Part 5

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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 the prisoners into the inner court in the morning, each from his separate cell.

“They knowed me there for _Cuckoo_ 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 _Cuckoo_ 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 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 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 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 qualifying terms) “bloated bond-holders lives that we poor devils out here has to work for.”