonly
wet. The rains set in about the time that I
quit work with a gang of roadmakers on the
Exposition grounds. So incessant were they
that it grew difficult to leave Chicago on foot,
and when, in the middle of May, I did set out,
I got only as far as Joliet, when I had to seek
employment again.

At the yards of the Illinois Steel Company
I was taken on and assigned to a gang of laborers,
mostly Hungarians. But my chief association
of a week’s stay there is with a boarding-house,
and especially its landlady.

She was a girlish matron, with a face that
made you think of a child-wife, but she was a
woman in capacity. Her baby was a year old,
and generous Heaven was about to send another.
Her boarders numbered seven when
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I was made welcome; and to help her in the
care of a crippled husband and the child and
guests, she had a little maid of about fifteen,
while, to add to the income from our board,
she took in all our washing, and did it herself
with no outside help. She may have been
twenty, but I should have guessed eighteen,
and every man of us stood straight before her
and did her bidding thankfully.

It was a proud moment, and one which
made me feel more nearly on equal terms with
the other men, when one evening she came to
me and,

“John, you mind the baby this time while
I finish getting supper,” she said, as she put
the child in my arms.

On the sofa in the sitting-room we would
lay the little wide-eyed, sunny creature whom
we rarely heard cry, and who never showed
fear at the touch of our rough hands, nor at
the thundering laughter that answered to her
smiles and her gurgling attempts at speech.

The mother waited at the table, and joined
freely in our talk. She had a way of saying
“By gosh!” that fairly broke your heart, and
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at times she would stand still and swear softly,
while her deep blue eyes widened in innocent
surprise.

They were haunting eyes, and they followed
me far out on the rain-soaked roads of the
valley of the Illinois. The walking was not
bad at first. Over a rolling country the way
wound past woodland and open fields, between
banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but
for the evident richness of soil, and the entire
absence of rock, it might have been a New
England valley with nothing to suggest the
earlier monotony of undulating prairie.

But the walking became steadily worse,
until by nightfall each step was a painful
pulling of a foot out of the mire then planting
it in the mire ahead, with Morris a good
ten miles beyond. I was passing in the late
twilight a farm-house that stood close to the
road. In his shirt-sleeves, and seated in a
tilted chair on the porch, was a young farmer
with a group of lightly clad children about
him. He accepted the explanation that I
found the walking too heavy to admit of my
reaching Morris that evening, and, readily giving
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me leave to sleep on his hay-mow, asked
me in to have something to eat.

I was struck at first sight with a marked
resemblance in him to my friend Fitz-Adams,
the manager of the logging camp in Pennsylvania.
All through our talk, while seated
on the porch in the evening, there were reminders
in his manner and turns of speech
and ways of looking at things of that very efficient
boss.

He was living in apparent poverty. The
house was small and slightly built and meanly
furnished. Indeed, there was an effect of
squalor in its scant interior, and in the unkempt
appearance of his wife and children.
But the man impressed you with the resolute
reserve of one who bides his time and knows
what he is about. It appeared in his evident
contentment, joined with a certain hopefulness
that was very engaging. It is true that
the spring was wet, so wet that he had not yet
been able to plant his corn, and it was growing
late for planting, but, even if the crop should
fail completely, he had much corn in the best
condition, he said, left over from the uncommonly
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large crop of the year before, which
would be selling in the autumn at a better
price. He was depressed by the persistent
rains, but not discouraged, and, as for the
region in which he had cast his lot, he clearly
thought it one of the best for a man beginning
the world as a farmer. With land at fifty
dollars an acre, there was a good market near
at hand, and money on the security of the land
could be had at five per cent. It was best to
buy, he said. Four thousand dollars would
secure a farm of eighty acres, and two hundred
dollars would pay the interest, whereas the
rental might reach three hundred or even three
hundred and fifty. Unmistakably he was
poor, but he was certainly not of the complaining
sort, and I thought that it did not require
a long look into the future to see him in full
possession of the land and the owner of a more
comfortable home besides.

When the barn-yard fowls wakened me in
the morning the sun was rising to a cloudless
dawn. But, by the time that I took to the
road, all the sky was overcast again, and progress
was as difficult as on the night before.
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The stoneless soil was saturated, until it could
absorb not another drop, and water formed a
pool in every foot-print and ran in muddy
streams in the wheel-tracks.

Two miles down the road was a railway. I
reached it after an hour’s hard walk and followed
it to the tow-path of a canal, which
afforded comparatively firm footing over the
remaining eight miles into Morris. It was
now ten o’clock, and for the past hour a steady
drizzle had been falling, which increased to a
down-pour as I entered the town. There I
remained sheltered until nearly noon, when
the rain ceased and I renewed the journey.
The roads I knew by experience to be almost
impassable, so I found the line of the Rock
Island Railway and started west in the hope
of reaching Ottawa by night.

Dense clouds lay heavily upon the fields that
stood, many of them, deep in water. The
moist air was hot and sluggish, but under foot
was the hard road-bed, and the course was the
straightest that could be cut to the Mississippi.
The line was a double one, and the gutter
between formed a good cinder-track, so that I
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had not to measure the distance from sleeper
to sleeper at every step, which grows to be a
horrible monotony.

I had cleared the town by two miles or more
and was settling to the swing of a long walk
when I saw, not far ahead, a gang of navvies
at work; almost at the same moment there appeared,
emerging from the fog beyond, the
figure of a man. We were about equally distant
from the gang, and I had passed the
workmen only a few yards when we met.
The impression grew as he drew near that here
was a typical tramp, and, being unaccustomed
to his order and its ways, I wondered how we
should fare, if thrown together. But if I recognized
him as a tramp, he had done as much
by me; for, when we met, he hailed me as a
<i>confrère</i> with,

“Hello, partner! which way?”

“I’m going to Ottawa,” I said.

“How long will you hold Ottaway down?”
he asked.

“Oh, I’m only passing through on my way
to Davenport.”

That was enough for Farrell as evidence of
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my being a hobo, however raw a recruit; but
there was a certain courtesy of the road which
he wished to maintain, if he could, in the face
of my awkward ignorance. I was conscious
of an embarrassment which I could not understand.

“How far is it to Morris?” he asked next,
and the opening should have been enough for
any man, but I answered dully, with painful
accuracy as to the distance that I had come.

Clearly nothing would penetrate such density
but the frankest directness, so out he
blurted:

“Well, partner, if you don’t mind, I’ll go
with you.”

Light dawned upon me then, and I tried to
make up in cordiality for a want of intuition.
Embarrassment was gone at once, and with an
ease, as of long acquaintance, Farrell began to
tell me how that, on the day before, he had
lost his partner and for twenty-four hours had
been alone. The loneliness was a horror to
him, from which he shrunk, even in the telling,
and he expanded, in the companionship of
a total stranger, like a flower in light and
warmth.
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Without a moment’s hesitation he abandoned
the way toward Morris and turned back
upon his former course, with a light-heartedness
at having a partner that was highly flattering.

Here certainly was life reduced to simple
terms. As we stood at meeting on the railway
line, Farrell was as though he had no single
human tie with a strong hold upon him. The
clothes that covered him were his only possessions,
and a toss of a coin might well determine
toward which point of the compass he would
go. The casual meeting with a new acquaintance
was enough to give direction to an immediate
plan and to change the face of nature.

There was trouble in his blue eyes when we
met, the fluttering, anxious bewilderment that
one sees in the eyes of a half-frightened child.
It was an appeal for relief from intolerable
loneliness; all his face brightened when we set
off together. He had the natural erectness of
carriage which gives a distinction of its own,
and, apart from a small, weak mouth, slightly
tobacco-stained, and an ill-defined chin, he was
good to look at, with his straight nose and well
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set eyes and generous breadth of forehead, the
thick brown hair turning gray about it and
adding to his looks a good ten years above his
actual two-and-twenty. A faded coat was
upon his arm and he wore a flannel shirt that
had once been navy blue, and ragged trousers,
and a pair of boots, through rents in which his
bare feet appeared. A needle was stuck
through the front of his shirt, and the soiled
white cotton with which it was threaded was
wound around the cloth within the projecting
ends.

However accustomed to “beating his way,”
instead of going on foot, Farrell may have
been, he was a good walker. Stretching far
ahead was the level reach of the road-bed, with
the converging lines of rails disappearing in
the mist. Our muscles relaxed in the hot,
unmoving air, until we struck the gait which
becomes a mechanical swing with scarcely a
sense of effort. Then Farrell was at his best.
Snatches of strange song fell from him and
remembered fragments of stage dialogue with
little meaning and with no connection, but all
expressing his care-free mood. It was contagious.
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Oh, but the world was wide and fair,
and we were young and free, and vagabond
and unashamed! Walt Whitman was our
poet then, but I did not tell Farrell so; for the
new, raw wine of life was in his veins, and he
sang a song of his own.

A breeze sprang up from the west, and the
heavy mists began to move, but from out the
east great banks of clouds rose higher with the
sound of distant thunder, which drew nearer,
until spattering raindrops fell, fairly hissing
on the hot rails. No shelter was at hand;
when the storm broke it came with vindictive
fury and drenched us in a few moments. We
walked on with many looks behind to make
sure of not being run down, for we could
scarcely have heard the approach of a train
in the almost unbroken peals of thunder that
nearly drowned our shouts. Then the shower
passed; the thunder grew distant and faint
again, and from a clear sky the sun shone upon
us with blistering heat, through air as still and
heavy and as surcharged with electricity as
before the storm.

Farrell had been quite indifferent to the
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rain, accepting it with a philosophic unconcern
that was perfect. There was certainly little
cause to complain, for in half an hour our
clothing was dry; meantime the expression of
his mood was changed. He had been friendly
before, but impersonal; now he wished to get
into closer touch.

“Where are you from, partner?” he asked.

“I worked last winter in Chicago,” I said.

“What at?”

“Trucking in a factory for awhile, then
with a road-gang on the Fair Grounds. I had
a job in Joliet, but I quit in a week,” I concluded.
I was short, for I knew that this was
merely introductory, and that Farrell was
fencing for an opening.

“I’ve been on the road seven weeks now,
looking for a job, and, in that time, I ain’t
slept but two nights in a bed,” he began.

“Two nights in a bed out of forty-nine?”
I asked.

“Yes. In that time I’ve beat my way out
to Omaha and back to Lima and up and down;
and one night a farmer near Tiffin, Ohio, give
me a supper and let me sleep in a bed in his
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wagon-house, and one wet night in Chicago I
had the price of a bunk in me jeans, and I says
to meself, says I, ‘I’d sooner sleep dry to-night
than get drunk.’”

It came then of itself, needing only an occasional
prompting question, and the narrative
was essentially true, I fancy; for, free from
embellishment, it moved with the directness of
reality.

Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emigrated
from Ireland, Farrell was bred in an
Illinois village, about fifty miles north of
where we were walking at the time. His two
sisters lived there still, he thought, but his
mother had died when he was but a lad. His
father was a day laborer at work in Peoria, so
far as Farrell knew. He had not seen him for
many years, and he kept up no contact with
his people.

Much the most interesting part of the story
to me was that which related to the past year.
Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he
hardly knew how, and was already a confirmed
roadster, with an inordinate love for tobacco,
and a well-developed taste for drink.
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In the early summer he had drifted into
Ottawa, the very town that we were nearing,
and, being momentarily tired of the road, he
sought and found a job in a tile factory. At
this point his narrative grew deeply absorbing,
because of the unconscious art of it in its simple
adherence to life; but being unable to
reproduce his words, I can only suggest their
import.

It was a crisis in his history. The change
began with an experience of a mechanics’
boarding-house. He was a vagabond by
breeding, with no clearly defined ideas beyond
food and drink, and immunity from work. He
was awaking to manhood, and there began to
dawn for him at the boarding-house a sense of
home, and of something more in the motherly
care of the housekeeper.

“Say, she was good to me,” was his own
expression, “she done me proud. She used to
mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never
chewed the rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I
swore off for good; and then I used to give her
me wages to keep for me, and she’d allow me
fifty cents a week above me board.”
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The picture went on unfolding itself naturally
in the portrayal of interests undreamed
of beyond idleness, and enough of plug and
beer. The savings grew to a little store; then
there came the suggestion of a new suit of
clothes, and a hat and boots, and a boiled shirt
and collar, and a bright cravat. Farrell little
thought of the native touch of art in his description
of how, when all these were procured,
he would fare forth on a Sunday morning,
not merely another man, but other than
anything that he had imagined. A sense of
achievement came and brought a dawning
feeling of obligation, and a desire to take
standing with other men, and to know something
and to bear a part in the work of a
citizen of the town.

Some glimmer had remained to him of religious
teaching before his mother died, and,
in the conscious virtue of new dress, he sought
out the church, and began to go regularly to
mass.

I knew what was coming then; there had
been an inevitableness that foretold it in the
tale, and I found myself breathing more freely
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when he began to speak without self-consciousness
of the girl.

He said very little of her, but it was not at
all difficult to catch the ampler meaning of his
words. Sunday began to hold a new interest,
quite apart from Sunday clothes. He found
himself looking forward through the week to
a glimpse of her at church, but the week was
far too long, and in the autumn evenings he
would dress himself in his best, regardless of
the jeers of the other men, and would walk
past her father’s corner grocery. Sometimes
he saw her on the pavement in front of the
shop, or helping her father to wait on customers
within.

All this was very disturbing; a new world
had opened to him with a steady job. It was
unfolding itself with quite wonderful revelations
in the home-life of his boarding-house,
and the friendship of the matron, and the companionship
of other workingmen, and the responsibility
which was beginning to replace his
former recklessness. Moreover, he was getting
on in the tile factory. He was strong
and active, and the chances of being transferred
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to piece-work was a spur to do his best
at his present unskilled labor. Utterly unforeseen
in its train of consequences had come
into this budding consciousness, the vision of a
girl. He had merely seen her at church, then
seen her again, then found himself looking
forward to sight of her, and unable to wait patiently
for Sunday. The very thought of her
carried with it a feeling of contempt for his
former life, and a distressing sense of difference
in their present stations, which developed,
sometimes, into the temptation to go back to
the road and forget. That was the temptation
that was always in the background, and
always coming to the fore when the craving
for drink was strongest, or when the monotony
of ten hours’ daily labor grew more than commonly
burdensome. For four months and
more he had resisted now, and, as a reward, he
had become just man enough to know feebly
that he could not easily forget, even on the
road.

How he plucked up courage to meet her I
do not know, for he did not tell me, and not
for treasure would I have asked him at this
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point of the story. He did meet her, however,
and the wonder of it was upon him still,
as he told me modestly, in quaint speech, that
she smiled upon him.

Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo
of a few months before, should be reading now
in a good girl’s eyes an answering liking to his
own! He was little more than a lad, and she
but a slip of a girl, and I do not know what
it may have meant to her, but to him it was
life from the dead. Very swiftly the winter
sped and very hard he worked until he earned
a job at piecework in the factory, and then
harder than ever until he was making good
wages. He could see little of her, for she had
an instinctive knowledge of her father’s probable
displeasure, but there grew up a tacit
understanding between them that kept his
hope and ambition fired.

Nothing in experience could have been more
wonderful than those winter months, when he
felt himself getting a man’s grip of things
unutterable, that came as from out a boundless
sea into the range of his strange awakening.
And this new life was centred in her, as
// 034.png
.pn +1
though she were its source. He lived for her,
and worked and thought for her and tried to be
worthy of her, and between his former and his
present life was a gulf which by some miracle
she had created.

It came upon him with the suddenness of
a pistol-shot one evening late in March when
they stood talking for a moment before saying
good-night at her father’s door. Thundering
down the steps from the living-rooms over
the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid Irishman.
In a moment he was upon them, hot in
the newly acquired knowledge that Farrell was
“keeping steady company” with his daughter.
His ire was up, and his Irish tongue was
loosed, and Farrell got the sting of it. It
lashed him for a beggarly factory laborer of
doubtful birth, and, gaining vehemence, it
lashed him for a hobo predestined to destruction,
and finally, with strong admonition, it
charged him never to speak to the girl and
never to enter her home again.

If only he could have known, if only there
had been a voice to tell him convincingly that
now there had come a crucial test in his life
// 035.png
.pn +1
between character and circumstance, a voice
“to lift him through the fight”! But all his
past was against him. In another hour he was
dead drunk and he went drunk to work in the
morning, and was discharged.

The pleading of his landlady was of no
avail. He thought that he had lost the girl.
Nothing remained but the road, and back to
the road he would go, and soon, with his savings
in his pocket, he was “beating his way”
to Chicago. There he could live on beer and
free lunches, and, at dives and brothels, he
would “blow in” the savings of ten months
and try to forget how sacred the sum had
seemed to him, when, little by little, he added
to it, while planning for the future. Its very
sacredness gave a hellish zest to utter abandonment
to vice while the money lasted; then
he took again to begging on the streets with
“a hard-luck story,” until, in the warm April
days, he felt the old drawing to the open country
and began once more to “beat his way” up
and down the familiar railway lines and to beg
his bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in
feeding him, were fast completing his ruin.
// 036.png
.pn +1

We were entering Seneca now, and another
thunder-storm was upon us, but, as it broke in
a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under the
eaves of the railway station. A west-bound
passenger-train drew in as we stood there.

“That’s the way to travel,” I heard Farrell
say, half to himself. It was the sheltered comfort
of the passengers that he envied, I supposed.
But not at all.

“See that hobo?” he continued, and, following
the line of his outstretched finger, I saw
a ragged wretch dripping like a drowned rat
as he walked slowly up and down beside the
panting locomotive.

“Yes,” I answered.

“The train’s got a blind baggage-car on,”
he continued. “That’s a car that ain’t got
no door in the end that’s next the engine.
You can get on the front platform when the
train starts, and the brakemen can’t reach you
till she stops, but then you’re off before they
are and on again when she starts up. The
fireman can reach you all right, and if he’s
ugly, he’ll heave coal at you, and sometimes
he’ll kick you off when the train’s going full
// 037.png
.pn +1
speed; but generally he lets you be. That
hobo come in two hours from Chicago and
he’s got a snap for as long as he wants to
ride,” he concluded.

Nevertheless, I was glad to see the train go
without Farrell’s saying anything about joining
our adventurous brother on the fore-platform
of the “blind baggage-car.”

In the seething sunlight that followed the
storm we left the station and walked along the
village street which lay parallel with the railway.
At a mineral spring we stopped to
drink, while a group of school-children who
were loitering homeward stood watching us,
the fascination in their eyes which all children
feel in the mystery which surrounds the lives
of vagabonds and gypsies.

On the outskirts of the village, when we
were about to resume the railway, Farrell suggested
that he should go foraging. He was
hungry, for he had eaten nothing since early
morning, while I had bought food at Morris.
I promised to wait for him and very gladly sat
down on the curbstone in the shade.

Two bare-foot urchins, their trousers rolled
// 038.png
.pn +1
up to their knees, who had evidently been
watching us from behind a picket-fence, stole
stealthily out of the gate when Farrell turned
the corner. Creeping as near as they dared,
they gathered a handful of small, sun-baked
clods and began to throw them at me as a
target. It was rare sport for a time, but I was
beyond their range and much absorbed in Farrell’s
story. Disappointed at not having the
excitement of being chased back to the shelter
of their yard, they gave up the game and seated
themselves on the curb, with their naked,
brown feet bathed in the pool which had
formed in the gutter. I had become quite unconscious
of them, when I suddenly realized
that they were in warm discussion. It was
about me, I found, for I heard one of them
raise his voice in stem insistence.

