CHAPTER VII

FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER

THE BARTON FARM, FARIBAULT COUNTY, MINNESOTA, July 6, 1892.

For a week past I have been Mr. Barton’s hired man, but in the early morning I must take leave of the family and renew the long journey. More than once during the past year I have found it hard to say good-by to an employer, but that is altogether apart from the real sadness of the present farewell.

It might have been months ago, so strong has my attachment to Mr. Barton’s family grown and so well do I feel that I know them, that Mr. Barton stopped me on the wayside as I was leaving Blue Earth City and offered me work on his farm. I hesitated, but finally agreed to accept his offer for a week. I am staggered now at realizing how near I came to missing an experience which will always be a cherished memory of my life.

With utmost hospitality I, a mere chance workman, picked up on the public highway, was taken in by the Bartons and made one of themselves; and during the days since I have shared their life of summer industry with hard work for all of us from five in the morning until nightfall, but healthful, worth-while work, and with it a home most daintily neat, and having an atmosphere of true refinement and of simple, genuine religion.

My pain at leaving is precisely that which one feels in the farewells which end the rare, halfborn friendships of life. A voyage, perhaps, or a short sojourn in a foreign country proves the chance occasion of a meeting, and kindred hearts awaken to quick recognition of one another, and then their roads diverge and from the parting of the ways each bears a sorrow which is of the tragedy of existence. Who has not felt that sadness and seen its shadow fall over the face of nature and far over the coming days?

There is, in my mind, no smallest fear of fresh encounter with an untried world. I have long since lost all such feeling, and can set forth of a morning as light of heart, as free from anxious care as are the birds which share my early start, and with a sense of pure animal enjoyment which is, I sometimes dream, not far removed from their own.

And with small wonder can I be so careless, for ever since I left Chicago work has ceased to be a difficult thing to find and has grown to be an increasingly difficult matter to avoid. It has come to be a positive embarrassment, for every day I am stopped by the way and urged to go to work, and it is not easy to refuse men who are most evidently short-handed. I shall set out in the morning with six dollars--five earned from Mr. Barton and one remaining from my last employment--and I shall try to cover a wide strip of country before settling down to another job; but, upon the basis of my past experience, I am sure that on an average of at least once a day in the coming march some farmer will ask me to help him at his work. All through Illinois and from Minneapolis to this point, which is near the Iowa border, this has been my uniform experience.

It was late in the spring when I left Chicago. Almost continuous rains compelled me to defer my start from day to day until the month of May was far advanced, and then I stopped at Joliet and joined for a week a gang of laborers in the works of the Illinois Steel Company. So that it was the first of June before I found myself in the open country once more, after six months as a city workman. Even then the skies continued threatening, and frequent rains forced me from the soft loam of the country roads to a firmer footing on the line of the Rock Island Railway for most of the journey to the Mississippi. I was relatively flush with wages earned at Joliet, and so was under no necessity to stop. But the chance of work never failed me, for not only in the rich farming region about Morris but also in the brick-kilns in the neighborhood of Ottawa and Utica I found abundant offers of a job.

From Davenport I went by rail to Minneapolis, for I had resolved to emerge for a week and attend the National Republican Convention in that city, and not days enough remained, when I reached the river, to admit of my walking there in time for the political gathering. But when the Convention closed I started again, penniless and afoot, on the long march which I have interrupted twice, once when working for a fine old Irish farmer near Belle Plain, and a second time when I accepted Mr. Barton’s offer.