“Naw,” he said, “that ain’t the same bum,
that’s another bum!”

Farrell returned empty-handed and a trifle
dejected, I thought. His mind was evidently
on food. A little farther down the line he
pointed out a farm-house to the right and suggested
our trying there. Along the edge of a
// 039.png
.pn +1
soft meadow, where the damp grass stood high,
nearly ready for mowing, we walked to a
muddy lane which led to the barn-yard. A
lank youth in overalls tucked into top-boots
and a gingham shirt and a wide-brimmed straw
hat stood in the open doorway of the barn,
calmly staring at us as we approached.

Farrell greeted him familiarly and was answered
civilly. Then, without further parley,
he explained that we were come for something
to eat.

“Go up to the house and ask the boss,” said
the hired man.

The farmer was plainly well-to-do. His
house was a large, square, white-painted,
wooden structure topped with a cupola, and
with well-kept grounds about it, while the
farm buildings wore a prosperous air of plenitude.
Just then a well-grown watch-dog of
the collie type came walking toward us across
the lawn, a menacing inquiry in his face.

“Won’t you go?” suggested Farrell.

The hired man had caught sight of the dog,
and there was a twinkle in his eye as he answered,
airily,
// 040.png
.pn +1

“Oh, no, thank you.”

“Does the dog bite?” Farrell ventured,
cautiously.

“Yes,” came sententiously from the hired
man.

“We’d better get back to the road,” Farrell
said to me, and we could feel amused eyes upon
us as we retraced our steps to the track.

Once more Farrell tried his luck; this time
at a meagre, wooden, drab cottage that faced a
country lane, a hundred yards from the railway.
I watched him from the line and noticed
that he talked for some time with the woman
who answered his knock and stood framed in
the door.

When he returned he had two large slices
of bread in his hand and some cold meat.

“I didn’t like to take it,” he remarked.
“Her husband’s a carpenter and ain’t had no
work for six weeks. But she says she couldn’t
have me go away hungry. That’s the kind
that always helps you, the kind that’s in hard
luck themselves, and knows what it is.”

He was for sharing the forage and, hungry
as he was, he had not eaten a morsel of it when
// 041.png
.pn +1
he rejoined me. That I would take none
seemed to him at first a personal slight, but he
understood it better when I explained that I
had had food at Morris.

There was a cloudless sunset that evening,
the sun sinking in a crimson glow that foretold
another day of great heat. The stars came
slowly out over a firmament of slaty blue, and
shone obscurely through the humid air. Farrell
and I were silent for some time. Both of
us had walked about thirty-six miles that day,
and were intent on a resting-place. At last
we began to catch the glitter of street-lights in
Ottawa, and, at sight of them, Farrell’s spirits
rose. He was like one returning home after
long absence. The sound of a church-bell
came faintly to us. Farrell held me by the
arm.

“You hear that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s the Methodist church bell.”

I could see his face light up, as though
something were rousing the best that was in
him.

At the eastern end of the town, and close to
// 042.png
.pn +1
the railway, we came upon a brick-kiln. Farrell
was perfectly familiar with his surroundings
now, and we stopped for a drink. For
some reason the water would not run in the
faucet, so we went around to a barn-like building
in the rear. Through a large, open doorway
he entered, while I remained outside.
Soon I heard him in conversation with someone,
who proved to be the night-watchman,
and, finding that Farrell was not likely to rejoin
me soon, I also entered.

Some moments were necessary to accustom
one’s eyes to the interior, but I could see at
once the figure of a white-bearded old man
lying at full length on a bed of gunny-sacks
thrown over some sloping boards. His head
was propped up, and he held a newspaper
which he had been reading by the light of two
large torches that hung suspended near him,
and from which columns of black smoke rose,
curling upward into dark recesses among the
rafters. Everything was black with smut and
grimy dust. Soon I could see that on one side
were great heaps of coal that sloped away to
the outer walls like the talus against a cliff.
// 043.png
.pn +1

Farrell was seated on a coal-heap, and was
absorbed in the news of the town, as he gathered
it from the old man. Quite unnoticed, I
sat down on a convenient board and listened
dreamily, hoping heartily the while that we
should not have to go much further that night.

Presently I found myself alert to what was
being said, for they were discussing the question
of a night’s lodging. It was from the
watchman that the suggestion came that we
should remain where we were, and very readily
we agreed. Taking a torch from its socket,
he lighted us through a long passage to another
room that was used as a carpenter’s shop.
A carpenter’s bench ran the length of it, and
the tools lay strewn over its surface. From
a corner he drew a few yards of old matting,
which he offered to Farrell as a bed; and he
found a door off its hinges, which, when
propped up at one end as it lay on the floor,
made what proved that night a comfortable
bed for me. With a promise to call us early,
he left us in the dark, and, quickly off with our
boots, we wrapped ourselves in our coats and
were soon fast asleep.
// 044.png
.pn +1

The watchman was true to his word; for the
stars were still shining when Farrell and I,
hungry and stiff, set off down the track in the
direction of the railway station. His mood
was that of the evening before, as though,
after long wandering, he was returning to
his native place. Recollections of those ten
months of sober industry crowded painfully
upon him, and he shrunk like a culprit from
possible recognition. Yet every familiar sight
held a fascination for him. With kindling interest
he pointed out the locality of the boarding-house,
and again held me by the arm and
made me listen, until I, too, could catch the
sound of escaping steam at the tile factory
where he had worked.

The iron was entering into his soul, but he
knew it only as a painful struggle between a
desire to return to a life of work and the inertia
that would keep him on the road. We walked
on, in silence for the most part, under the
morning stars that were dimming at the approach
of day. When Farrell spoke, it was to
reveal, unconsciously, the progress of the
struggle within him.
// 045.png
.pn +1

“It ain’t no use tryin’ for a job; I’ve been
lookin’ seven weeks now.” That was the lie
to smooth the road to vagabondage.

“I’d have a hell of a time to get square in
this town again. Everybody that knowed me,
knowed I got fired for drinkin’.” That was
the truth that made strait the gate and narrow
the way that led to life.

In a moment of encouragement he spoke of
the boarding-house keeper and of her promise
to take him back again, if he would return to
work; but his thoughts of the girl he kept to
himself, and deeply I liked him for it.

We were leaving Ottawa behind. With a
sharp curve the railway swept around the base
of bluffs that rose sheer on our right from the
road-bed, rugged and grim in the twilight, the
trees on top darkly outlined against the sky.
At our left were the flooded lowlands of the
Illinois bottom. We could see the decaying
cornstalks of last year’s growth just appearing
above the water in the submerged fields, and,
here and there, a floating out-building which
had been carried down by the flood and was
caught among the trees.
// 046.png
.pn +1

Was he man enough to hold fast to his
chance, or would he allow himself to drift?
This was the drama that was unfolding itself
there in the dark before the dawn, under
frowning banks beside a flooded river, while
the silent stars looked down.

We came to another brick-kiln, with its
buildings on the bank just above the railway.
A light was shining from a shanty
window, and a well-worn foot-path led from
the road up through the underbrush of the
hillside to the shanty door. A night-watchman
was making a final round of the kiln
to see that all was right before the day’s
work began.

Farrell stood still for a moment, the struggle
fierce within him.

“Let’s get a drink of water,” he said.

The night-watchman led us to a spring and
answered, encouragingly, Farrell’s inquiry
about a possible job.

“Go up and ask the boss,” he said. “He’s
just finished his breakfast. That’s his house,”
he added, pointing to the shanty with the
light in the window.
// 047.png
.pn +1

From the foot of the path I watched Farrell
climb to the shanty door and knock. The
door opened and the voices of two men came
faintly down to me. My hopes rose, for
it was not merely a question and a decisive
reply, but the give and take of continued dialogue.
The suspense had grown to physical
suffering, when I saw Farrell turn from the
door and begin to descend the path.

I could not see his face distinctly; but, as
he drew nearer, I caught its expression of distress.
The half-frightened, worried bewilderment
that I had noticed on the day before
was back in his eyes, as he stood looking
into mine, evidently expecting me to speak.
I remained silent.

“I’ve got a job,” he said, presently, and I
could have struck him for the joy of it.

“Me troubles is just begun, for the whole
town knows me for a bum,” he added, while
his anxious eyes moved restlessly behind frowning
brows. I said nothing, but waited until I
could catch his eye at rest. Then out it came,
a little painfully:

“I’ll go to the boarding-house to-night,
// 048.png
.pn +1
when me day’s work is done, and put up
there, if the missus can take me.”

“Good,” I said, and I waited again until
his gaze was steady upon me.

For a day we had tramped together, and
slept together for a night, and, quite of his
own accord, he had given me his confidence.
We were parting, now that he had found work,
and I hoped that I might receive the final
mark of his trust, so I waited.

He read my question, and his eyes wandered,
but they came back to mine, and he
spoke up like a man:

“I can’t, till I’m a bit decent again and got
some clothes; but I’ll hold down me job, and,
as soon as I can, I’ll go back to her.”

A warning whistle blew; Farrell went up
the path to take his place in the brick-kiln, and
I was soon far down the line in the direction of
Utica.
// 049.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.nf c
<xl>WITH IOWA FARMERS</xl>
.nf-
.sp 4
// 050.png
.pn +1
// 051.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch02
WITH IOWA FARMERS
.sp 2
Scarcely a generalization with the
least claim to value can be drawn from
my superficial contact with the world of
manual labor in America. If there is one,
it is, that a man who is able and willing to
work can find employment in this country if
he will go out in real search for it. It may not
be well paid, but it need not be dishonest, and
it is difficult to conceive of its failing to afford
opportunities of making a way to improved
position.

And yet, one has no sooner made such a
statement than it becomes necessary to qualify
it. Suppose that the worker, able and willing
to work, is unemployed in a congested
labor market, where the supply far exceeds
the demand, and suppose that he must remain
with his wife and children, since he cannot
desert them and has no means of taking them
// 052.png
.pn +1
away. Or imagine him newly landed, thrown
upon the streets by an emigrant agency, ignorant
of the language and of our methods of
work, and especially ignorant of the country
itself. To the number of like suppositions
there is no end. Actual experience, however,
serves to focus the situation. I have stood beside
men whom I knew, and have seen them
miss the chance of employment because they
were so far weakened by the strain of the
sweating system that they were incapable of
the strain of hard manual labor.

Even at the best, much of the real difficulty
is often the subjective one summed up in the
sentence of a man who has wide knowledge of
wage-earners in America, to whom I once
spoke of the surprising ease with which I
found employment everywhere, except in
larger towns.

“Oh, yes,” he replied; “but you forget how
little gifted with imagination the people are
who commonly form by far the greater number
of the unemployed.”

It merely serves to show again the futility
of generalizing about labor, as though it were
// 053.png
.pn +1
a commodity like any other, sensitive to the
play of the law of supply and demand, while
supported by a thorough knowledge of markets
and the means of reaching quickly those
that, for the time, are the most favorable.

The mass which men speak casually of as
“labor” is an aggregation of individuals,
each with his human ties and prejudices
and his congenital weaknesses and strength,
and each with his own salvation to work
out through difficulties without and within
that are little understood from the outside.
You may enter his world and share his life,
however rigid, sustained by the knowledge
that at any moment you may leave it, and
your experience, although the nearest approach
that you can make, is yet removed
almost by infinity from that of the man at
your side, who was born to manual labor
and bred to it, and whose whole life, physical
and mental, has been moulded by its
hard realities.

It would be quite true to say that “the problem
of the unemployed in America is a problem
of the distribution of workers,” taking
// 054.png
.pn +1
them from regions where many men are looking
for a job, to other regions, where many
jobs are looking for a man. But it would be
a shallow truth, with little insight into the
real condition of multitudes, whose life-struggle
is for day’s bread and in whom the gregarious
instinct is an irresistible gravitation.
It is not difficult to show that congestion in an
industrial centre, with its accompanying misery,
might be relieved by an exodus to country
districts, where an unsatisfied demand for
hands is chronic. But the human adjustments
involved in the change would be beyond all
calculation; and, even were they effected, it
would be not a little disturbing in the end to
find large numbers returning to the town,
frankly preferring want with companionship
and a sense of being in touch with their time
to the comparative plenty and, with it, the
loneliness and isolation of country living. A
part of the penalty that one pays for attempting
to deal with elements so fascinating as
those of human nature is in their very incalculability,
in the elusive charm of men who
develop the best that is in them in spite of circumstances
// 055.png
.pn +1
the most adverse, and in an evasive
quality in others who sometimes fail to respond
to the best devised plans for their betterment.
But human nature never loses its interest, and,
as earnest of a good time coming, there are
always men in every generation who, through
unselfish service of their fellows, have won

.pm verse-start
The faith that meets
Ten thousand cheats,
Yet drops no jot of faith.
.pm verse-end

However little the fact may have applied to
the actual “problem of the unemployed,” it
nevertheless was true, as shown in my own experience,
that there was a striking contrast
throughout the country between a struggle
among men for employment and a struggle
among employers for men.

Early in the journey I began to note that
every near approach to a considerable centre of
population was immediately apparent in an
increasing difficulty in finding work. I had
never a long search in the country or in country
villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities,
unless I was bent upon another errand than
that of employment.
// 056.png
.pn +1

I could easily have escaped Chicago and its
crowded labor market. Offers of places in the
late autumn as general utility man on farms in
northern Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as
I passed, and I well knew, during a fortnight’s
fruitless search for work in Chicago in early
winter, that at any time a day’s march from
the city, or two days’ march at most, would
take me to regions where the difficulty would
quickly disappear. The temptation to quit
the experiment altogether, or, at least, to go
out to the more hospitable country, was then
strong at times; but I could but realize that,
in yielding, I should be abandoning a very
real phase of the experience of unskilled labor,
that of unemployment, and that I should miss
the chance of some contact with bodies of organized
skilled workmen as well as with the
revolutionaries who can be easiest found in
our larger towns. So I remained, and for two
weeks I saw and, in an artificial way, I felt
something of the grim horror of being penniless
on the streets of a city in winter, quite able
and most willing to work, yet unable to find
any steady employment.
// 057.png
.pn +1

With the return of spring I went into the
country again, drifting on with no more definite
plan than that of going westward until I
should reach the Pacific; and here at once was
the contrast. Opportunities of work everywhere;
with farmers, when one was on the
country roads; in brick-kilns, when bad walking
drove one to the railway lines.

Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the
Rock Island Railway in Illinois, had, for seven
weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to
Lima and back again, he told me, and yet he
got a job near Ottawa in response to his first
inquiry; while a few miles farther down the
line I, too, was offered work in a brick-kiln at
Utica. I did not accept it, only because I
had savings enough from my last job to see me
through to Davenport.

It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June
4, 1892, that I reached Davenport. I had
followed the line of the Rock Island Railway
from Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one
night, at Bureau Junction, in a shed by the
village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had
developed a plan to go to Minneapolis. I
// 058.png
.pn +1
hoped to work the passage as a hand on a river
boat.

At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped
to ask the way to the office of the steamboat
line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a man
who sat just inside. With a kindly face of
German type, he was of middle age, a little
stout, dressed in what is known as a “business
suit,” and when he spoke, it was with a trace
of German accent.

Mr. Ross is a sufficiently near approach to
his name. He was not an Iowa farmer, but
he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he
had things to say about the unemployed. A
director in a bank and the owner of a livery-stable,
he was owner of I know not what besides,
but I know that he was delightfully cordial,
and that his hospitality was of a kind to
do credit to the best traditions of the West.

He answered my question obligingly, then
asked me whether I was looking for a job.

“For if you are,” he added, “there’s one
right here,” and he waved his hand expressively
in the direction of the stalls at the rear.

This was more than I had bargained for;
// 059.png
.pn +1
it was wholly new to my experience to find
work in a town before I even asked for it.

I told him frankly that I was out of employment
and that I must find some soon, but that
there were reasons, at the moment, why I
wished to reach Minneapolis as early as possible.

Being without the smallest gift of mimicry
I could not disguise my tongue, and it had
been a satisfaction from the first to find that
this lack in no way hampered me. I was accepted
readily enough as a working-man by
my fellows, and my greenness and manner of
speech, I had every reason to think, were
credited to my being an immigrant of a new
and hitherto unknown sort.

“What’s your trade?” the men with whom
I worked would generally ask me, supposing
that clumsiness as a day laborer was accounted
for by my having been trained to the manual
skill of a handicraft.

“What country are you from?” they inquired,
and when I said “Black Rock,” which
is the point in Connecticut from which I set
out, I have no doubt that there came to their
// 060.png
.pn +1
minds visions of an island in distant seas,
where any manner of strange artisan might be
bred.

What they thought was of little consequence;
that they were willing to receive me
with naturalness to their companionship as a
fellow-workman was of first importance to me,
and this was an experience that never failed.

At last I was west of the Mississippi, and,
that I might pass as a man of education in the
dress of a laborer, was a matter of no note,
since men of education in the ranks of workmen
have not been uncommon there.

It was plainly from this point of view that
Mr. Ross was talking to me. If I was an educated
man, it was my own affair. That for a
time, at least, I had been living by day’s labor
was evident from my dress, and it was not unlikely
that I was looking for a job. Happening
to have a vacant place in the stable, he
offered it to me, and, being interested in what
I had to say, he led me to speak on of work
during the past winter in Chicago, and my
slight association there with the unemployed
and with men of revolutionary ideas.
// 061.png
.pn +1

Before I knew it, we were drifting far down
a stream of talk, and time was flying. Six
months’ living in close intimacy with what is
saddest and often cruelest, in the complex industrialism
of a great city had produced a depression,
which I had not shaken off in three
weeks’ sojourn in the wholesome country. I
was steeped in the views of men who told me
that things could never grow better until they
had grown so much worse that society would
either perish or be reorganized. The needed
change was not in men, they agreed, but in
social conditions; and from every phase of Socialism
and Anarchy, I had heard the propaganda
of widely varying changes, all alike,
however, prophesying a regenerated society,
the vision of which alone remained the hope
and faith of many lives.

The pent-up feelings of six months found a
sympathetic response in Mr. Ross; the more so
as I discovered in him a wholly different point
of view. He had no quarrel with conditions
in America. As a lad of fourteen he came
from Germany and, having begun life here
without friends or help of any kind, he was
// 062.png
.pn +1
now, after years of work and thrift, a man with
some property and with many ties, not the least
of which was a love for the country which had
given him so good a chance.

The mere suggestion of a programme of
radical change roused him. He began somewhat
vehemently to denounce a class of men,
foreigners, many of them, strangers to our institutions,
irresponsible for the most part, who
bring with them from abroad revolutionary
ideas which they spread, while enjoying the
liberties and advantages of the nation that
they try to harm.

“Why don’t they stay in their own countries
and ‘reform’ them?” he added.
“Thousands of men who have come here from
the Old World have raised themselves to positions
of honor and independence and wealth as
they never could have done in their native
lands. And yet these disturbers would upset
it all, a system that for a hundred years and
more we have tried and found not wanting.