It is difficult to pass thus lightly over wide stretches of the journey. Under every casual sentence is a mine of what proved valuable experience to me: The days in the Steel Works, for example, as a member of a gang of foreign laborers and associated with an army of skilled and disciplined workmen, meeting some of them on familiar terms at the boarding-house and at the club, which is an interesting experiment on the part of the company. Then a tramp along the Illinois River through a rich country which teemed with vegetation in the luxuriance of the tropics; and a day’s march on the railway with a veritable hobo who had lost his partner and cheerfully took up with me, and who proved to be a delightful fellow, by no means lost to manliness, from whom I parted most regretfully when a job was found for him in a brick-kiln near Ottawa. Then the Convention itself, with its vast array of party organization, and its highly dramatic incidents as affecting the careers of political leaders, and its strong undercurrents of personal and sectional ambition, and the interesting personages, and picturesque figures; all so intensely real and finely typical and keenly alive with national spirit, and splendidly representative of wide, heterogeneous empire bound together in marvellous union. And then a few days spent near Belle Plain, where, driven by the rain from the road, I found shelter in a farm-house shed and was eagerly seized upon by the farmer as a hired man, until one morning, when, as usual, I had risen at sunrise and had cleaned the stables and curried the horses and was milking the old white cow, the longing for the tramp laid sudden hold of me and soon after breakfast my eager feet were again on the main-travelled road. The storm had passed, the sun was shining from a cloudless sky, and a strong, cool wind was tossing the graceful branches of a cluster of American elms at the roadside as I left the farm, and was blowing through the dewy, dark recesses of a bit of fragrant woodland as I climbed the hill, giving the sense of infinite vitality; when I reached the summit there lay below me, embedded in deep green, one of the hundred exquisite lakes of southern Minnesota, with its rippling surface joyously dancing in the sunlight and adding a touch of magic beauty to the rich, undulating landscape of varying field and forest and deep meadow-land. All about me were the homes of original settlers, where yet live some of the very men and women who, only a generation ago, began to reclaim this paradise from a boundless waste of treeless prairie. Looking out upon it now from such a height, seeing its dense woodlands, the fields rank with standing grain, the farm-houses gleaming white in the sun, the blue sheets of living water, and the distant Minnesota threading its way by towns and villages along fertile banks, one could but dream of its future, when the crudeness will be gone, and close culture will have made it all a very garden of the Lord!

It was through such country as this that my way led me toward the Iowa border. I walked along the valley of the Minnesota by Le Sueur and St. Peter to Mankato, where I spent Sunday, and then, cutting over the ridge, I went by Lake Crystal to Garden City, and so through Vernon and Amboy to Winnebago and on to Blue Earth City.

Not often on the march am I offered a lift, but now and again I am picked up and hurried over some miles of the road, and it was one of the best of these windfalls that befell me on this particular journey. I had left Amboy only a few miles behind, and the long, dusty road stretched far to the south in the direction of Winnebago, where I meant to spend the night. The day was clear and gratefully warm; in the meadows had just begun the metallic music of the mowers, and on the air was the first fragrance of new-mown hay. Soon I caught the sound of the rapid drum of horses’ hoofs behind me, and, turning, I saw a gentleman seated in a light open four-wheeler, driving a pair of Indian ponies at a spanking pace in my direction. He drew up beside me, and asked, pleasantly, whether I cared to ride. I lost no time in thanking him and in mounting to the seat at his side; in a moment more we were off at a ten-mile gait, and I was watching with delight the business-like movement of the ponies’ pace, with their backs so straight and level that each might almost have held a coin without dropping it.

In the meantime Dr. Brooks (for so I shall call the gentleman, who was returning to Winnebago from a professional visit on the outskirts of his practice) was engaging me in conversation. We very naturally discussed the recent nominations and the issues of the coming general election, and then I had ample opportunity of learning much from him of actual local conditions.

He seemed to me to be singularly well informed. He had travelled widely over the West, and this particular region he had known familiarly since its early settlement. Every farm-house which we passed he pointed out to me, telling me the farmer’s name meanwhile, and something of his history. There was a curious uniformity in the narrative. The life was rough enough in the beginning, no doubt, and of the essence of hard frontier struggle, but it sounded like a fairy tale as he told me of one man and another who had come out in the early days almost penniless from the East or the Middle West or, in some cases, from a foreign country, and had “squatted” on the soil; now these settlers had each a hundred and sixty acres under high cultivation and a good, substantial house and adequate barns and machinery and stock; they could secure money on easy terms at the local bank when they needed it, and the market value of their land had risen two hundred per cent and even higher in the past twenty-five years.

I should have suspected a land-boomer in the doctor had there been anything aggressive or boastful in his manner, but he was speaking with the simple directness of one who knows and who needs no bluster to disguise ignorance or an ulterior motive.

I was deeply interested, and presently remarked that, coming as I did from the East, the demand for labor on the Western farms had been a surprise to me, and that I was sure that what he was telling me would sound strange to Eastern men, whose preconceptions of agrarian conditions at the West are formed largely from the representations of certain political parties which are recruited from the farming classes.

Dr. Brooks smiled indulgently, and kept his eyes straight ahead while he answered me.

“If you stay out here long enough,” he said, “you’ll find that there are two kinds of farmers in the West. There is one kind that know their business and that are farmers, and there’s another kind that are a good deal more interested in politics than they are in farming. You can put it down as a pretty safe rule that the farmers who have the best knowledge of their business and who are the most industrious and frugal and economical are the least dissatisfied with their conditions and the least anxious to change them by political action, while the more inefficient and shiftless and thriftless a farmer is, the more likely he is to be a violent agitator for financial or political change.

“There seems to be a growing weakness among whole masses of our people,” he went on, “which leads them to look to the Government for help instead of to themselves in their own industry and thrift. Not only the farmers are affected by it, for every demand upon the Government for special legislation in the interest of one class or another is evidence of this spirit. We need very much, as a people, to relearn the simple, common-sense maxims of Benjamin Franklin, and to practise them.”

I told him something at this point of my past winter in Chicago--of an army of unemployed and of other armies of underpaid workers, and of hosts of sweat-shop victims who could scarcely be said to be lacking in industry and at least a measure of enforced economy.

He listened patiently and with some curiosity, I thought, and when I had done he took up the subject quite eagerly.

“What you say is true enough,” he answered. “We live in an age of high civilization, and civilization means city life, and that means great centres of population, and that gives rise to congested labor markets with all the want and misery which you describe. All this, as we have it now, in this country, is of comparatively recent growth, being complicated by the vast numbers of our ignorant immigrant population, and we have by no means adjusted ourselves to it yet. You tell me of an army of unemployed in Chicago, and I can tell you, in reply, of a chronic demand for help in this country-side, which I know well; a demand so great that within the limits of a few neighboring counties we could put fifty thousand men of the right kind to work.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have met with an amazing demand for workers ever since I left Chicago. But this is the busy season in the country; when the winter comes, would not the men who answered to the demand for agricultural laborers be forced out of employment again and back upon the chance livelihood of the towns?”

“Not unless they preferred it,” he replied. “Of course the demand is exceptional at this season. How great it is you can infer when I tell you that, for the next five or six weeks, almost any sort of a man could get his board and a dollar a day, and men of fair skill and experience two and two dollars and a half a day, while the best men will command, for certain kinds of work, as high a wage as three dollars and a half a day besides their keep.

“But the point is that our farmers prefer to hire men by the month for the whole season. They want their help from the 1st of April until the end of November, and they are willing to pay an active, steady fellow twenty dollars a month and everything found, even to his washing. And the demand is so steady and the difficulty of getting good, industrious men so great, that multitudes of our farmers would be willing enough to keep the right sort of hands through the winter months and pay them something for the little that they could find for them to do, for the sake of having them through the spring and summer and autumn when men are hard to find.”

* * * * *

On the next day I reached Blue Earth City at noon, and spent a dime at a bakery for a mid-day meal, and then went bowling off toward the Iowa border at Elmore, which place I counted upon reaching by nightfall.

One dollar remained to me of my last store, and there is a marvellous fund of the feeling of independence in a dollar for one who is familiar with the sense of cowing, unmanning insecurity which comes of being penniless. Already I had stopped once in southern Minnesota, and so large a sum as a dollar would certainly see me well into Iowa, I was thinking, before I should be obliged to halt again to replenish my purse.

It was this view of the case which made me not very hospitable to the offer of a farmer who presently called to me with an inquiry as to whether I would work for him.

The incident was an every-day occurrence, and I felt at first only the usual embarrassment in my effort to evade the offer with some show of reason; but Mr. Barton, for it was he, asked me to at least give it a trial before deciding the matter, and, seeing in the suggestion an admirable opportunity for a short term of service, I replied that, if I concluded to stay at all, I could not consent to remain for longer than a week together, and must be held free to go at the end of the first week if I chose.

Mr. Barton agreed to this immediately, and invited me to a seat beside him on a load of wheat which he was taking to the mill. I said that I preferred to walk on to his farm, the direction of which he had pointed out to me and which was but a couple of miles down a side road.