“I am interested in a local bank,” he continued.
“The management has been successful;
the directors are capable men, and the
investments pay a fair dividend. Now suppose
// 063.png
.pn +1
someone, the least responsible person in
the corporation, were to come forward with a
new, untried system of banking and should
insist upon its adoption and even threaten the
existence of the bank if his plan should be
rejected. That would be a case like this of
your Socialist and Anarchist.”

He was a little heated, but he caught himself
with a laugh and was smiling genially as
he added:

“I see your ‘unemployed’ friends often.
Scarcely a day passes that men don’t come in
here asking for a job. My experience is that
if they were half as much in earnest in looking
for work as I am in looking for men that
can work, they wouldn’t search far or long.
I’ve tried a good many of them in my time. I
can tell now in five minutes whether a man
has any real work in him; and those that are
worth their keep when you haven’t your eye
on them, are as scarce as hens’ teeth. There
are good jobs looking for all the men that are
good enough for them; if you want to prove
it, start right in here, or go into the State and
ask the farmers for a chance to work.”

I did not say that this last was the very
// 064.png
.pn +1
thing I meant to do. Instead, I began to tell
him of the cases that I knew of men, who,
through no fault of their own, were out of
work and were not free to go where it could be
easily found. Mr. Ross was sympathetic with
what was real and personal in the sufferings of
unfortunate workers; and gathering encouragement,
I went on to speak of suffering no
less real which was the result of sheer incapacity,
a native weakness of will or lack of courage
or perseverance. This made him smile again,
and, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked me
whether I did not think it was expecting a
good deal of organized society to provide for
the unfit. Then drawing out his watch, he
glanced at it and, turning to me with a fine
disregard of the outer man, he asked me to go
home with him to supper. I should have been
delighted. Perhaps I ought to have gone. I
had not forgotten, however, a too hospitable
minister in Connecticut; but at the next moment
I accepted gladly Mr. Ross’s invitation
to drive with him in the evening.

Behind a sorrel filly that fairly danced
with delight of motion, we set out an hour
// 065.png
.pn +1
or more before sunset, and Mr. Ross drove
first through business streets, pointing out to
me the principal buildings as we passed, then
up to the higher levels of the hillside, on which
the city stands, through an attractive residence
quarter. From there we could look down
upon the river flowing between banks of
wooded hills, with its swollen, muddy waters
made radiant by the sunset. Then back to the
lower city we went and out over the bridge to
the military post of Rock Island, past the
arsenal and the barracks to the officers’ quarters
among splendid trees and broad reaches of
shaded lawn, and finally to an old farm-house,
which had been the home of Colonel Davenport
at the time of his struggles with the
Indians. It was not a distant date in actual
years, but the contrast with the present sway of
modern civilization seemed to link it with a
far antiquity.

The streets were ablaze with electrics as we
drove through the cities of Rock Island and
Moline, where the pavements were thronged
by slowly moving crowds.

When I left Minneapolis, a little more than
// 066.png
.pn +1
a week later, I had in mind Mr. Ross’s challenge
that any search for work in the interior
of the State would discover abundant opportunities.
I was bound next, therefore, for the
Iowa border. It would not have taken long to
reach it at the usual rate of thirty miles a day.
But I did not go through directly. For several
days I worked for a fine old Irish farmer
near Belle Plain, whose family was stanch
Roman Catholic, and whose wife was a veritable
sister of mercy to the whole country side,
indefatigable in ministry to the sick and poor.
A few days later I stopped again and spent a
memorable week as hired man on Mr. Barton’s
farm near Blue Earth City.

It was well along in July, therefore, when
I crossed into Iowa from the north, walking
down by way of Elmore and Ledyard and Bancroft
to Algona, where I spent a few days and
then set out for Council Bluffs.

The walk from Algona to Council Bluffs
was a matter of two hundred miles and a little
more, perhaps. The heat was intense, but,
apart from some discomfort due to that, it
was a charming walk, leading on through regions
// 067.png
.pn +1
that varied widely but constantly presented
new phases of native wealth. I should
have enjoyed it more but for the awkwardness
of my position. It was embarrassing to
meet the farmers, yet I wished to meet all
that I could. It was not easy to frame an excuse
for not accepting the work that was constantly
offered to me. To negotiate with a
farmer for the job of helping with the chores
in payment for a night’s lodging and breakfast
was trying to his temper, when he was
at his wit’s end for hands to help at the harvesting.
I felt like one spying out the land and
mocking its need.

Through a long, hot afternoon I walked
from Algona in the direction of Humboldt,
some twenty-six miles to the south. The country
roads were deserted, the whole population
being in the hay-fields, apparently. The corn,
which was late in the planting, owing to the
spring floods, was making now a measured
growth of five inches in the day.

In the evening twilight I passed through
the Roman Catholic community of St. James
and walked on a few miles in the cool of the
// 068.png
.pn +1
evening. Not every farm-house that I saw
wore an air of prosperity. I came upon one,
which, even in the dark of a starlit night, gave
evidence of infirm fortune. The garden-gate
was off its hinges and was decrepit besides.
With some difficulty I repropped it against the
tottering posts when I entered. In a much
littered cow-yard, I found a middle-aged
farmer, who with his hired man had just finished
the evening milking. Without a word
he stood pouring the last bucket of milk, slowly
through a strainer into a milk-can on the other
side of the fence, as he listened to an account
of myself. What I wanted was a place to
sleep and a breakfast in the morning. In return
I offered to do whatever amount of work
he thought was fair. When the bucket was
empty he gave me a deliberate look, then simply
asked me to follow him to the house.
Throwing himself at full length on the sloping
cellar-door, he pointed to a chair on the doorstep
near by as a seat for me, and began to
question me about the crops in the country
about Algona. I was fortunate enough to
divert him soon to his own concerns, and, for
// 069.png
.pn +1
an hour or more, I listened, while he told me of
a long struggle on his farm. For fifteen years,
he had worked hard, he said, and had seen the
gradual settlement and growth of the region
immediately about him; yet, with slightly
varying fortunes, he was little better off than
when he took up the farm as a pioneer.

There was a mystery in it all that baffled
him. Low prices were the ostensible cause of
his ill-success; he could scarcely get more for
his crops than they cost him; but back of low
prices was something else, an incalculable
power which took vague form in his mind as
a conspiracy of the rich, who seemed to him
not to work and yet to have unmeasured
wealth, while he and his kind could hardly live
at the cost of almost unceasing toil.

By five o’clock in the morning we were at
the chores, and were hungry enough when the
summons came to breakfast at a little after six.
There is, in certain forms of it, a cheerlessness
in farm-life the gloom of which would be difficult
to heighten. The call to breakfast came
from the kitchen, which was a shed-like annex
to the small, decaying, wooden farm-house.
// 070.png
.pn +1
The farmer, the hired man, and I washed ourselves
at the kitchen-door, then passed from the
clear sunlight into a room whose smoke-blackened
walls were hung round with kitchen utensils.
The air was hot and dense with the
fumes and smoke of cooking. A slovenly
woman stood over the stove, turning potatoes
that were frying in a pan, while, at the same
time, she scolded two ragged children, who
sat at the table devouring the food with their
eyes.

Scarcely a word was spoken during the meal,
until, near its close, the farmer’s wife quite
abruptly—as though resuming an interrupted
conversation—broke into further account of a
horse-thief, whose latest escapade had been not
far away, but those whereabouts remained unknown.
The very obvious point of which was
that, however her husband had been imposed
upon, my efforts to pass as an honest man had
not met with unqualified success with her. In
such manner the breakfast was saved from dulness,
and I was sure that the parting guest
was heartily speeded when my stint was done.

There is a high exhilaration in a day’s walk,
// 071.png
.pn +1
even in the heat of July. The feeling of
abounding life that comes with the opening
day after sound sleep and abundant food,
when one is free from care, and there are
twelve hours of daylight ahead for leagues of
delightful country, is like the pulse of a kingly
sport. From higher points of rolling land I
could see far over the squares marked by the
regularly recurring roads that intersect one
another at right angles at intervals of a mile.
The farm-houses stood hidden each in a small
grove, with the wheel of a windmill invariably
whirling above the tree-tops, and with here
and there a long winding line of willows and
stunted oaks marking the course of a stream.

It was but twelve miles to Humboldt, and
I stopped there only long enough to ask the
way to Fort Dodge. The roads were as deserted
as on the day before, and I was some
distance past Humboldt before I fell in with
a single farmer.

He came rumbling down the road, sitting
astride the frame of a farm wagon from which
the box had been removed. The fine dust was
puffing like white smoke about his dangling
// 072.png
.pn +1
legs, while the massive harness rattled over
the big-jointed frames of the horses.

“You may as well ride,” he called, as he
overtook me, and I lost no time in getting on
behind.

More fruitful as a field of conversation
even than the weather were the crops at that
season. I had picked up a smattering of
the lingo, and we were soon commenting
on the abundant yield of hay, and the fair
promise of rye and wheat, and the favorable
turn that the unbroken heat had given to
the prospects of the corn, in the hope that
it held, in spite of the late planting, of its
ripening before the coming of the frost. But,
for all the good outlook, the farmer was far
from cheerful. I suspected the cause of his
depression and avoided it from fear of embarrassment
to myself, while yet I wished to hear
his views about the situation. When they
came, they were what I anticipated:

A good hay crop? Yes, there could hardly
be a better, but of what use was hay that
rotted in the fields before you could house it,
for want of hands? And this was but the beginning
of the difficulty.
// 073.png
.pn +1

The whole harvest lay ahead, and the advancing
summer brought no solution of the
problem of “help.” He was very graphic in
his account of the year-around need of men
that grows acutest in midsummer, and I did
not escape the embarrassment that I feared;
for, when he pressed me to go to work for him,
I could only urge weakly that I felt obliged to
hurry on. He was glad to be rid of me at the
parting of our ways, a little farther down the
road, where he turned to the unequal struggle
on his farm, while I walked on at leisure
in the direction of Fort Dodge.

A heave of the great plain raised me presently
to a height, from which, far over the roll
of the intervening fields, with the warm sunlight
on their varying growths, I could see the
church spires in the town surrounded almost
by wooded hills, with the Des Moines River
flowing among them. The air was full of the
distant clatter of mowing machines, which carries
with it the association of stinging heat and
the patient hum of bees and the fragrance of
new hay.

As I descended into the next hollow there
// 074.png
.pn +1
came driving toward me a young farmer. He
was seated on a mower, his eyes fixed on the
wide swath cut by the machine in its course
just within a zigzag rail fence that flanked the
road. The green timothy fell before the blade
in thick, soft, dewy widths that carpeted the
meadow. A chance glance into the road discovered
me, and he brought the horses to a
stand. As he pushed back his hat from his
streaming forehead, I could see that he was
young, but much worn with care and overwork.

“Will you take a job with me?” he asked,
and the wonder of it was the greater, since
that whole region has through it a strong
Yankee strain, and men of such stock are sore
pressed when they come to the point without
preliminaries.

Again I had to resort to a feeble excuse of
necessity to go farther; but, curious as to the
response, I ventured an inquiry about the
local demand for men.

“Oh, everyone needs men,” the farmer
rejoined impatiently, as, tightening the reins
and adjusting his hat, he started the horses,
// 075.png
.pn +1
anxious, evidently, to drown further idle talk
in the sharp noise of the swift-mowing knives.

In the river valley I was not long in finding
a lane which disappeared among a scattered
growth of stunted trees in the direction of a
rocky bluff that marked the bed of the stream.
Every day’s march brought some chance of a
bath, and, at times, I was fortunate enough to
fall in with two or three in thirty miles, and
nothing could be more restful or refreshing in
a long walk, or a better preventive against
the stiffness that is apt to accompany it. Here
I could both bathe and swim about, and when
I regained the highway, it was almost with
the feeling of vigor of the early morning.

The main-travelled road did not lead me, as
I expected, into Fort Dodge, but to an intersection
of two roads, a little west of the town.
Instead of going eastward into the city, I
turned to the west, in the direction of Tara, a
small village on a branch of the Rock Island
Railway. The setting sun was shining full
in my face, but no longer with much effect of
heat. As I hurried on in the fast cooling air,
the way led by an abrupt descent into a ravine,
// 076.png
.pn +1
where flowed a small tributary of the Des
Moines among rocks and sheer banks, forming
a striking contrast with the rolling prairie. It
was but a break in the plain. From the top
of the opposite bank, the land stretched away
again in undulating surface, with much evidence
of richness of soil and the wealth of the
farmers.

Not without exception, however; for, at
nightfall, I was nearing a small house, through
whose coating of white paint the blackened
weather-boards appeared with an effect of
much dilapidation. When I entered the garden,
passing under low shade-trees, I met a
sturdy Irishman, bare-headed, and in his shirtsleeves,
whose thin white hair and beard alone
suggested advancing years.

There was no difficulty in dealing with him.
He was not in need of a hired man, but was
perfectly willing that I should have supper and
breakfast at his home and a bed in the barn
on the terms of a morning stint. Accordingly,
I followed light-heartedly into the
kitchen, where, in the dim light, I saw his
wife and a married daughter, with her son, a
lad of six or eight.
// 077.png
.pn +1

Supper was ready; with every mark of
kindly hospitality, the farmer’s wife, a motherly
body with an ill-defined waist, made ready
for me at the table, moving lightly about, in
spite of age and bulk, in bare feet, that appeared
from under the skirt of a dark print
dress with an apron covering its ample front.
A lamp was lighted, and from the vague walls
there looked down upon us the faces of saints
in bright-colored prints. A kitchen clock
ticked on the mantel-shelf, and a kettle was
singing on an iron stove that projected half
way into the room. We supped on tea and
bread and hard biscuits, while the farmer questioned
me about the crops along the day’s
route, and his wife heaved deep sighs and
broke into a muttered “The Lord bless us!”
when I owned to having walked some thirty-five
miles since morning.

I was charmed with my new acquaintances.
There was no embarrassment in being with
them, and nothing of restraint or gloom in
their home. After supper I pumped the
water for the stock, and helped with the milking.
When the chores were done, I asked
// 078.png
.pn +1
leave to go to bed. A heavy quilt and pillow
were given to me, and, spreading them upon
the hay, I slept the sleep of a child.

The cows had been milked in the morning
and were about to be driven to pasture, when
there arose a difficulty in separating from its
mother a calf that was to be weaned. The calf
had to be penned in the shed, while the old
cow went afield with the others. To imprison
it, however, proved no easy undertaking.
With the agility of a half-back, it dodged us
all over the cow-yard, encouraged by the calls
of its mother, from the lane, and it evaded the
shed-door with an obstinacy that was responsible
for adding materially to the content of the
old man’s next confession.

For some time his wife stood by, her bare
feet in the grass, her arms akimbo, and her
gray hair waving in the morning breeze, as,
with unfeigned scorn, she watched our baffled
manœuvres. She could not endure it long.

“I’ll catch the beast,” she shouted presently
in richest brogue; and, true to her word, by a
simple strategy, she surprised the little brute
and had it by a hind leg before it suspected her
nearness.
// 079.png
.pn +1

But capture was no weak surrender on the
part of the calf. For its dear life it kicked,
and the picture of the hardy old woman,
shaken in every muscle under the desperate
lunges of the calf, as, clinging with both hands
to its leg, she called to us with lusty expletives,
to help her before she was “killed entirely,”
is one that lingers gleefully in memory. The
old man winked at me his infinite appreciation
of the scene, and between us we relieved his
panting wife and soon housed the calf.

When my work was done, and I had said
good-by to the family, whose hospitality I had
so much enjoyed, I set out for Gowrie, which
was twenty odd miles away. At Tara I found
that, to avoid a long <i>détour</i>, I must take to the
railway as far, at least, as Moorland, the next
station on the line. Walking the track was
sometimes a necessity, but always an unwelcome
one. It is weary work to plod on and
on, over an unwavering route, where an occasional
passing train mocks one’s slow advance,
and where, for miles the only touch of human
nature is in a shanty of a section-boss, with
ragged children playing about it, and a haggard
// 080.png
.pn +1
woman plying her endless task, while a
mongrel or two barks after one, far down the
line.

At Moorland I resumed the highway, and
held to it with uneventful march, until, within
a mile or two of Gowrie, two men in a
market-wagon overtook me and offered me a
lift into the village.

To me the notable event of the day was a
drive of several miles with a farmer, in the
afternoon. He had been to the freight station
in Gowrie, to get there a reaper, which
had been ordered out from Chicago. The machine,
in all the splendor of fresh paint, lay in
the body of the wagon, while he sat alone on
the high seat in front.

When, at his invitation, I climbed up beside
him, I was delighted with the first impression
of the man. In the prime of life and of
very compact figure, his small dark eyes, that
were the brighter for contrast with a swarthy
complexion, moved with an alertness that denoted
energy and force. Individuality was
stamped upon him and showed itself in the
trick of the eye, and in every tone of his voice.
// 081.png
.pn +1

He asked me where I was going, and said
that he could take me five miles over the road
toward Jefferson, “unless,” he added, “you’ll
stop at my farm and work for me.”

I thanked him, but said that I would keep
to the road for the present, and then I changed
the subject to the reaper. It was of the make
of the factory in which, for eight weeks, during
the previous winter, I worked as a hand-truckman,
and very full of association it was as
I looked upon it in changed surroundings.
Hundreds of such tongues John Barry and I
had loaded on our truck in the paint-shop, then
stacked them under the eaves over the platform;
scores of such binders we had transferred
from the dark warehouses to the waiting
freight-cars below. Equally familiar
looked the “wider,” and the receptacle for
twine, and the “binder,” and the “bar.” I
told the farmer that I had been a hand in the
factory where his machine was made, and he
appeared interested in the account of the vast
industry where two thousand men work together
in so perfect a system of the division of
labor, that a complete reaper, like his own, is
// 082.png
.pn +1
turned out in periods of a few minutes in every
working day.

He, too, was autobiographical in his turn.
His history was one of the innumerable examples
at the West of substantial success
under the comparatively simple advantages
of good health and an unbounded capacity
for work.

From an early home in Pennsylvania, he
drifted, as a mere boy, into Indiana, and
“living out” there to a farmer, he remained
with him for five years. Shrewd enough to
see his opportunity, and to seize it, he made
himself master of farming, and became so indispensable
to his employer that he was soon
making more than twenty dollars a month and
his keep the year around. At the end of five
years he had saved a little more than eight
hundred dollars, which he invested in a mortgage
on good land. Then came his <i>Wanderjahre</i>.
He went to Colorado, worked for
two years on a sheep ranch, and looked for
chances of fortune. They were not wholly
wanting, but the prospects were distant, and,
rather than endure longer the lonely life of the
// 083.png
.pn +1
frontier, he returned as far as Iowa, and
bought his present farm at the rate of ten dollars
an acre. For twelve years he had lived
and worked upon it. Under improvement,
and the growth of population about it, its
value had risen threefold, for he had recently
added to it a neighboring farm, for
which he had to pay at the rate of thirty
dollars an acre.

The narrative was piquant in the extreme.
There was in it so ingenuous a belief in the
order of things under which he had risen unaided
from the position of a hired man to that
of a hirer of men. Like Mr. Ross, he had no
quarrel with social conditions, except that they
no longer furnished him with such hands as
he himself had been. Under the demoralization
of a demand for men far in excess of the
supply, the agricultural laborers of the present
sit lightly on their places, and are mere time
servers, he said, with no personal interest in
their employers’ affairs. He seemed to imply
a causal relation between the condition of the
labor market as it affects the farmer and the
degeneracy in agricultural laborers. But
// 084.png
.pn +1
whether he meant that or not, he was certainly
clear in an insistence that, from his point of
view, the social difficulty is one of individual
inefficiency, and hardly ever takes the form
of any real hindrance to a genuine purpose to
get on in the world. All along our route he
enforced the point by actual illustration, showing
how one farmer, by closest attention to
business, had freed himself of the obligations
at first incurred in taking up the land, and had
added farm to farm, while such another, less
efficient than his neighbor, had gone down
under a burden of debt.

I opened the gate, and stood watching him
as he drove up the long lane leading to his
house and barns, while the horses quickened
their pace in conscious nearness to their stalls.
A Philistine of the Philistines in the impregnable
castle of his hard-earned home, I could
but like and honor him.

Under the stars, on top of a load of hay that
had been left standing in a barn-yard in the
outskirts of Jefferson, I slept that night, and
spent most of the next day, which was Sunday,
under the trees of the town square, in
// 085.png
.pn +1
front of the court-house, going in the morning
to a Methodist church, where awaited me the
courteous welcome which I found at all church
doors, whether in the country or the town.
For food I had a large loaf of bread, which I
had purchased for ten cents at Gowrie. A
little beyond Jefferson, after a delightful bath
in the Raccoon River, with the uncommon
luxury of a sandy bottom, I got leave of a
farmer on the road to Scranton to sleep in his
barn, and, after the rest of Sunday, I set out
on Monday morning keen and fit for the remaining
walk to Council Bluffs.

Monday’s march took me from a point not
far west of Jefferson, by way of Coon Rapids,
to the heart of the hills in the neighborhood
of Templeton, where I spent the night on the
farm of a Scotsman of the name of Hardy.
The heat of the day was prodigious. Not like
the languid heat of the tropics, it was as
though the earth burned with fever which
communicated itself in a nervous quiver to the
hot, dry air, and quickened one’s steps along
the baking roads. The stillness was almost
appalling, and, as I passed great fields of
// 086.png
.pn +1
standing corn, I could fancy that I heard it
grow with a crackle as of visible outbudding
of the blades.

I did not walk all the way. Twice in the
day I had a lift, both of several miles, and
each with a farmer whose views differed as
widely from the other’s as though they were
separated by a thousand miles, instead of being
relatively next-door neighbors.

The first lift came in the morning along a
main-travelled road which I took in the hope
of meeting an intersecting one that would lead
me on to Manning. A good-looking young
farmer, fair-haired and blue-eyed, asked me to
the seat at his side high above the box of a
farm wagon. We were not long in learning
that both were interested in the economics of
farming, where he knew much and I little,
and where I was glad to be a listener. It was
like talking again with a socialist from a sweatshop
in Chicago. The fire of a new religion
was in him. The difference lay chiefly in that
his was not the gospel of society made new and
good by doing away with private property and
substituting a collective holding of all the land
// 087.png
.pn +1
and capital that are made use of for production;
his gospel was that of “free silver,” but
he held it with a like unshaken faith in its
regenerating power. For months he had been
preaching it, and organizing night classes
among the farmers in all the district schoolhouses
within reach, for the purpose of study
of the money question. Just once in the talk
with me he grew convincing. There was
much of the usual insistence of “a conspiracy
among rich men against the producing
classes,” whatever that may mean, and there
were significant statements to the effect that
nine-tenths of the farmers of the region, which
he proudly called “The Garden of Eden of
the West,” were under mortgage to moneylenders,
and that farmers in general, owing to
the tyranny of “the money power,” were fast
sinking to a condition of “vassalage;” but at
last he rose to something more intelligible. It
was the sting of a taunt that roused him. He
had seen copied from an Eastern newspaper
the statement that Western farmers were
beginning to want free silver, because they
grasped at a chance to pay their debts at
// 088.png
.pn +1
fifty cents on the dollar. The man was
fine in his resentment of the charge of dishonor.

“We mean to pay our honest debts in full,”
he said; “but see how the thing works out:
I borrowed a thousand dollars when wheat was
selling at a dollar a bushel. If I raised a
thousand bushels, I could pay my debt by selling
them. But when wheat has fallen to fifty
cents a bushel, I must raise two thousand to
meet the obligation. That came of appreciation
in the value of money. It is to the interest
of Wall Street men to have it so, while we
need an increased volume of money. They
deal in dollars and we in wheat, and the more
they can make us raise for a dollar, the better
off they are. It costs me as much time and
labor and wages to raise a thousand bushels of
wheat as when it sold for a dollar, and the
justice of the case would be in my paying my
debt with a thousand bushels, for I don’t raise
dollars, I raise wheat.”

No abstract reasoning or historical examples
could have convinced him that an appreciation
in the value of money was due to causes other
// 089.png
.pn +1
than a conspiracy among what he called “the
money kings,” who, in some manner, had got
control of the volume of currency and so determined
the prices of commodities. But
with all his hallucinations in finance, it was
very plain that the charge of dishonesty had
been misapplied.

It was toward the end of the day’s march
that I came by the second lift. For miles the
country had grown more hilly, and when I
left behind me the village of Coon Rapids I
found myself climbing a hill that was really
steep, then making a sharp descent into a
valley, only to begin another hill longer and
steeper than any before.

I was slowly ascending one of the longest
hills when a farmer in a light market wagon
called to me, making offer of a drive. I waited
at the crest of the hill and climbed to the
seat at his side, while the horses stood panting
lightly in the cooler air that moved across the
hill-tops.

In the two or three miles that we drove together,
the farmer conversed very freely.
Quite as well informed as my acquaintance of
// 090.png
.pn +1
the morning, he was of sturdier calibre than
he, and the difference in their views was complete.
He knew of no conspiracy against
farmers or any “producing class,” and he held
that almost the most disastrous thing that
could be done would be to disturb the stability
of the currency. An appreciation in the value
of money there had been, but it was plainly
due to causes at work the world over, and quite
beyond any man’s control. Farmers were suffering
from it now; but a few years ago they
had profited by appreciation in the value of
crops, and might look hopefully for a return
of better times for them. As to the farmers
of that part of Iowa, their fortune had been
of the best. These hills were looked upon at
first as the least desirable land and were last to
be taken up, but had proved, when once developed,
almost the richest soil in the State.
The farmers who settled there had found themselves,
in consequence, in possession of land
that was constantly increasing in value.
From $10 an acre it had quickly risen to $20,
and many of the owners would now reluctantly
yield their farms for $40 an acre.
// 091.png
.pn +1

There was nothing boastful in the statements.
My informant was a person of quiet
speech and manner, but he had the advantage
of being able to enforce from concrete examples
all that he had to say, and the histories
of most of the farmers, and every transaction
in real estate for miles around seemed to be at
his command.

Nothing could have fitted better the mood
in which I left him than my meeting that
evening with Mr. Hardy, at whose farm I
spent the night. A genial Scotsman of clear,
open countenance, whose deep, rich voice
seemed always on the verge of laughter; he
welcomed me right heartily, and gave me supper
of the best and a bed in the granary on
fragrant hay, which he spread there with his
own hands, and a breakfast in the morning;
and for all this he would accept return, neither
in work nor pay.

We talked long together of English politics,
but he was at his best on the condition of the
Iowa farmer. A more contented man I have
rarely met, nor a man of more contagious
good-humor. As a youth he came from Scotland,
// 092.png
.pn +1
and had been a pioneer among these Iowa
hills. For him the hardships were all gone
from farming, as compared with his early experience.
An accessible market, admirable
labor-saving machines, ready intercourse with
neighbors and with the outside world, had
changed the original struggle under every disadvantage
to a life of ease in contrast. Very
glad I should be of the chance to accept his
parting invitation to return at some time to
his home.

Early in Tuesday’s march a young Swedish
farmer picked me up, and carried me on to
within five miles of Manning; and, a little west
of the town, I fell in with another farmer,
who shared his seat with me over six miles of
the way. A third lift of a couple of miles into
Irwin helped me much on the road to Kirkman.
I had not reached the village, however,
when night fell. At a farm, a mile or more
to the east of it, I found as warm a welcome as
on the night before. Supper was ready, and
room was made for me; then I lent a hand at
the milking with the hired men. Last, before
going to bed, we had a swim. The
// 093.png
.pn +1
farmer kept for the purpose a pool in the barn-yard
which was well supplied with constantly
changing water, and nothing could have been
more grateful after a day of work and walking
in a temperature of 105° in the shade. I
should liked to have remained there as a hired
man almost as much as with Mr. Hardy, but
the journey to Council Bluffs was now well
under way, and I was bent upon completing it
before another long stop.

On Wednesday I wished to reduce as much
as possible the distance to Neola, which is a
village at the junction of the St. Paul and
Rock Island railways; but I had to spend the
night a few miles southwest of Shelby. This
was because I was not so fortunate as on the
day before in the matter of lifts. I got but
one drive that day. Turning from Kirkman
into the stage-road leading into Harlan, the
county-seat of Audubon County, I saw approaching
me a buggy containing two men. I
stepped aside to let it pass, but it stopped beside
me, and one of the men invited me to get
in. The country doctor was writ large upon
him, and, at his side, was a coatless, collarless,
// 094.png
.pn +1
taciturn youth, who clearly was his “hired
man.” Crowded between them I sat down,
and the physician turned his sharp, genial eyes
upon me.

“Where are you from?”

“Where are you going?”

“How old are you?”

“What’s your name?”

“Where do you expect to go when you
die?”

“Why don’t you shave?”

Such were the questions that, with almost
fierce rapidity, he plied me with, waiting
meanwhile for but the briefest answer to each.
And when the ordeal was over, he laughed a
low, shrewd laugh while his eyes twinkled merrily,
as he remarked, dryly: “I guess you’ll
do.”

He allowed me no time to acknowledge the
compliment, but went swiftly on:

“Do you know that Mr. Frick has been shot
and may die?”

I did not know it, for I had not seen a newspaper
since leaving Algona, and my intercourse
had been with farmers whose news
reaches them by the weekly press,
// 095.png
.pn +1

It was an exceedingly tragic climax to the
situation at Homestead, and not without influence
in determining the sympathies of the
Western farmers with the issues involved
there. It had been amazing to me to discover
how keen was the interest taken in the strike
all along my route, and it was not a little significant,
I thought, to find everywhere a strong
indignation against the use of a private police
force in accomplishing ends legal in themselves
and fully provided for by law and usage. So
far in the struggle the feeling of the farmers
was with the men. Beyond that they appeared
uncertain. There was a question of
fact to begin with. Did the cut affect more
the hands who were working for a dollar and a
half a day or the skilled workmen who were
reported to get, some of them as much as fifteen
dollars? Until this was clear, there could
be but speculation.

Most interesting of all, I had found their
attitude toward the question that was widely
raised of a right the workmen were said to have
in the property at Homestead, apart from their
wages, on the ground of their having created
// 096.png
.pn +1
its value. Here was the real issue of modern
industrialism, and on it I found the farmers
conservative, to say the least.

The American farmer is a landed proprietor
with a gift for logical tendencies that does him
credit. His chiefest aim is to maintain, if
possible, his economic independence, and a doctrine
that would give to his hired man an ultimate
claim to ownership in his farm is not one
that is likely soon to meet with wide acceptance
among his class.

It was with the physician that I talked these
matters over, and I was interested to find my
experience confirmed by that of so expert an
observer, whose chances were so good.

Very reluctantly I parted from him at his
door and made in the direction of Neola.
Owing to rains that delayed me on Thursday,
I did not enter Neola until the middle of the
afternoon of that day, and there I did not stop
in passing, but pressed on to Underwood,
where I spent the night.

Friday was clear again and hot, but the
roads were difficult, and I had to desert them
for the lines of the St. Paul and Rock Island
// 097.png
.pn +1
railways, that parallel each other side by side
for several miles into Council Bluffs.

For the past day I had not had a single offer
of a job. The farmers, as I approached the
town, seemed either less in need of men or
less willing to take up with a chance wayfarer.
No doubt I should have had no difficulty had
I set about a search for work. Certainly I
could not have fared better than I did for dinner
at a farm, where I was allowed to lend a
hand with a load of hay. And after dinner,
when the farmer and I talked together for an
hour, I found in him the same contentment
which struck me as so general among Iowa
farmers.

But my letters were in the Post-office at
Omaha, and I felt impatient of delay until I
should get them. I did not get them on that
day, however, nor for several days to come.
In Council Bluffs I met the unlooked-for barrier
of a toll-bridge across the Missouri. Five
cents would give me a right of way, but I had
only one, and must, therefore, look for work.
I counted myself very fortunate when, at
nightfall, I got a job in a livery-stable.
// 098.png
.pn +1

I had crossed Iowa, and Mr. Ross’s promise
had been abundantly fulfilled. On any day
of the march I could have found a dozen
places for the asking, and scarcely a day had
passed that I had not repeatedly been asked to
go to work. I should have thought this a
condition peculiar to the harvest time, had not
many of the farmers told me that, while their
need is greatest then, it is so constant always
that no good man need ever be long without
work among them.
// 099.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.nf c
<xl>A SECTION-HAND ON THE
UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY</xl>
.nf-
// 100.png
.pn +1
// 101.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch03
A SECTION-HAND ON THE UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY
.sp 2
It cost five cents to go from Council Bluffs
to Omaha in the summer of 1892.
That was the toll of a foot passenger in crossing
the bridge which, spanning the Missouri,
joined the two cities. It was a reasonable
toll, I dare say, and paid probably no more
than a fair return on the capital invested in
the bridge, but it was five cents and I had only
one. One dingy copper coin, with its Indian
head and laurel wreath, was all that was left of
the savings from my last job. I must, therefore,
find work in Council Bluffs, and the letters
which had been waiting for me in Omaha
must wait a little longer. But I felt fagged,
for I had reached the end of a six days’ walk
of some 200 miles, so I took a seat on a bench
in the shade in the public square near a fountain,
// 102.png
.pn +1
whose play was soothing in the heat of a
midsummer afternoon.

I thought regretfully then of the farmer
with whom I dined at noon that day, and with
whom I might have remained as a hired man.
Besides, I remembered with some concern two
men on foot who met me on the outskirts of
Council Bluffs.

“Where are you from, partner?” one of
them asked, with some bluster in his manner.

“I’ve just come down through the State
from Algona,” I replied.

“Is there any work out the way you
came?”

“Lots of it,” I assured him.

“Well, there ain’t none the way you’re
goin’. Me and me pal is wore out lookin’ for
a job in Omaha and Council Bluffs.”

I had come 1,500 miles as a wage-earner,
and I had 1,500 yet to go before I should reach
the Pacific, but not yet had it been hard to
find work of some sort, except when I chose
to stay in a crowded city in winter. The
anxiety that I felt in this instance proved
groundless, for when, in the cool of the evening,
// 103.png
.pn +1
I looked for employment I found it at the
third application, and I went to bed that night
a hostler in a livery-stable at a wage of twenty
dollars a month and board at a “Fifth Avenue”
hotel.

Ten dollars less twelve cents, which were
due for the hire of books at a stationer’s shop,
were clear gain at the end of two weeks’ service
in the stable. But the necessity of writing
up notes and of answering many letters,
besides the allurements of a public library,
kept me for several days in Omaha, so that my
cash had dwindled, when, one afternoon about
the middle of August, I left the city, with the
broad State of Nebraska as the next step of the
journey.

It was natural to follow the Union Pacific
Railway. It takes its course westward
through the State, and is paralleled by a main-travelled
road that connects the frequent settlements
along the line. Just out of Omaha
the railroad makes a southern bend, and I
avoided this by following the directer course
of the highway that led next morning to a
meeting with the rails at Elkhorn. The going
// 104.png
.pn +1
there was of the plainest. The railway
followed the northern bank of the Platte River
and the road followed the rail. If the day was
wet, I left the road and walked the sleepers;
if the day was dry, I walked the road, but always
I was within easy hail of a lift, and so
fell in with many an interesting farmer and
was saved many miles of walking.

It was late in the afternoon of a rainy day
that there chanced a lift of the most timely.
From low, heavy clouds had been falling since
early morning a misty rain that almost floated
in the warm, still air. For a hundred yards
together I might find a tolerable path along
the turf at the edge of the road. Then, as the
mud grew deeper, I took to the rails and kept
them, until the monotony of the sleepers drove
me to the mire again. I had seen scarcely a
soul that day except the fleeting figures on the
trains and an occasional bedraggled section-hand
who looked sullenly at me, barely deigning
a salutation as I passed. It seemed hardly
worth while to be abroad, but I had found it
generally best to stick to the road when I
could, and I was beginning now to think of a
// 105.png
.pn +1
shelter for the night and trying to find some
satisfaction in having covered more than
twenty miles since morning.

The rumble of a heavy wagon began to
sound down the road; and when I could hear
the splash of the horses’ hoofs near by, I was
delighted to catch the call of the driver, as he
asked me to a seat at his side. He was a farm-hand,
young and muscular and slouching, as
he sat stoop-shouldered, with the lines held
loosely in his bare hands, while the rain
dripped from a felt hat upon the shining surface
of his rubber coat.

Why he had asked me to ride I could not
clearly see, for he scarcely turned his lacklustre
eyes upon me when I climbed up beside
him, and he seemed not in the least anxious to
talk.

We were driving through a region that was
growing familiar from its changelessness.
On every side were fields of corn, unfenced,
and bounded only by the horizon, apparently,
as they stretched away into cloudy space.
Like islands in a sea of standing corn were
widely scattered groups of farm buildings,
// 106.png
.pn +1
their clusters of cottonwood-trees about them
and sometimes a fruit orchard. And if there
was any other break in the monotony of corn,
it was where vast acres had been turned to
raising beets for the sugar trade. Hardly a
swell marred the level of the prairie, and the
rails reached endlessly on in an unbending line
across the plain.

The usual subjects of conversation were of
no avail with my new acquaintance. He was
not interested in corn and only languidly in
the experiment with beets, and the general
election failed to move him, although he ventured
so far as to insist that there was no hope
for the farmers of the West until the free
coinage of silver should be secured. His
mood was in keeping with the day, and life
was “flat, unprofitable, and stale.”

He quickened finally, to the theme of work,
but only as a vent to his depression. Work
was plentiful enough; for such as he, life was
little else than work, but of what profit was it
to slave your soul out for enough to eat and to
wear and a place to sleep?

There was no escaping the tragedy of the
// 107.png
.pn +1
man’s history as he told me simply of his
father’s death from overwork in an attempt to
pay off the mortgage on the farm and how his
mother was left to the unequal struggle. He
himself was eleven then, and the elder of two
children; he could remember clearly how the
home was lost—the accumulated labor of
many years. From that time his life had
been an unbroken struggle for existence,
against odds of sickness that again and again
had swept away his earnings and thrown him
back to the dependence of an agricultural
laborer.