At first every step which bore me away from the main-travelled road added to my uncertainty of mind. Was I acting wisely in stopping so soon again when I might easily push on for another fifty miles or more? Presently I came to a railway crossing, and sitting down to rest on the roadside, I thought the matter over, and decided finally to go on to the farm.

I had no difficulty in recognizing it from Mr. Barton’s description. A row of poplars stood just within a trim picket-fence which enclosed the farm-house yard from the road. Opening the gate I walked up the foot-path which cut its way for a hundred yards through a well-kept lawn, shaded with fruit-trees, to the house standing on the crest of the ridge, surrounded by well-grown maples. It was the usual two-storied, white farm-house with green shutters, having a wing at the side with a porch in front of it overgrown with honeysuckle.

I had come armed with a message for Mrs. Barton from her husband; but for all that, an increasing feeling of embarrassment accompanied me up the walk, and when I knocked at the screen-door which opened upon the porch, I was sorely tempted for a moment to break and run. The inner door was open, and through the screen I could see Mrs. Barton and one of her daughters, whom I shall call Miss Emily, ironing at opposite ends of a table, while another daughter, Miss Julia let us say, was sewing beside them. The faultless order and precision which had appeared in every external detail of the farm were in perfect keeping with what I could see of the interior of the home. It contained only the plainest furniture, but the room was redolent of a clean, cool, inviting comfort, perfectly suited to the needs of men who come in from long, hard work in the heat of the fields. The windows and outer doors were guarded by close-fitting screens; the inner wood-work was painted a light, delicate color, as fresh and clean as though newly applied; and the walls were covered with a simple, harmonious paper which matched well with the prevailing shade in the clean rag-carpet on the floor. A large rocker and a sofa, covered with Brussels carpet, were supplemented by a plentiful supply of plain chairs.

Miss Julia was the first to notice me; putting down her sewing, she stepped to the door and stood facing me from behind the screen.

“Is this Mr. Barton’s house?” I asked.

“Yes,” said his daughter.

“Well, he has sent me here with a message for Mrs. Barton,” I went on; “and wishes me to say that he has hired me to work on the farm.”

I was sadly ill at ease by this time, and very sorry that I had not accompanied Mr. Barton to the mill, and then to his home, and left to him all necessary explanations. But it was too late now for regrets, and Mrs. Barton, a sweet-faced, gentle little lady, had joined her daughter at the door.

“I did not know that father meant to hire any more men just now,” she said, while a nervous alarm played in her timid eyes at sight of so rough an applicant for work.

I do all that I can to keep a respectable appearance, and never a day passes without the opportunity of a bath in a lake or a wayside stream, and sometimes I am so fortunate as to come upon two or three such chances for refreshment in a day’s march. But a long course of wearing the same outer garments and sleeping in brick-kilns and hay-ricks must inevitably produce an effect in clothing which, accompanied by an unshaven face, gives rise to a somewhat scandalous figure.

I could only say, in reply to Mrs. Barton, that her husband’s instructions to me were simply to deliver the message which I had brought, and then to await his coming at the farm.

She was by no means reassured, but her hospitality overcame her fear, and, unfastening the screen-door, she opened it with an invitation to me to come in.

The dust on my boots and the general condition of my dress became the instant source of poignant feeling as I stepped upon the speckless carpet and took a seat in a straight-backed wooden chair which shone as though the varnish were but newly dry.

The situation was unmistakably awkward, and, under the disturbing spell of it, I sat very straight in the chair with feet close together and my hands on my knees, anathematizing myself for stopping before there was any need for it and getting myself into a mess. Then I began to cast about for some excuse for going out-of-doors once more, so that I could cut and run for the road.

Out of purest kindness of heart Mrs. Barton was trying to set me at ease. There was some threat of rain, she remarked; and we had had a great deal of rain this spring, she added; and where had I met Mr. Barton? and when did he say that he would be home? she inquired.

My best efforts at responsiveness were dismal failures, and the gloom was growing denser when Miss Julia came to my rescue with a copy of _The Youth’s Companion_, which she suggested that I might care to read while waiting.