Once his savings had gone in quite another
fashion. It was at the very point when there
seemed to have come a change for the better
in his fortunes. He was $200 to the good at
the end of the last autumn, and with this as
an opening wedge he meant to force a way
eventually to independent business of his own.
So he went to Omaha, and, in one of the employment
bureaus there, he met a man, past
middle life, who offered him work on a stock
farm twenty miles below the city. Thirty
dollars a month were to be his wages from the
// 108.png
.pn +1
first, if he proved himself worth so much, and
there was to be an increase when he earned it.
In the meanwhile, he would be learning the
trade of rearing horses for the market, and, if
he chose to invest his savings in the business,
when he knew it better, there could be no surer
way, his informer said, to a paying enterprise
of his own.

He was committing himself to nothing, he
found, so he decided to give the place a trial.
His new employer and he left the office together,
and, having an hour before train time,
they went to a restaurant for dinner, and the
stock farmer told his man much in detail of
the farm. He was an elderly person of quiet
manner, very plain of speech, and friendly
withal, and very thoughtful; for when they
were about to leave the restaurant, he opened
a small leather bag that he carried guardedly
and, disclosing a bank book and a considerable
sum of money, which he had drawn to pay the
monthly wages of the hands, he suggested to
our friend to deposit with them his own valuables
in safety from the risk of pickpockets
about the station and in the cars, adding, meanwhile,
// 109.png
.pn +1
that he would then entrust the bag to
him, as there were one or two places where he
wished to call on the way to the train.

The farm-hand held the bag firmly as his
employer and he walked down the street together,
and very firmly as he waited in a shop,
where his boss left him with the plea that he
had an errand in an office overheard, but would
return in a few minutes. The minutes grew
to an hour, and the youth would have been
anxious had it not been that the bag with his
savings was safe in his keeping. But when
the second hour was nearly gone, his feeling
was one of anxiety for the boss, until a question
to the shop-keeper led to the opening of
the bag and the discovery that it contained
some old newspapers and nothing more.

He went back to the farm then and worked
all winter and through the summer that was
now nearing its end, but illness in his family
had consumed his earnings, and, at the end of
fourteen years of labor, he was very much
where he started as a lad, apart from added
strength and experience.

That evening, in a village inn, while the
// 110.png
.pn +1
rain poured without, I sat cheek by jowl with a
Knight Templar who had just returned from a
convention of his order in Denver. It was
not the meeting that now inspired him; it was
the mountains. Reared on the prairie, he had
never seen even hills before, and the sight of
the earth rising from a plain until it touched
high heaven was like giving to his mind the
sense of a new dimension. For hours, he said,
he would let his eyes wander from Long’s Peak
to Pike’s and back again, while his imagination
lost itself among the gorges and dark
cañons, and in the midsummer glitter of aged
snow. There lay the charm of it, in the plain
telling of the opening to him of a world of
majesty and beauty such as he had never
dreamed of, revealing powers of reverence and
admiration that he had not known were his.

The humor of it, touched with charm, was
all in his description of concrete experience of
the new world of mystery. His account of an
ascent of Pike’s Peak would have made the
reputation of a humorist. An expedition to
the Pole could hardly take itself more seriously.
A few of his fellow-knights and he,
// 111.png
.pn +1
with the ladies who were of their company, set
out at midnight from Manitou to make sure
of reaching the summit (a four hours’ walk)
before dark of the following day. Not “the
steep ascent of heaven” is beset with greater
difficulty and danger for a struggling saint
than was the climb along the line of a “cog”
railway for this band of knights-errant and
ladies fair. One can readily conceive the peril
of the adventure—for feet accustomed only to
the prairie—in treading from midnight until
dawn the brinks of yawning chasms, with
water falling in the dark.

Nor did day dispel the terrors. The precipices
were still there and a growing awfulness
in the height above the plain that caused a
“giddiness” which was the harder to resist
because of the increasing difficulty of breathing
the rarefied air. Some of the women
fainted on the way, and the last hour’s climb
was an agony to all the company; for now the
effort of a few steps exhausted them, and they
despaired of ever reaching the goal.

It was past noon when finally they sank
down at the summit in the shelter of rocks that
// 112.png
.pn +1
shielded them from the piercing wind and ate
what was left of their store of provision.

The unconscious exaggeration took now a
form even more comical in an account of what
was visible from the mountain. I have heard,
in a national convention, a young negro from
Texas second the nomination of a party leader
with a fervor and in terms that might befit an
archangel. The play of fancy about Pike’s
Peak was comparable with it, not in eloquence,
perhaps, but certainly in a pitch which made
both speeches memorable as gems of unstudied
humor

From Thursday afternoon, when I left
Omaha, until Saturday evening, I walked as
far as Columbus, then rested over Sunday.
On Monday morning the course was still the
line of the Union Pacific, which had now
turned southwestward in following the bank of
the river.

Tuesday’s march was the longest that I had
made so far. From a point near Clarksville I
went to one a little beyond Grand Island,
which was, I judged, about forty miles in all;
but as various lifts had carried me quite a fifth
// 113.png
.pn +1
of the way, the actual walking was not much
above the normal amount.

On Wednesday morning, August 24th, my
funds were low. I saw the way to a dinner in
the middle of the day, but to no supper or bed
at night. Settling down to work would now
be a welcome change, however, after hard
walking, just as I always found the life of the
road a grateful relief, at first, from the strain
of heavy labor.

After dinner I began to think of something
to do. It would be easy to apply for work
upon some of the many farms that I was passing,
and not difficult to find it, I fancied, from
the reports of the farmers with whom I had
talked on the road from Omaha. Still, I had
had a little experience as a farm-hand and I
wished to extend the range of the experiment
as far as I could within the limits of unskilled
labor, so I thought again.

I was a little beyond the town of Gibbon.
It was a hot August afternoon, and glancing
down the line I saw a gang of section-hands at
work, the air rising in quivering heat-waves
about them, and the glint of the sunshine on
// 114.png
.pn +1
the rails. When I reached them I could
easily pick out the boss, a white-haired, smooth-shaven,
ruddy Irishman with a clear blue eye,
and, as it proved, a tongue as genial as it was
coarse. Two of his sons were of the gang, well-grown
lads, scarcely out of their teens, dark,
good-looking, and reserved. He told me that
they were his sons, and he gave me much information
besides; for my applying for a job
had been a signal to the whole gang to quit
work and soberly chew the cud of the situation,
while the old man gossiped. The fourth
hand was a slovenly youth, who stood contentedly
leaning on his shovel and listening idly to
what was said.

No, the boss could not give me work; he
already had the full number of men, but he
knew that the gang of the next section to the
west was short a man when he saw them last,
and he thought that my chance of employment
with them was good.

I walked something more than three miles
into the next section, which was the Thirty-second,
before I came up with the gang that
worked it. They were three men when I
// 115.png
.pn +1
found them and they were bracing the sleepers
near a little station which is known as Buda.
I went up to them and asked for Osborn, the
boss, and was answered by a tall, frank-eyed
young Westerner of unmistakable native
birth.

Osborn owned at once to being short-handed
and said that I might go to work next morning,
if I wished, and then went on, in business-like
fashion, to explain that the wages were
twelve and a half cents an hour for ten hours’
work and that his wife would board me for
three dollars and a half a week.

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll take the job.”

“You can go right over to the house,” he
went on, “or wait here and go home with us at
six o’clock.”

I much preferred to wait and leave explanations
to the boss, for my attempts at explaining
myself to the women folk of my employers
had not always ended in leaving me perfectly
at ease.

The present situation could be taken in at a
glance. Four miles farther on the road was
the town of Kearney, built out, for the most
// 116.png
.pn +1
part, to the north of the line. The station at
Buda was the conventional frame building,
with a pen for cattle at one end and a fenced
platform for transferring the stock to the
cattle-cars. A siding ran for a hundred yards
or more beside the main line, and a few steps
beyond it and across the main-travelled road
was the section-boss’s shanty, a lightly built
wooden shell, unpainted and weather-stained.
Near an end of the siding, with a few feet of
rails spanning the distance between, stood a
little structure not unlike an overgrown kennel,
where the hand-car for the men and the
section tools were housed. For a space about
the station and the boss’s shanty and on either
side the railway and the road it was clear, then
began the inevitable corn that stood full-grown
on the prairie as far as the eye could see.

The shadow of the station lay across the
high prairie grass under its eastern wall, and
there I lay down to rest.

If I had failed of work at Buda, I should
have thought little of it and should have
walked on as a matter of course to further
search in Kearney or in the country about the
// 117.png
.pn +1
town. But having found a job and knowing
that I had only to rest until going to work in
the morning, there came a feeling of languor
which it was a luxury to indulge. As I lay
there in the high prairie grass at the end of another
stretch of nearly 200 miles of walking,
and looked dreamily up at the sky and thought
contentedly of my new post, every muscle relaxed,
and the will to summon them to action
seemed gone, until the mere thought of further
effort for that day was an agony which one
harbored for the edge it gave to the sense of
ease.

It was difficult to respond even to a call to
supper. But I got to my feet at six o’clock
and joined the gang, and together, after storing
the tools, we walked over to the boss’s
shanty. On a bench outside the kitchen-door
were tin basins and soap and water, with the
usual roller towel, and soon we were waiting
for a summons to the evening meal.

Already I was much attracted by Osborn
and the section-hands. Tyler was a young
American, a long-limbed youth with clear
smooth muscles and an intelligent, expressive
// 118.png
.pn +1
face that suggested breeding, while Sullivan
was a full-faced, stocky Irishman, of five-and-twenty,
ready and frank, and full of
energy.

The shop that they talked as we waited outside
was still the topic at the table when we
were called to supper in the little front room
of the cabin with its wooden walls papered
with old journals. Never had I been adopted
more naturally by any company of fellow-workmen.
They asked my name and where I
was from, and having learned that I had come
from the East, they appeared satisfied with the
account of myself and made me one of their
number with perfect friendliness. Osborn’s
father, a quiet old farmer, joined us, but we
saw the women and children only as we passed
through the kitchen. Osborn’s mother was
there with her daughter-in-law and in one or
other of them, perhaps in both, there was a
singularly good cook and housekeeper.

One could see instantly the cleanliness of
the house for all its shabbiness, and the supper
to which we sat down was not only clean, but
bountiful and good. We had soup and boiled
// 119.png
.pn +1
chicken, with rich gravy, and potatoes and
steaming green corn, besides white bread of
the rarest and a sauce for dessert. I looked
with a livelier interest at the women as we
passed out, and I saw in the elder one a serene,
sweet-faced, old farmer’s wife, so trim and
neat that she might have stepped from a New
England country side, while the younger woman,
in her abounding vigor, appeared rather
a product of the West.

Osborn and Tyler had turned the talk at
supper to something that attracted them to
Kearney for the evening, and almost immediately
when the meal was ended they hitched
an Indian pony that was Osborn’s to a light,
rickety sulky and drove to town. Sullivan
and I were left alone, for the old farmer had
disappeared. We lit our pipes and sat down
in the prairie grass with our eyes to the sunset.
The horizon was aglow with crimson and gold
that faded to a clear, cold green before changing
to the purple in which the evening star
was set. The keen gleam of electrics flashed
out over the town, and a breeze rustled faintly
among the crisping blades of corn.
// 120.png
.pn +1

Sullivan and I sat smoking lazily in the twilight.
He had begun to tell me about himself,
and my spirits were rising, for it was no furbished
tale that I heard.

There is little marvel in leading men to talk
of themselves, and workingmen are no exception;
but there is a difference, which is all the
difference in the world, between a narrative
that is evidently inspired by the hope of impressing
you, and one that is a spontaneous self-revelation.

Sullivan was such another waif as Farrell,
but older, and with not so fair a chance of settling
ever into the framework of conventional
living. Twice he had crossed the Atlantic as
a deck-hand on a cattle-ship, and, therefore, he
knew the nether depths of depravity, but he
boasted nothing of his knowledge. Once
only, there came into his voice a note of exultation.
It was at the end of an account of a
thirty days’ term that he once served in the
Bridewell, at Chicago. The description was
admirable, for the memory of it was strong
upon him, and he unconsciously made you see
the prison and the keepers, and the flocking of
// 121.png
.pn +1
the prisoners into the inner court in the morning,
each from his separate cell.

“They knowed me there for <i>Cuckoo</i> Sullivan,”
he said, “which was the name the cops
in Chicago give me; and I guess they’d know
yet who you was after, if you asked at the
Harrison Street Station for <i>Cuckoo</i> Sullivan.”

We moved presently to a little platform
near the line and were sitting on the steps
smoking contentedly while there came to us
the soughing of the night air in the corn.
Sullivan was telling me of a long stay in Oklahoma
and the Indian Territory, of the wild
days of the opening of the reservation, and
wilder days, when, with other adventurers, he
roamed the new lands and lived at give and
take with strange fortune. He told me of his
loves, and they were many and some of them
were dusky; and of the fights that he had
fought, not all of them good; and how, finally,
he had drifted north again as far as Scotia,
Neb., and had worked there as a section-hand
before coming to Buda.

Sullivan and I were friends when we turned
in that night to our cots in the attic under the
// 122.png
.pn +1
shanty roof. Next morning Osborn paired us
as partners, when the day’s work began. On
the stroke of seven we four opened the tool-house
and loaded the car with the crowbars
and wrenches and picks and shovels that would
be needed, then placing our dinner pails on
top, we ran the car out to the line and lifted it
into position.

Twenty years earlier our predecessors, who
laid the line and who used the same tool-house,
took with them each a rifle every day in readiness
for attacks of Indians. The worn sockets
and rests were still to be seen, where the rifles
had stood at night against an inner wall. Giving
the car a start in the direction of Kearney
we jumped aboard, and each taking a handle
of the crank, we were soon flying over the rails.
The sun was obscured, the early morning air
was cool, and the rapid movement exhilarating,
so that the first impression of the job
was a jolly one. But pumping a hand-car is
not the whole of a navvy’s work. Soon we
reached the western end of our section, where
there met us on their car the gang of the section
next our own. Osborn had some talk
// 123.png
.pn +1
with the other boss about certain details of the
work, then lifting the car from the line, we
settled to the day’s task. Osborn and Tyler
worked together and Sullivan and I. Sullivan
seemed not to mind having a green hand
to break in, for he set about it with energy and
not a little skill. There were sunken sleepers
that had to be raised and tamped, and new
coupling bars put in to replace those that had
split, and spikes to be driven where the old
ones were loose, and nuts to be tightened that
were working free of their bolts.

Five hours on end of this were fatiguing; it
was the drill, drill of rough manual labor, but
with the difference of some variety, and there
could not have been a better partner than Sullivan.
He taught me how to tamp about the
sleepers and put the new bars in place and
tighten the nuts, but the noon signal was welcome
as we heard it sounded by the steam whistles
in Kearney.

We joined Osborn and Tyler then, and taking
our dinner-pails from the hand-car, we all
sat down in the prairie grass, settling ourselves
to an hour of keen enjoyment. Slices of bread
// 124.png
.pn +1
and cold meat and a bit of sausage and a piece
of pie and cheese with cold tea, made up each
man’s ration and laid the foundation for a
smoke. Rough hand labor is always hard,
however trained to it one’s muscles may have
been, and ten hours of it daily are apt to have
a deadening effect upon the mind, and time
drags heavily to the end. Yet, when the
nooning is reached, or the day’s work is done,
there come with meat and drink a feeling of
renewal that others cannot know as workingmen
know it, and a solace in tobacco that is
the very lap of ease.

As we lay there in the prairie grass, our eyes
following, dreamily, the smoke as it curled in
the warm sunlight, the talk drifting aimlessly,
eddying now and then about a topic that held
it for a moment, then flowing free again.
Once it came my way.

“When you was living East, did you ever
go to New York?” asked the boss.

“Yes, quite often,” I said.

“Was you ever in Wall Street?”

“Many times.”

“Well, that’s where them” (I omit the intervening
// 125.png
.pn +1
qualifying terms) “bloated bond-holders
lives that we poor devils out here has
to work for.”

It was not worth while to explain that Wall
Street is not a residence quarter, but the statement
had an interest of its own, and so I
probed the boss for what lay under it. There
was nothing, apparently, beyond a vague sense
of injustice which had bred a feeling of hatred
for a class that the Free Silver agitation had
taught him to call “money lords.” These
were a company of men who had got control
of the “money market” and lived, consequently,
in much splendor, in Wall Street, at
the expense of the “producing classes,” which
appeared to consist solely of those who work
with their hands on their own account or for
day’s wages.

The idea would have been not in the least
surprising had it come from a fellow-laborer
in a town, where some wave of well-defined
revolutionary agitation might have touched
him, but coming from a native-born farmer’s
son, grown to a section-boss, it served to deepen
the wonder that one felt in finding so often
// 126.png
.pn +1
among an agrarian population the beginnings
of revolutionary doctrine.

Sullivan did not share the boss’s views.
“Money lords” and “the producing classes”
were but idle words to him. Life was a matter
of working or loafing. If you labored
with your hands, yours was the bondage of
work; if not, you had escaped the primal curse.
His philosophy was luminous in a single sentence
while we were at work in the afternoon.

It was late in the day, but still very hot, for
the clouds had melted in the morning and the
sun gained in strength as the day passed, and
no breeze came to stir the sweltering air. We
were employed now near the eastern end of
the section, where some regrading was necessary
because of weakening in the road-bed.
Sullivan and I were together as before. It
was pick and shovel labor, and, because of
some earlier experience, I did not need much
coaching, so that we were working in silence
for the most part, except that Sullivan now
and then would burst into song. But his
snatches of song grew rarer as the afternoon
wore away and as the muscles in our backs protested
// 127.png
.pn +1
the more against the continued strain.
With leaden feet the minutes plodded slowly
past, sixty minutes to the hour and five hours
of unbroken toil. Like Joshua’s moon at
Ajalon, the sun seemed to stand at gaze, and,
from the mid-western sky, transfixed us with
his heat. Five o’clock came, and the next
hour stretched before us in almost intolerable
length. For some time Sullivan had been
silent, drudging doggedly on. Now, I saw
him draw himself slowly erect, rubbing with
one hand, meanwhile, the small of his back,
while his face expressed comically the pain he
felt, and then he said, and I wish that I could
suggest the rich Irish brogue with which he
said it:

“Ach, I’m that sorry that I didn’t study for
the ministry.”

Two days later the gang from the next section
to the east joined us in the afternoon, and
together we put in a new “frog” in the switch
near the Buda station. They were the Irish
boss with his two sons and the taciturn hand of
the farm-laborer type. The boss remembered
me instantly and commented favorably on my
// 128.png
.pn +1
having taken his advice in applying to Osborn
for a job.

The point of our joining forces was in the
necessity of laying the frog without interfering
with traffic. Osborn had chosen the hour
in the day when there was the longest interval
between trains, and we had everything in
readiness when, at the appointed time, the
other gang met us, so that with our united
labor the frog was in place and secure when
the next train passed.

Much of the talk between the bosses at this
time referred to a later meeting, when, on an
appointed day, the gangs for many miles along
the line were to foregather at Grand Island
under the Division-Superintendent’s orders.
There was to be a general distribution then of
new sleepers along the railway.

What interested me most at the moment
was the tone of the men in speaking of their
superior in the service. I had caught it frequently
in earlier references to the Superintendent
among ourselves. He was the official
in command of all the section-gangs in the division
and directly responsible for the condition
of the road.
// 129.png
.pn +1

The men told me that he had been a section-hand
himself and then a boss, and that he had
worked his way to the position of superintendent
in a long service with the company. The
feeling that they bore him was one of admiration,
not unmixed with fear. They respected
his knowledge of every detail of their work,
and a certain liking for him grew out of the
fact of his having been a laborer like themselves,
but they feared him with an awesome
fear.

I remember his passing one afternoon while
we were at work. We had stood aside at the
coming of a freight train, and, as we stepped
back to our work, we caught sight of a wiry
little man standing on the rear platform of
the caboose, his hands clasping the railing and
his eyes intent on the road-bed. Osborn
thought that he saw the flutter of a piece of
paper in the dust raised by the passing train,
and suspecting that it was an order for himself,
he dropped his tools and searched the embankment,
and even the neighboring cornfield to
the leeward, with an eagerness that might have
marked a hunt for hid treasure. He could
// 130.png
.pn +1
find nothing, however, and for the rest of the
day, and I know not for how much longer,
the incident was upon his mind with a sense
of keen anxiety.

When the day appointed for distributing the
sleepers came, we boarded at Buda an eastbound
passenger train, and were pressed into
a smoking-car already overcrowded by bosses
and section-hands. Osborn vouched for us to
the conductor, as the other bosses did for their
men when we picked up a gang at almost every
station.

It was a welcome escape to get off at
Grand Island. Like boys set free from school
we clambered over the long freight-train, laden
with sleepers, that stood waiting for us on a
siding. Our orders were perfectly clear.
We were to distribute ourselves through the
train and, at a given signal, to unlade the
sleepers as fast as we could, throwing them
along the road-bed well free of the line. Each
man was to remember, moreover, that, at the
end of his own section, he was to leave the
train.

I found myself in a box-car with three other
// 131.png
.pn +1
navvies, all strangers to me. Sleepers lay
piled to the roof from end to end of the floor,
with only a passage across the middle wide
enough for us to begin the work. A blue-eyed
young Swede and I had just agreed to be
partners when the Superintendent passed in
his way along the train, noting the number of
men in each car.

In a few moments we were off, and we had
not gone far before the prearranged signal
came. Then we bent to the work with a will.
It was a break in the regular routine and we
took it as a lark. Two men attacked one side
of the passage and the Swede and I the other.
Soon it was a race between us to see which
could unload the faster.

The train moved slowly, discharging sleepers
that piled themselves in grotesque confusion
along the sides of the embankment, while
above the noise of the cars, rose the voices of
the men as they shouted excitedly in the unwonted
rivalry.

Before I realized that we had gone half so
far, I caught sight of the Buda station. Our
car was nearly empty, and as nearly empty at
// 132.png
.pn +1
our end as at the other, the Swede and I
thought, but our fellow-navvies claimed a victory
when, at the end of the section, I jumped
to the ground with much care to avoid the flying
sleepers. Osborn was there, and soon the
other members of the gang gathered, and then
we returned to the usual work until six o’clock.

For two weeks or more I remained at work
on this section, then I knew that I must be
going; for the autumn was at hand, and I
aimed to cross the Rockies and reach the
milder climate of the Southwest by the beginning
of winter. But the actual parting
with the gang presented the usual embarrassments.
I had become used to the men, and
they to me, and we worked together harmoniously
and were on terms of easiest friendliness.
Besides, no one had appeared who
would take my place, and there were many
sleepers to be laid.

I always stipulated with my employers at
the beginning of an engagement that I wished
to be free to go when I pleased, as they were
free to discharge me when they wished, but
this rarely smoothed the way of going, for they
// 133.png
.pn +1
lost sight of the agreement as they grew accustomed
to me as a hand.

When I told Osborn one evening that I
must be gone in a day or two, his eyes took on
a look of perplexity that did not relieve my embarrassment,
and he began to plead the pressure
of the work and the difficulty of getting
section-hands until I felt like a deserter. But
there was no help for it, and early one September
morning, after reluctant good-byes to the
family and the men, I set off down the line
with my wages in one pocket and in another a
luncheon that the boss’s mother put up for me.

When the sun was setting that evening, I
had entered a region where the cornfields were
fewer, where the cattle country had begun,
and the alkali shone white in the soil, and the
bones of dead cattle lay bleaching on the plain.
// 134.png
.pn +1
// 135.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.nf c
<xl>“A BURRO-PUNCHER”</xl>
.nf-
.sp 4
// 136.png
.pn +1
// 137.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch04
“A BURRO-PUNCHER”
.sp 2
Mike Price was a prospector by nature;
his prospecting through the summer
and autumn of 1892 in the Wagon
Wheel Gap country of southwestern Colorado
was a mere incident in a long career.
Phœnix, Ariz., was his head-quarters, and he
would fain return there for the Indian summer
of its winter climate; for he hated snow
and the hard cold of the Rocky Mountain
camps, where, as he said, a man must hibernate
until spring. But Phœnix was the best part
of 600 miles away across a thinly settled frontier.
Burros and blankets and food for the
journey were to be had only for ready money,
and Price had not “struck it rich”; indeed,
he had not struck it at all. One after another
the parts of his camping outfit had gone into
a pawnbroker’s shop at Creede, in the progress
of a luckless season, until the late autumn
// 138.png
.pn +1
found him without burro or blanket or bacon,
and bereft even of the “gun” (a six-shooter)
which General —— had given him in recognition
of his services as a scout.

It was late November when I met him, and
Price was making a precarious living at odd
jobs for civil engineers. One of these was my
friend Hamilton, who had known Price for
years and who proved himself a friend in need
to both of us, for he brought us together and
proposed the journey which took us to Phœnix,
and which gave me six weeks’ experience as a
“burro-puncher.”

You could trust Hamilton to find a way out.
There is scarcely a phase of frontier life that
he did not know from personal experience,
and he saw at a glance that Price’s position and
my own would exactly complement each other
in furthering a plan which was common to us
both. Price wanted to reach Phœnix, and so
did I; he knew the way but was without the
means of travel, while I, knowing nothing of
the country, yet had some store of savings.

Wages were high at Creede. The miners
were getting $3, and I, as an unskilled laborer,
// 139.png
.pn +1
working with a gang that was cutting a road
down Bachelor Mountain from the New York
Chance Mine to Creede, was paid $2.50 a day.
Our board and lodging cost us $7 a week, but
they were worth it, and, even at that rate,
there remained a considerable margin for possible
saving.

Hamilton knew my plans; he was one of the
few whom I had told, in the course of my wandering,
of the object of the expedition. We
had been spending an evening with a company
of kindred Bohemians at the house of a mine
superintendent, and were returning together
to his quarters in the quiet of two o’clock in
the morning through a world white with the
first snow of winter and dazzling under a full
moon.

I had money enough to take me to Phœnix
by rail, and it seemed the height of folly to go
in any other way, so I began to explain why I
wished to walk and why I had already walked
most of the way from the Atlantic. Hamilton
listened patiently, but without interest, I
thought, until abruptly he turned upon me
with approval, immeasurably beyond my desert,
// 140.png
.pn +1
yet showing so sympathetic an insight
into the possible service of such work, that I
saw again, as by a flash, the rich human quality
that had already endeared the man.

“And so you worked with the road gang
on Bachelor Mountain to get enough to grub
stake you to Phœnix?” he said, and he
laughed aloud. Then he swore—deeply, resonantly,
and from the heart.

Price was sent for on the next day, and, in
the afternoon, he turned up in Hamilton’s
office, a dark, bearded, keen-eyed Irishman,
slender and wiry, and all alert at the prospect
of getting back to “God’s country,” which in
his phrase meant Arizona. Soon, not merely
Hamilton and I, but our friends the barrister
and the editor and the grave mine superintendent
were involved in preparation for the trip.
We accompanied Price to the pawnbroker’s
shop, where he identified his belongings, and I
redeemed them. Then we all set about selecting
additional blankets and a fresh store of
food.

Our pack animals could not have carried
their loads, had we taken all that was pressed
// 141.png
.pn +1
upon us for the journey. Price borrowed a
shot-gun from the private arsenal that was put
at our disposal, and I a six-shooter, and we
gladly accepted gifts of tobacco until our pockets
were bursting with plenty.

Weird as it was, our little caravan was but
the typical prospector’s outfit as we moved in
single file through the winding street of the
mining camp, an object of interest only to the
four friends who bade us good-by with many
slaps on the back and with affectionate oaths.
Price was mounted on his Indian pony and I
on Sacramento, a burro of uncommon size,
while our effects were packed on the backs of
two other burros, Beecher and California by
name, with two of California’s foals trotting
abreast as a running accompaniment to the
show.

Past the shops and saloons and dance-halls
and hotels we wound our way on among the
frail shanties at the outskirts of the camp, until
we struck the wagon trail that led southward
through a ranching country in the direction
of the pass over the mountain to Durango.
Snow lay lightly on the ground; vast tracts,
// 142.png
.pn +1
however, had been swept clear by the wind, so
that ours was an unobstructed course, except
where we had to plough through occasional
drifts, which our animals did with ease, tossing
the feathery flakes until they flashed again in
the clear sunlight of a frosty morning. The
burros were at their best, keeping the trail at
a steady pace that never hinted at the habit of
wandering. Price was high-spirited at the
thought of Phœnix, and, between snatches of
song, he regaled me with the glories of the
Indian summer which we should find across
the range. I could well share his light-heartedness.
As far as Creede I had walked alone,
picking the way with ease, but, between Creede
and Phœnix, there lay a stretch of the fast-fading
frontier which I longed to cross on foot,
yet knew that I could not without a guide.
And here, as by miracle, one had appeared in
the person of Price, who knew the land and
them that dwelt therein, and who was more
than guide in being a philosopher and friend.
The keen air quickened our blood, as we
breathed deep of its rarefied purity and felt the
mild warmth of the winter sun like the glow
// 143.png
.pn +1
of rising spirits. The mountain-peaks rose
white and still above the dark ruling of the
timber line, yet radiant in the light, and serene
in a peace that passeth knowledge; and the
head waters of the Rio Grande swept past us
in streams that were dark against the snow, but
ablaze where they reflected the sun.

It was long past noon before I thought of
stopping, and then I found that there were to
be no mid-day stops on this expedition, for the
days were so short that camp had to be made
between four and five in the afternoon, and, as
it was difficult to get started in the morning
much before eight o’clock, we could give at
the best but little more than eight hours in the
day to travel.

For some time that afternoon we had been
in the shadow of a mountain to the west, and
the light was fading fast, when, as we rose
upon a knoll above the stream whose bed we
were ascending, Price saw that it was a good
camping-ground, and the caravan came to a
halt. Wood was abundant about us, so that
water was soon boiling, and slices cut from a
frozen shoulder of beef were presently frying
// 144.png
.pn +1
in the saucepan, while the tea drew to a fearful
strength at the fire’s edge. After supper and
a smoke, we made ready our bed. An old
piece of canvas, some seven feet by fourteen,
was first spread upon level ground; then we arranged
upon half of it all the gunny-sacks that
we had brought as cushions for the pack-saddles.
These formed a mattress, over which
we spread our blankets, drawing up finally the
unused half of the canvas as a top covering.
Going to bed consisted simply of taking off our
boots and folding our coats for pillows, then
disappearing with all speed under the blankets,
with the canvas drawn well over our heads to
keep out the bitter night cold of that altitude
in late November. Our animals browsed near
the camp, the bells about their necks tinkling
as they moved, until they, too, found shelter
and settled down to rest.

When I wakened it was from deepest sleep,
and I looked out from under cover for some
sign of day, but there was none. The stars
were shining undimmed, with the effect of nearness
which brought back vividly an illusion of
childhood. Nothing in their position gave me
// 145.png
.pn +1
a hint of the time, but Price, on waking, saw at
a glance that the dawn was near. Scarcely
was the fire lit and water put on to boil before
the dark bulks of the mountains to the east
were clear cut against a brightening sky.
Breakfast over and the dishes washed, we had
a smoke and, having fed the animals from a
little store of grain, we saddled and packed
them for the day’s march.

Nothing in the previous day’s experience
suggested the rigor of this afternoon’s progress.
All went prosperously in the morning,
for we were still following the wagon trail, and
the burros kept it as by instinct. Only the
snow was deepening, which was a reminder of
the warnings we received in Creede that we
were attempting the pass dangerously late in
the year. What with snow and the loss of
leaves, the “look” of the region had so far
changed since Price passed that way in spring
that, with small wonder, he could not find the
lead of the foot-trail that crosses the Divide.
Again and again we struck in to the left only
to discover presently that we were following a
false lead, until Price, impatient of further
// 146.png
.pn +1
dallying, boldly led the way in an ascent of a
trackless mountain whose farther side, he
knew, would disclose the lost trail.

A long, steep climb by a well-trodden way is
difficult at the best for pack animals, but we
were now in a forest with the course obstructed
by undergrowth and the trunks of fallen
trees, and the uncertain footing covered with
treacherous snow. The burros took it splendidly
from the first, straining their muscles in
a toilsome climb that was doubly hard because
of its obstacles. But as the hours passed and
the way grew more difficult, their strength began
to fail. Then came long resting spells,
followed by spurts of frantic climbing.
Again and again we seemed to be nearing the
top, only to find the crest of a ridge with another
summit towering far beyond. Presently
the burros were falling from sheer fatigue.
With a few yards of upward struggle, down
they would sink exhausted, and, after letting
them rest, Price and I had our hands full in
dragging them to their feet again.

It was nearing sunset when we gained the
top, and, once there, all our troubles vanished.
// 147.png
.pn +1
We passed from the cover of the wood out
upon a treeless slope, swept clear of snow and
covered by the past summer’s growth of grass,
brown and dry and excellent fodder. A
stream flowed through the natural meadow,
and on a ledge above it, as plain as day, was
the winding trail making off in the direction
of the Divide. We gratefully camped there
that night, while our tired beasts gorged themselves
with grass.

Whatever the difficulties of crossing were
to be, we were clearly not to be hampered by
foul weather. The night was as still and cold
as the last had been, and the morning again
was cloudless. We were up by starlight as
before, and the camp-fire was sending volleys
of glowing sparks into the surrounding darkness
when the signs of dawn appeared. I
went to the brook for water and was back just
in time to see the sunrise from the camp. We
were in a narrow valley that stretched southwestward
in an upward trend toward the summit
of the range. From its northeastern opening
we could see far over a confused mass of
mountains whose outlines grew clearer in the
// 148.png
.pn +1
return of day. With infinite majesty the
light streamers flung themselves across the sky,
paling the bright stars; and, when a distant
snow-peak caught the first clear ray, all the
others seemed to lift their heads in an ecstasy
of praise and welcome. In another moment
the eastern wall of our valley was fringed by
a tracery of fire, where level beams shone
through the trees which stood out against the
sky. And last, upon us in the depth of the
valley, the sun rose, prodigal of his splendor
and of his gifts of light and life.

I had left Price squatting near the fire with
his face to the east as he cut slices of bacon into
a saucepan. On my return from the brook I
found him still sitting there, but grown oblivious
to bacon. His forearms were resting on
his knees, while loosely in one hand he held a
knife and a piece of bacon in the other. From
under an old felt hat, long, black, matted hair
fell upon his neck and mingled with a dark,
unkempt beard. His face, blackened by the
smoke of the camp-fire, was lifted to the eastern
sky, and his eyes were on the sunrise.
Such a look, transfixed with reverence and
// 149.png
.pn +1
wonder, seemed to link him with some early
epoch of the race, when the sense of power and
beauty awoke in man; and as he drew himself
erect without lifting his eyes from the scene
before him, “It’s not strange,” he remarked,
“that men have worshipped the sun.”

The snow grew deeper with every mile of
the march that morning. We were nearing
the Divide, and one evidence of it was the
piercing wind that blew down the gorge. Not
since the morning of the first day out had
either of us ridden; for the animals had as
much as they could do to carry themselves and
their packs, and now we found that we must
help them by opening a path through the
snow. It lay a foot deep before us, then two
feet and more as we mounted the Divide, so
that Price and I were soon alternating in the
work of breaking a way. One of us would
plunge through until fagged out, then the
other would take his place in treading down
the drift, and so we forged ahead, a few yards
at a time, wet to the skin with melting snow
and cut to the bone by the wind.

I do not know how far we travelled that
// 150.png
.pn +1
day; it could not have been many miles, and
I do not care to think of possible consequences,
had we been overtaken by a storm, instead of
having the fairest possible winter weather.
But we put in more than eight hours of continuous
work and were repaid in the late
afternoon by reaching camping-ground on the
western side of the Divide, almost as good as
that which we found for the night before.

The next day’s, Tuesday’s, march was one
that dwells delightfully in memory—not for
any element of excitement, but for the simple
joy of it. All day we descended by a trail that
wound through cañon after cañon, crossing
and recrossing the streams whose waters were
flowing toward the Pacific, as those of the day
before were to find a final outlet in the Atlantic.
It was cold, but it seemed like spring
in contrast with the day before, for the sun
shone bright, and birds were in the trees, and
here and there the snow had melted, giving
to the soil the suggestion of returning life.

The burros plainly shared the feeling of relief
in reaching a more passable region, and
the art of burro-punching began, consequently,
// 151.png
.pn +1
to disclose its difficulties. From one side
and then the other of the trail they would
break away in all directions, exploring the surrounding
country, never with an air of mischief,
but always with a sober, dogged perversity
that was the more exasperating because
it wore a mask of reason. Once back into the
trail, they might keep it faultlessly for miles
on end, and then, from no apparent cause, begin
once more to wander. They were most
difficult to manage at the fords. Generally
they scattered to the four winds at the first
approach to water, and when we had corralled
them again and forced them down to
the brink, they would stand calmly, planted
ankle-deep in the stream, resolutely determined
not to move. It was then that Price
gave vent to real profanity, and I am bound to
own that it was effective. When beating and
prodding and the milder invective failed to
urge the burros forward, Price would stand
back, pale with rage, and begin to swear, calling
upon all his gods and blasting the reputations
of his beasts unto the third and fourth
generation of their ancestors. By some subtle
// 152.png
.pn +1
perception they seemed to understand that this
meant business, and slowly at first, but presently,
as though they rather enjoyed the water,
they waded through and started down the trail
beyond.

We camped that night in a narrow cañon
whose level bed was well grown with trees and
walled by scarped cliffs, which rose sheer above
it. Price said that it formed a miniature
Yosemite, and certainly it made good camping-ground;
for with plenty of wood and
water, it was well protected from the wind,
and we slept there in great comfort. But our
fare was growing monotonous. We soon exhausted
the supply of beef and had since been
living upon bacon and bread, so that we heartily
welcomed the sight of a ranchman’s cabin
near the end of the next day’s march, for there
we purchased a peck of potatoes and thus enlarged
our bill of fare to bacon and “spuds”
and bread and gravy.

Thanksgiving-day was celebrated by faring
sumptuously in the evening and sleeping under
cover. And it was the more delightful celebration
for being wholly unpremeditated.
// 153.png
.pn +1
There was no prospect through the day of anything
but the usual march and camp in the
open at night. We were plainly in a more
populous region, for we had struck a wagon trail
again, and repeatedly, in the morning, we
met farm wagons laden with solemn families
in Sunday dress. As the afternoon wore on
we grew hungrier for thinking of Thanksgiving
dinners. At dusk we were passing a
ranch upon which the hay presses had just
ceased working for the day. A little farther
down the road we overtook two men who were
about to enter a wooden building, which
proved to be a deserted school-house. Price
hailed them and they turned, standing in the
open door. Practised as he was in the amenities
of the frontier, it took him no time to
strike up an acquaintance, and soon we were
bade welcome to share the school-house as a
camping-place.

Our hosts were a young American frontiersman
and his “partner,” an Indian, who together
had a contract for pressing hay on the
neighboring ranch, and who were living meanwhile
in this deserted building. Having
// 154.png
.pn +1
admitted us, they completed their welcome by
doing everything in their power for our comfort.
They arranged with the owner to pasture
our animals on the ranch for the night,
and showed us where to find wood for a fire
and where on the floor to spread our bed.
And when the evening meal was ready, they
proposed that we should club together, giving
us of their fresh meat and roasted Indian corn
and steaming hot bread in exchange for our
“spuds” and bacon. But we had some chance
of making return, for they had no tobacco to
compare with ours, and far into the night we
sat talking, over pipes fragrant of good weed.

Price and I were making progress in acquaintance,
and every day I had fresh cause
for self-congratulation at my extraordinary
luck in having fallen in with so good a guide.
Of excellent Irish family, Price was not without
education and a taste for letters, although
he had chosen, almost as a boy, the career of
an adventurer on the frontier. And now at
middle life, having ranged the Southwest as
few men have done, and having seen all phases
of its life and shared most of them, he was
// 155.png
.pn +1
looking forward to further casual living, perfectly
content so long as he had a camping
outfit and could wander as he pleased over the
face of nature. That some day he would
“strike it rich” he never doubted—and may
his faith come true. Meanwhile he was getting
a good deal out of life. Nature in her
milder moods was a constant solace and a joy
to him. In long marches through golden Indian
summer days, he sang and spouted verses
of his own, and told me veritable Ulysses’s
tales of men and their strange ways. The few
books which he had read he had made his
own, for his memory was retentive, and he
never forgot, apparently, a face or a name,
so that his progress through the country was
like a walk about his own neighborhood.

With the instinctive, gentlemanlike reserve
of the Western frontiersman, he never questioned
me about myself; he was far more interested
in what knowledge I might have gathered,
which he could add to his own. Oddly
enough, it was the little reading that I had
done in philosophy that seemed to attract him
most. Many a night when it was mild enough
// 156.png
.pn +1
to sleep with our heads uncovered we lay side
by side, “overarched by gorgeous night,” gazing
into the starry firmament, and I would
tell him what I could of theories of the universe
from Thales to Herbert Spencer, feeling
all the while the tension of his mind as he
reached out eagerly for these guesses at the
mystery of things.

It happened that I had been reading “Coningsby,”
at Creede, and Prince slipped the
copy into his pocket as we left the camp. He
devoured it by our camp-fires at night. The
story held him, but most of all he was spellbound
by its literary charm, and he added a
quaint reason for his liking in the remark:

“You know,” he said to me, “Lord Beaconsfield
was always square with the Irish.”

His national partisanship was of the stanchest,
and he had always given to the Irish fund
when he could; but the outcome of the fight
in Committee Boom No. 15 had been too much
for him, and he would stoutly maintain that
never again, so long as the “traitors” who
had turned against Parnell were in the ascendant,
would he interest himself in furthering
// 157.png
.pn +1
Home Rule—threads of vital connection
which were a little strange, I thought, between
points so widely severed as St. Stephen’s and
the deserts of Arizona.

Elsewhere I have already sketched in outline
our trip as we walked south together from
Durango to the San Juan, then through the
Navajo Reservation to the high plateau of
northern New Mexico, where, utterly deserted
by fair weather, we camped for a week, while
a cold wave swept over us, forcing the thermometer
down to ten and twelve degrees below
zero, and nearly freezing us and our animals
in the still cold of the winter nights.

Even after we got under way again and
were making progress southward in the direction
of the “rimrock” of the Mogollon
Mountains, persistent ill-luck followed us in
the shape of almost nightly falls of snow and
rain, which added nothing to the comfort of
sleeping on the ground or walking across an almost
trackless waste. But if we were disappointed
here, Price’s promise of Indian summer
was abundantly fulfilled when once we
had waded through the snow in the great
// 158.png
.pn +1
primeval forests that cover the northern slopes
of the Mogollons, and made the abrupt descent
of the “rimrock.” It was like the contrast
of Florida with our Northern winter.
The live-oak and budding cottonwood and the
warm sun and sprouting grass gave us royal
welcome from the cold and snow beyond; and,
at the end of the first day’s journey in this
region, we came out upon a ranch. It was
thirty miles to the nearest neighbor, and the
ranchman and his wife were glad to see anyone,
even casual “burro-punchers,” like Price
and me. There chanced to be a considerable
company at the ranch that night. An outfit
of three men who were hunting mountain lion
through the range for the sake of the bounty
on their scalps had come there to camp, bringing
with them the carcass of a bear. And the
postman, whose beat took him from the Santa
Fé line southward through some Mormon settlements
and on to scattered ranches north of
the Tonto Basin, was also quartered there. So
that we sat down more than a dozen strong to
dine on bear steak and potatoes and bread and
coffee; and when dinner was over, Price and
// 159.png
.pn +1
I again had the good fortune to find that our
tobacco suited well the taste of the company.
We were gathered now in the living-room of
the cabin. Some of the men were seated on
the floor and others in rough, hand-made chairs
about a wood fire in a large, open fireplace.
The talk ranged at random over phases of
hard living known to such men as these. It
was varied and rich and sometimes racy. In
it Price shone as a bright, particular star.
None had travelled the Southwest so thoroughly
as he, or experienced so much of its characteristic
life. Then his native readiness at
narrative stood him in good stead, and, penniless
prospector that he was, he held unchallenged
the centre of the stage.

The door of the dining-room stood open,
and, when I had finished my pipe, I joined the
ranchman’s wife, who sat beside the table in a
rocking-chair, holding in her arms her oldest
child, a boy of five or six. She seemed glad
to have someone to talk to. The conversation
at table had swept from end to end in a manner
diverting to her, but in which she as little
dreamed of joining as a bird would venture
// 160.png
.pn +1
with untried wings into a high wind. She
was too delicately reared to be at home in the
thickening tobacco-smoke of the living-room
and so she was alone with the child, the hired
woman being in the kitchen. I praised the
country side which she and her husband had
chosen as their home, and told her how well it
contrasted with a region only a few miles to
the north; but, if I found a way to her heart
at all, it was in genuine admiration of the boy,
whose light hair rested in moist curls about his
glowing face, as he lay sleeping in his mother’s
arms. She was not a discontented woman—far
from it; she was young, and her eyes shone
with health and with vital interest in the
things about her. But it was rarely that she
saw anyone from the world outside, and I was
a stranger, and when I owned to having been
in the Northwest, she told me eagerly that her
own people and her husband’s lived “back east
in Minnesota,” where they both were born and
bred.

How can I suggest the pathos of it? She
was not complaining and yet, as she went on
telling me of an earlier time, it was almost as
// 161.png
.pn +1
a captive might have spoken of the wide range
of living when he was free. Life in constant
contact with her friends and the breadth of
their many interests was in such striking contrast
to existence on a ranch, with the nearest
neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with
never a look from year to year over the rugged
hills that formed the horizon.

One could see at a glance the opposite effects
of the change upon the two natures. Her husband,
native-born and country-bred, like herself,
and schooled as a man must be whose
bringing up is in a community which draws its
blood and traditions pure from New England,
yet had become more a frontiersman every
year, in whom the memories of earlier things
faded fast before the dominant realities of his
new surroundings. She, on the contrary, cherished
these memories of her own—her home
and friends and church associations and Chautauqua
circle (she told me particularly of that)
until they were enshrined within her, and one
could but see that, however loneliness might
oppress her, she had an escape which must
have furnished at times an enjoyment keener,
// 162.png
.pn +1
perhaps, than any which real experience would
have brought.

I have forgotten its name, but I think that
it was known as “Young’s Valley,” a region
some distance south of the “rimrock” and
north of the hills which hem in the Tonto
Basin. There were several ranches there, and
a well-defined trail led on, by way of San Reno
Pass, to Phœnix. When we entered the valley
Price was all for veering off to the southwest
and reaching Phœnix by the Natural
Bridge, which he wished me to see. We left
the trail near the first cabin which we passed
in the valley, a deserted cabin for the time, and
struck across the grass-grown hills in search
of another way. Soon we were in a maze of
trails; they were leading in every direction,
but they were cattle-paths, and we came upon
herds feeding over the winter-brown hills. It
was a gently rolling country at the first, where
Price had not the smallest difficulty in steering
a course; for, although he had never been
there before, yet the way had been described
to him and he had no fear of losing it. Our
only danger lay, apparently, in exhausting our
// 163.png
.pn +1
provisions before reaching an inhabited region
beyond. But we thought little of that, and
entered light-heartedly enough upon an exploration
that was new and attractive to us
both.

Trouble began with the weakening of our
burros. We had very little grain when we
left the Tonto trail, and we counted upon fodder
enough from a grazing country. But the
grass grew thinner as we went, and the leanness
of the cattle attested the leanness of the
land, until we began to fear that our beasts
would not have strength enough to pull
through. Moreover, the country became increasingly
rough, so that the effort of travel
was the greater. Soon there came a day when
our animals were weak and tottering under
their loads, and we ourselves had to begin the
march on a breakfast of tea and a few boiled
beans, which exhausted our store. Still Price
was confident of getting through, and, if the
burros could hold out, there was prospect of
plenty by night.

In the middle of the morning we found lying
beside the trail a cow that was plainly dying.
// 164.png
.pn +1
For an hour we worked over her, trying
to discover evidences of a wound or of a broken
leg, and trying, too, to ease her pain. I left
her alive regretfully, but Price advised against
shooting her.

Matters grew serious that afternoon. The
trail became hopelessly lost, so that not even
Price, with his developed instinct, could find
it again. We were in the heart of the hills
now, with cañons opening in strange confusion
about us. One after another we explored
them, only to find each a “box-cañon” at the
end. Price was sure that our desired country
lay just beyond, and it was maddening,
late in the day, to acknowledge that he could
find no way out but the one by which we entered.
It was a sorry retreat; hungry and
worn we went supperless into camp. By rare
good luck, however, we hit upon camping-ground
where there was more grass than we
had seen for some time, and in the morning
our burros and the pony were comparatively
revived, fit again for a hard journey. And we
gave it them.

Price and I had had nothing to eat for
// 165.png
.pn +1
twenty-four hours, and very little then.
Meanwhile we had been working hard in keen
mountain air, and I was so hungry by the time
that we got back to the cow, now dead beside
the trail, that I proposed our eating some of
her. Price quickly put an end to the plan,
however, not on hygienic grounds, but by explaining
that the cattlemen, if they found her
mutilated, would conclude that she had been
killed, and would make matters lively for us in
consequence, hanging being the not uncommon
penalty for this offence.

One does not keep close count of days in
wandering over a frontier, and it was only an
aggravation of our plight to remember that it
was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as
well. But if Christmas heightened the sense
of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting
to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short
cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the
afternoon upon open hills, from which we not
only saw a section of Young’s Valley, but, rising
clear from the middle of it, a column of
blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s
cabin. We wasted no time in covering the intervening
// 166.png
.pn +1
miles and then we lifted, light-heartedly,
the latch of the road-gate and, with the
easy assurance of the frontier, drove our animals
into the yard beside the corral. For
some reason we had not been seen from the
cabin, so Price walked on to the door, while I
mounted guard over the burros. From a seat
in the sun on an old hen-coop I could watch
them as they nibbled the short grass, while
from the cabin came peals of laughter, denoting
that Price had fallen among friends who
were keeping Christmas festival.

I was willing enough to rest outside, knowing
that we had reached a hospitable roof and
that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for
some time, I presently began to question
what was keeping Price, when the cabin-door
opened and two women appeared. As they
walked down the footpath to the gate, I gathered
that they were neighbors returning from
a Christmas call. But this was the least interesting
inference, and I was totally at a loss
for others. The wonder grew as they came
nearer. They were young and faultlessly
dressed, and one of them was beautiful.
// 167.png
.pn +1
Their dress was of the kind that charms with
its perfect simplicity and the air of natural
distinction with which it is worn. They
rested frank eyes on me for a moment as they
passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking their
thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding
open the gate. Who they were remained a
mystery, and I was content to have it so, for
they left me not without a sense of Christmas
visitation, which stirred again the memories
of my own “God’s country.”

The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed,
and soft of speech, and when he and
Price came out together they were stanch
friends on the strength of an earlier acquaintance,
and we had the freedom of the ranch.
We unpacked and corralled the animals and
then made ready for dinner. Not for two
days had we tasted food, and now we were
seated with our host and hostess and their two
sons at a table which groaned under sweet
potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and
great dishes full of steaming “hog and
hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas
cheer. For two days we stayed at the Virginian’s
// 168.png
.pn +1
ranch and then, having purchased
from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the
march by way of the Tonto Basin and Fort
McDowell to Phœnix.

On New-year’s-day we were camped at Fort
McDowell; and, when we set out early on the
next morning, there remained but about thirty
miles to Phœnix, so we resolved to cover it in a
single march. Night found us still some miles
from the city, but the night was clear and
flooded with moonlight. The moon made
plain the way, yet played fantastically over
the face of the country. Long reaches of
white sand were converted into Arabian deserts,
with pilgrim caravans moving across
them; the irrigated ranches were transformed
into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was
heightened by the exquisite softness of the
night, and then there were stretches of uncompromising
Arizona desert, dusty and cactus-grown
and redolent of alkali.

It was nearing midnight when we entered
the town. Price directed the way to a corral
where he was known, and where we left the
animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we
// 169.png
.pn +1
fared forth to see his friends. It was precisely
as though Price had invited me around to
his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as
we entered it, I saw at once its typical character.
At the left of the entrance was a bar,
gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while
down the deep recesses of the room were faro
and roulette tables and tables for poker. The
groups about them were formed of “cow-punchers,”
and prospectors and “Greasers”
and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling
and intermingling with a freedom that suggested
that in gambling there is a touch of
nature that makes the whole world kin.

But more immediately interesting to us was
a group which stood beside the bar. It was
made up, as I found, of politicians, high in
territorial office, all of whom knew Price and
hailed him cordially while asking after his
luck. For some time we stood talking with
them, then one of their number, himself not a
politician but a business man, proposed our
joining him at supper. We accepted, I the
more delightedly because he, of all the group,
had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome,
// 170.png
.pn +1
he had the bearing of a gentleman, and
what he told me of himself confirmed my own
impression of a richly varied past. Far into
the night we talked, and I could well believe
him when he said that the fascination of the
life which he had led on the frontier had so far
grown upon him that, while he was glad to go
back at times to his former home in New York,
he could no longer remain contented there,
hearing as he always did after a few months,
at most, the call back to the wild freedom of
the plains. It was under the spell of what
he said, enforced by my little experience as a
“burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that
night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and
when I wakened in the morning and found letters
urging my return to the East, I was conscious
of an indifference to the idea which was
wholly new to my experience.
// 171.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.nf c
<xl>INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS</xl>
.nf-
.sp 4
// 172.png
.pn +1
// 173.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch05
INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS
.sp 2
If anything is wanting to darken the picture
of life in city slums, it is a sense of
the needlessness of much of the suffering.
And this is the sense which I cannot escape in
looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from
the vantage point of nearly a year of walking
and working through regions west of that city.
I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered
San Francisco in February of the following
year, having gone on foot, in the meantime,
through Illinois and southern Minnesota and
western Iowa, and almost from end to end of
Nebraska and Colorado and through some of
New Mexico and much of Arizona and California.
It was not in the character of a
tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the
journey; and the only notable fact about it was
that I not only never lacked for labor, but I
almost never had to ask for it, having scores of
// 174.png
.pn +1
opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers
hard up for hands. I am well aware
of the abnormal in my experiment and of its
little worth apart from the value of experience
to myself, and I know how slight a connection
with the deeper causes which give rise
to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready
employment in the country may have. Yet,
as one result of personal contact, I cannot help
seeing much of the misery of the mass in the
light of individuals suffering wretchedly for
want of knowledge of a better chance.

We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city’s
slums as though they were a local evil in the
town, quite remote in connection with the rest
of the corporate whole, while in truth we
know, in our haunting, new-found knowledge
of social solidarity, that they form a sore which
denotes disease in every part of the body
politic. The conviction grows upon us that it
is often at the cost of much suffering to our
kind that we have food to eat and raiment to
put on, and the immunity from personal responsibility
which once we felt in paying high
prices for our wares is fast being undermined
// 175.png
.pn +1
by increased acquaintance with the ramifications
of the “sweating system.” Indeed, we
seem to see that, from the very frame of
things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that
the unwitting oppressors of the poor are often
the poor themselves, while the destruction of
the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that
things were growing worse, and that hope lies
that way, because it points to ultimate dissolution
and a new order. I find it impossible to
share this form of optimism, and I cannot see
that things are really getting worse, but rather
incomparably better as measured, for example,
by the standard of the last century of industrial
progress. And so far from seeing hope in
a belief that matters are getting worse, I find
it rather in the view that much that is worst
in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in
a society which grows increasingly conscious
of vital interdependence and relationship.
Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here
is a glimpse of some of them as they appear
in a partial record of fragments of two days’
experience in Chicago.

I was working as a hand-truckman in a factory
// 176.png
.pn +1
far out on Blue Island Avenue. My
wages were $1.50 a day, and I was paying for
board and lodging, in a tenement across the
way, $4.25 a week. As one result, I was saving
money and would soon be able to leave the
job and write up my notes, while widening my
acquaintance with the town before looking for
other work. Already I had a little knowledge
of the city. For two weeks after entering
it I had been among its unemployed and
had suffered some and had seen the real suffering
among others of my class, before I found
occupation in a West-side factory.

It was during those two weeks that I came
to know a widow, with whom this tale is first
concerned. I met her early in December; it
was now nearing the end of January, and we
factory hands were marking with delight the
lengthening of the days, for we were beginning
to have a little daylight left when work
was over. At last one afternoon the setting
sun came pouring through the kitchen window
while we were washing up for supper at Mrs.
Schultz’s boarding-house. That was because
it was Saturday, and we had quit at five
// 177.png
.pn +1
o’clock, being given, as was the custom in the
factory, a half hour on Saturday afternoons.

The usual week’s end excitement was running
high among the men. Gibes and louder
talk than common were rife, as black hands
and faces came white from soap and successive
basins of hot water. Some of the men were
going in the evening to a “show,” others to a
“fancy-dress ball,” and a few were saying
nothing. We scattered widely after supper,
leaving the house to the family, which must
have been a welcome change to them, for generally,
through the week, we all foregathered
in the sitting-room at night and romped with
the children and played cards until bed-time.

Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow’s name,
and my first errand that evening took me to
her home, which was in the basement of a
building on Boston Avenue. We were both
concerned in pressing a claim which she had
upon her husband’s people, a highly just
claim, I thought; for he had deserted her some
time before his death, leaving her alone in the
support of herself and their two children.
Why she had ever come to the city, I could
// 178.png
.pn +1
never make clearly out, beyond what had
seemed to be to her a strong appeal to her
reason that, if she must make her own living
and the children’s, she could hope to do it
better in town than in the country where she
was born and bred. And the marvel was that
she had succeeded in keeping them all alive.
The city had, of course, furnished an awful
disillusionment. The children proved an insuperable
barrier to employment at domestic
service, and, failing to find any other labor, she
was rescued finally from starvation by getting
a job from a “sweater.” She deserved success,
for she was an heroic creature. To hear
her describe the struggle, you would gather
that hers had been the best of luck. She
merely wanted a chance to work, so that they
might live; and had she not found it, just
when she thought, for lack of it, that they
must starve?

From the sweater’s shop she would carry the
goods two miles to her home, walking both
ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then
all day and through much of the night she
made the garments. They were boys’ waists,
// 179.png
.pn +1
and the materials, ready cut, besides the necessary
thread and buttons, were furnished her.
There was left for her to do all the remaining
work, down to sewing on the buttons and making
the button-holes, and she was paid for the
finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents
a dozen.

It was hard, she did admit, to feed and
clothe her family and pay the rent on a wage-rate
like that, and she was near to going under
when another and a crowning stroke of fortune
fell. In answer to a notice tacked on her door,
two women, who worked in a neighboring
book-bindery, applied for board, and each
agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five
then lived together in the basement-room,
whose furniture consisted chiefly of dry-goods
boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the
home and the children, and things had gone
comfortably ever since. Gradually the children,
a boy of nine and a girl two years
younger, were learning to help at some of the
simpler forms of sewing and in the housework.

This, I beg to interpolate, was the small beginning
// 180.png
.pn +1
of Mrs. Stone’s success. Haying
shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discovered
that keeping boarders was more profitable
than making waists, and so she developed that
side of her enterprise. When I saw her last,
in the following May, she was mistress of a
well-appointed mechanics’ boarding-house on
Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had
taken new form, for the contamination of the
slums had begun to appear in her son, who was
fast developing into an incorrigible, and she
had sent for me in order to consult about a
plan of placing him in a reformatory.

But to return to the February evening, on
which I called to talk with Mrs. Stone about a
claim upon her husband’s people: I found
her at home. One ran little risk of failing to
find Mrs. Stone at home, her engagements
abroad being confined to trips to the sweater’s
shop for materials. I heard the swift clatter
of her sewing-machine as I walked down the
steps from the filthy pavement to the door
of the basement where she lived. The room
had always to me an effect of being brilliantly
lighted. It was due to the illumination of
// 181.png
.pn +1
two large lamps which were kept faultlessly
clean and were burning often in the day as
well as night, and in part to the general cleanliness
of the room, not to mention the cheerfulness
which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She
turned from her machine as I drew up an
empty soap-box and sat down in front of her,
and one would have thought, from the contagion
of her manner, that she never knew any
mood but one of hopeful courage. But she
had no time to spare, and when our talk was
ended, she turned again to work, while I went
over to another corner and chatted with the
children and the boarders.

I was waiting for my friend Kovnitz, whom
I had asked to meet me there. Kovnitz was
himself employed in the same trade as Mrs.
Stone, although in quite another branch of it.
He was a coatmaker, and had been brought up
to work under the sweating system. Much of
the value of his acquaintance, apart from my
personal liking for him, lay for me in his
thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a
socialist, and a very ardent one; but his efforts
for reform were directed mainly toward effecting
// 182.png
.pn +1
organization among the workers of his
kind, and with this I warmly sympathized.
We were to go together in the evening to a
gathering of the cloak-makers, and, when he
appeared at Mrs. Stone’s, we lost no time in
starting for the meeting-place on the South-side.

One was never at a loss for conversation
with Kovnitz, but it was always conversation
which had to do with the condition of his class.
That was uppermost and foremost in his mind.
Other things interested him only as they were
related to that. Although a collectivist, he
wasted little thought upon a future socialistic
state, and he cared little for present concerted
political action in his party. The one supreme
necessity, in his view, was that all wage-earners
should be led to act together as a class,
until their predominance in an industrial age
is recognized. When once wage-workers are
known to be the most powerful as a class, then
social institutions will change in accordance
with their interests. It was curious to see
how this, the central principle of his creed, absorbed
him. It was the criterion of all his
// 183.png
.pn +1
judgments, and it gave color and meaning to
everything he saw. Generally he noticed
little of what was about him. The inferno of
those city streets at night seemed not to impress
him as we passed. All the varied play
of life upon them did not divert him from preoccupation
in what he was telling me of the
work of organization among wage-earners.
Once only his attention was drawn off, and
even then his habitual cast of thought moulded
the new impression. In glancing up, his eyes
had fallen upon a building newly occupied as
a department store. It was Saturday evening,
and, for some reason, the place was still open.
Streams of shoppers were entering the doors
and pouring from them. More even than by
day, the store gave at night an impression of
a bee-hive in full activity. The swarming of
the crowds within, the lights from a hundred
windows, and the brave array of goods formed
the outer picture. But Kovnitz said nothing
of that.

“There are two men in that store who are as
different in general character as men can be,”
he remarked to me, as we stood at the curb.
// 184.png
.pn +1
“One of them,” he went on, “is a man of
scholarly instincts. He is a disciple of Kant,
and knows the Kantian philosophy well. Just
now he is giving his leisure to reading Goethe.
He is an enthusiast in philosophy and literature,
and a man of really fine sensibilities.
The other chap is a human brute, and looks it.
Nothing interests him beyond his business and
his dissipations. Both of these men are at
the head of departments of ready-made garments
in the store, and I know that they both
draw salaries of $4,000 a year. They have
good business heads, and manage their departments
well, but what makes them specially valuable
to their employers is the fact that they
know thoroughly the sweating system. They
keep carefully informed on the condition of
the labor market, and the demand for work;
and, when the competition is keenest among
the sub-contractors and the workers, they know
how to pit the bidders against one another,
until the tasks are finally let out at the lowest
possible figures. Mrs. Stone is making
boys’ waists for thirty-five cents a dozen, and
there are more than 20,000 sweatshops in Chicago
// 185.png
.pn +1
where similar prices prevail, and Chicago
is but one of a score of cities in this country
where sweating is in vogue.”

Late that night, after the labor meeting, I
was passing the store again. I was alone, for
Kovnitz had gone home another way. The
street lay quiet, and almost deserted through
its length, and I could hear the echo of my
tread under the glare of electrics. The sound
of jangling music came faintly from a long
line of almost continuous saloons. There was
some movement in front of them which contrasted
sharply with the general desertion of
the street.

One is rarely at a loss to trace the antecedents
of a sharp impression, and I can remember
clearly that I was conscious of a man and
woman who stood talking in low tones as I
passed, and who disappeared that moment into
an open passage. The next instant I was
keenly alive to them, for I heard the woman
scream as though in mortal fear, and turning,
I saw the man dragging her violently out
upon the pavement. Events followed one another
then in quick succession. I was near
// 186.png
.pn +1
enough to watch them at close range, and I had
the sense of interpreting them as they moved.
I saw the instant flash of anger in the face of a
young mechanic who stood near, and the first
quick thrust of his arm which sent the man
reeling from the girl, then the swift onslaught
of the two men, and I heard the rain of blows
and oaths, and the loud asseverations of the one
attacked that he was an officer, while the
crowd thickened about them, and the girl
pleaded piteously to be loosed from the grasp
of someone who held her.

Two officers in uniform came down upon us
from opposite quarters, and the fighting gave
way to noisy explanations. It developed then
that the attack had been made upon an officer
in citizens’ clothes who was doing detective
duty against street-walkers. But he was
wholly to blame for the disturbance, I
thought; for he had handled his prisoner with
needless violence, and the blow from the mechanic
was so obviously the instinctive, chivalrous
act of a man who sees a woman ill-treated.
Technically, however, he was guilty of “resisting
an officer while in the discharge of his
// 187.png
.pn +1
duty,” and he must answer for it, so that the
group which started for the Harrison Street
Station-house was made up of the three officers,
the girl, the mechanic, and four or five
stragglers, of whom I was one.

It was easy to learn at the station what
course the case had taken. Both prisoners
were admitted to bail, and bondsmen having
been found, they went free that night under a
charge to appear before the court on a certain
morning of the following week. When the
morning came I was on hand too, for by that
time I had given up my job in the factory.

I went early, not knowing at what hour the
case might come up, and; although there were
already many persons seated on the wooden
forms, I looked carefully through both of the
court-rooms without seeing those in whom my
interest lay. Finding a vacant seat in the
inner room, I sat there, watching intently the
changing groups at the bar. They were made
up of the commonest criminals of the town,
and it was rare that a novice appeared to disturb
the atmosphere of perfect naturalness.
Law-breakers they were without question; the
// 188.png
.pn +1
magistrate knew them as well as the police,
and frequently he spoke to them by familiar
names, reminding them of earlier warnings
and threatening them with severer penalties
for the future. It was a sort of clearing-house,
where a certain residuum of habitual criminals
was dealt with by a doctrine of averages in an
effort to regulate and control the crime inevitable
in a great city.

Sitting beside me on the form was a young
girl, plainly dressed, with an air of perfect
neatness. Her gloved hands lay folded in her
lap and in one of them she held a purse. Her
mackintosh of dark material was unbuttoned
and thrown open, with the cape falling loosely
over her arms. It was the trimness of her hair
and a certain trig simplicity in her hat
which struck me first, and, when she spoke,
the tone and manner were in keeping with her
quietness of dress.

“Will you tell me, please, what time it is?”
she asked, and, having learned the hour,
“What are <i>you</i> up for?” she continued,
abruptly.

There was nothing about her which had in
// 189.png
.pn +1
the least prepared me for the question, and I
floundered about in an explanation that I was
there merely out of interest in a case which I
expected to come up in the course of the morning.

She smiled wearily at that, regarding me
with eyes which asked whether I knew how
young I was and how dreary that sort of thing
made her feel. I was afraid that I had cut
short the conversation and was delighted when
she continued, quite simply:

“<i>I’m</i> up for shop-lifting. It was at Walker’s,
and it was the hardest luck, for I had
everything well concealed. But they suspected
me, and, when they brought me here,
the matron searched me and soon found the
goods. And there I was, red-handed! Now
I’m trying to think up some story, but the
judge knows me and he warned me well last
time.”

It was charming then, for we fell to talking
as though we had known each other long.
Her small gray eyes that looked straight into
mine were as frank and innocent as a child’s.
There was little beauty but an entire composure
// 190.png
.pn +1
in the lines of her face, heightened by
a natural pallor very becoming to her. Her
features betrayed no nervousness, and one saw
the change of feeling only in her eyes and in a
subtle quality in her smile which was expressive
and sometimes sweet.

We were two children, who had met by
chance, and, sitting there in the dingy light of
a station-house court-room, we were presently
unaware of anything but the fact that we had
a great deal to tell each other. I told her of
the mechanic and the girl, and she half believed
me, and, in turn, began to tell me of
herself. There was no system in her story,
only a simple sequence of spontaneity that
charmed me. I had but to listen and watch
her inscrutable face and ask questions where
my dull intuitions were at fault. In the foreground
was the incident of shop-lifting, and
running from that was a chain of events which
led back inevitably into the distant perspective
of memory. She had never an air of giving
me her confidence, rather of speaking freely
as man to man.

It was bad to be caught at shop-lifting, and
// 191.png
.pn +1
the more annoying because she had so often
carried it off with success. At the best, shop-lifting
was a wretched business, entailing
much anxiety both in getting and disposing of
the goods. But there was the stubborn fact
that one must live. Of course she had worked
as a shop-girl earning $3.50 a week. And
here she began to count up on her fingers the
items of bare subsistence with their cost, and
the smile with which she concluded was
touched with the question, “When you have
spent your all upon mere living, what have
you left to live on?” There had been something
of this idea in her protest to her employer,
and he met her frankly with the assurance
that, if she found it impossible to live on
her wages, it would give him pleasure to introduce
her to a “gentleman friend.” Other
employments which were open to her were no
better in point of wages; some of them were
not so good, but they were all alike in offering
relief by the way suggested at the department
store.

“I’m not what you’d call a ‘good girl,’” she
said, “only, you know, I’d so much rather
die than do that.”
// 192.png
.pn +1

And the revulsion of the child’s nature
against what to her was this infinite terror led
her to tell me of her bringing up. Her memory
did not go back to the beginning of her
stay in a convent near Dublin, where her parents
placed her to be taught. Life had begun
for her in the peaceful routine of the sisterhood.
All her deepest impressions were got
there, and, when as a child of twelve, she came
out to emigrate with her people to America,
she was instantly in a new world on leaving the
convent walls. It had been an almost overwhelming
discovery to her to find that the
standards of goodness and purity which prevailed
within were apparently almost unknown
outside the convent. It staggered her intelligence
as a child, and, during a long experience
of earning her living as a girl, she had
slowly constructed a philosophy of life which
was drawn from the facts of hard struggle
with a world which seemed bent upon compassing
her ruin.

She spoke reverently of the teachings of the
sisters, and of the influence of their devoted
work, “But you know,” she added, “I cannot
// 193.png
.pn +1
believe any longer that only those are
Christians who are members of the Catholic
Church, and that all others will be lost. The
world would be too horrible, if that were true.
To be a Christian must be simply to follow
Christ.”

It was from this revery that we were roused
by the loud calling of her name. I watched
her walk to the bar and stand there with perfect
composure, while the clerk read the indictment,
and the witnesses were mechanically
sworn, and the girl was heard, and the magistrate
gave his verdict.

“Minnie,” he said, in closing, “I told you,
when you were here last, that the next time
you came up, you should go to the Bridewell,
and now to the Bridewell you shall go. Minnie,
why can’t a smart girl like you be
decent?”

Her profile was toward me, and I saw a
faint smile play for a moment on the clear
lines of her face.

“Your honor,” she replied, “it is a little
late now, but when I began to earn my living
I wanted nothing so much as the chance to be
decent.”
// 194.png
.pn +1

Meanwhile, two reporters were quickly
sketching her where she stood—a singularly
well-poised figure—while others were noting
the salient facts of the case; for it was a good
“story,” having already attracted attention.
With wide notoriety as a thief, she went to
prison that day, and, when she came out, a
not too hospitable world was the more on its
guard against her. An officer accompanied
her from the room, but she did not forget to
nod to me and smile as she passed out.

Engrossed as I had been in Minnie, I had
not noticed the coming of the mechanic and
the girl whose case had drawn me there. I
saw them now when I looked around. The
sight of the girl was perplexing at first, for she
sat with another woman at the end of a neighboring
form, and they looked so much alike
that I could not distinguish the one who was
there on trial. Crossing the passage, I asked
leave to sit beside them. They drew up at
once to make room for me, and I saw then that,
the girl next me was the prisoner. The other
was a twin sister, as she frankly told me, and
the resemblance fully sustained her. I explained
// 195.png
.pn +1
that I had come to the station-house
because I happened to see the affair of a few
nights before, and was anxious to find what
course it would take in court. The girl agreed
with me that the mechanic was in no way to
blame.

“He never know’d that it was an officer that
was draggin’ me down the steps, and out into
the street. I never know’d it neither till I see
his star under his coat. I thought he was
crazy, and was goin’ to kill me like ‘Jack
the Ripper.’” She was a girl in age, and
obviously one of the most helpless of her
order.

There is a common impression that such
women are attracted to their ruin by vanity
and a love of dress. You lose that idea among
the wrecks who walk the city streets at night.
Anything to flatter their vanity or to gratify
their taste is the least likely of all possible
experiences to most of them. It is a matter
of keeping soul and body together. Some are
dexterous pick-pockets, who make large hauls
at times—not always, however, for themselves;
most are ill-fed, ill-dressed slaves, who,
// 196.png
.pn +1
when their tributes are paid, are penniless.
Any degree of viciousness may be found
among them, and you may find as well a high
degree of the innocence of the unmoral, the
sense of morality completely lost in the instinct
of self-preservation.

The girl beside me was like fragile porcelain,
her thin lips and nostrils and delicate skin
all marred by a pasty, white unwholesomeness.
There was a hectic flush in her sister’s face and
her eyes were ablaze with disease. We were
talking about the case and drifted naturally
into further talk about themselves. They
were orphans and had long supported themselves
by working in a tobacco factory, but
there their health had failed, and when they
were well enough to work again, they found
employment in a laundry. To supplement
the “sweating” wages, they had taken to
street-walking, and then their end was near.
But they spoke as frankly of this last as a
“business” as of the earlier occupations, and
you saw that, to their thinking, it was only
a degree more complete a sale of soul and
body.
// 197.png
.pn +1

“But business is poor,” the ill sister was
saying, presently, “and I ain’t very well,
which I wouldn’t mind, but there’s my baby,
and, if anything happens to me, who’s goin’ to
take care of him? You don’t think I’ve got
consumption, do you?” And she turned
upon me a face with the cheeks sunk to the
bone and the eyes dilating with the fire which
was burning out her life.

When our case came up, it went through
without a hitch. The officer told his story
with a pompousness that was due to wounded
pride and he dwelt over-much upon his efforts
to make his assailant understand from the first
that he himself was a member of the force.
The girl was simplicity and frankness itself;
not an effort to conceal her character, but a
straightforwardness about the officer’s brutal
roughness which threw it into strong relief.
But the young mechanic was the best. He
was new to courts as he abundantly proved,
and when his turn came to testify, he stood
licking his dry lips like one with stage-fright.
Speech came haltingly from him at the first,
while his face flushed, but the sense of injustice
// 198.png
.pn +1
urged him on to a perfectly clear statement of
how, while “doing the town,” he had seen
this girl ill-treated and had struck the man
without knowing that he was an officer.

I knew that all was well, for I saw a smile
pass vaguely now and then over the magistrate’s
face, and when he spoke, the girl was
dismissed with a fine and the young mechanic
with a friendly warning against “doing
the town,” while the officer was held up
in open court for reproof and told that, if
he knew no better how to handle his prisoners,
he was ignorant of the first principles
of the special service to which he had been
assigned.

It is only a few steps from the station-house
to the heart of the business section of the city.
I passed through it now, as I often did, for
the sake of the feeling that it gives one of the
reach and strength of the industrial forces
which are centred there. Here is no sense of
failure or of loss, but of energy and skill
trained to high efficiency in the co-operation
of productive powers. Men are there producing
for all mankind, and in spite of the present
// 199.png
.pn +1
waste of human life, I cannot doubt that,
with the problems of production so widely
solved, the genius of the race is turning
surely to the subtler questions of a fairer
distribution.

.pb
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.ul
.it Transcriber’s Notes:
.ul indent=1
.it Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
.it Typographical errors were silently corrected.
.it Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a\
predominant form was found in this book.
.if t
.it Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
.if-
.ul-
.ul-
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