Over and over again I read sections of continued “boys’ stories” and a number of interesting anecdotes and tried to study out certain puzzles, but Mr. Barton did not come. Mrs. Barton and her daughters had immediately resumed their work and their conversation, and, with kind considerateness, had left me to the paper. The hot summer afternoon slowly dragged its length toward evening. Through breaks in rolling clouds, heavy with rain, the sun shone at intervals with piercing heat. A warm, damp, sun-lit air, laden with honeysuckle and the fragrance of strawberry-beds, came floating idly through the open doors and windows, bearing the droning hum of many bees, which was like a low accompaniment to the soft voices of the women. Moving up the lane with the stately, steady motion of an elephant, came presently a huge rick of hay, the horses almost concealed under the overdrooping load and two hired men seated comfortably on top.

Soon after this Mr. Barton arrived, and I went out to meet him in the yard and helped him unhitch the horses. Then he set me to ploughing potatoes in the garden with his youngest son, an intelligent, gentlemanlike lad of seventeen, who, as I discovered later, was preparing for college, for scarcely a day passed that his sister Julia, who teaches school in a neighboring town through the winters, did not find time to help him with his Algebra and Latin. When we were called to supper I found that my case was satisfactorily explained to the family, and that I could now read my title clear to a perfectly comfortable position among them.

Would that I could do justice to the exquisite charm which I began to feel at once in that simple, natural home-life! The men assembled at the call to supper from different quarters of the farm. There were five of us, Mr. Barton and his son Richard, and, besides me, two other hired men, Al, an inflexible Yankee transplanted from far down East, and Harry, a stalwart young Englishman of the grown-up “butcher’s boy” variety, whose “h’s” had grown to be a source of discomfort to him. We washed on the kitchen porch, and, contrary to the usual custom on the farms, we put on our coats before entering the dining-room, which is also the family sitting-room, where I had found Mrs. Barton and her daughters at work.

The table was spread with clean linen, and a napkin was at each place. Mr. Barton said grace in the midst of a reverent silence, which continued while we began upon a meal abundant enough for a hungry man and dainty enough for a lady.

After supper Harry and I went to fetch the cows, which had to be driven in from a pasture beyond a little river that flows through the farm. There were thirty-seven of them in all to be milked, but Miss Emily and Miss Julia lent a hand, so that it did not take long, and when the horses had been fed and their stalls made ready for the night, we men were free. In the dark, star-lit evening, which followed almost instantly upon the setting of the sun, we walked down to the river for the regular evening bath.

It is early yet for sight of the past week in true perspective, but even now its events take form in memory with a certain natural sequence. With only one exception, clear, radiant summer days have followed one another, days begun for us at five o’clock and spent in the hay-fields when the chores were done and breakfast over. Long days they were, full of hard work in the heat of the meadows, but there was the refreshing cool of the house at mid-day, and a dinner excellent in itself but to our whetted appetites a keen physical delight. And better even than dinner was supper at the end of the day’s work in the fields, a delicious supper of cold meats and potatoes and home-made bread and milk and tea, and finally cake with strawberries from the garden. If anything could have been better than that it was when Richard and we three hired men took towels down to the river in the gloom of the early evening, and under the clear summer stars from the high embankment covered with soft turf, with the glitter of fire-flies all about us and the air full of the deep croaking of frogs and the sharp reiterations of the katydids, dove headlong into the dark, cool, flowing water. We swam about for a quarter of an hour and came out with scarcely a trace left in our muscles of the ache of the day’s labor and then went to bed to eight hours of deepest sleep.

One was a rainy day when work in the fields was impossible, and we spent it in the barn running some of last year’s wheat through the fanning mill and measuring and sacking it ready for shipment. Then Sunday came with its long, peaceful rest. Al and Harry secured each a buggy and were given the use of two of the farm horses, and, in their best Sunday black, they started after the chores were done to take their best girls to church, and for a long drive in the afternoon.

The family attend church in Blue Earth City, but their rector has another parish and can preach here only on alternate Sundays. This was his Sunday in the other parish and there was a Sunday-school service here. The restful observance of the day seemed to me in most natural keeping with the deeply religious tone of the family life. Morning worship followed breakfast as usual; then came the preparation for church, and after the morning service and the mid-day meal, which was almost wholly prepared on Saturday, the afternoon was spent in reading. After a light supper in the evening Miss Julia played the harmonium in the parlor, and we all joined in singing hymns until bedtime.

If there is one scene more than another which I shall always remember as eminently characteristic of the household, it surely is that of morning prayers. No pressure of work, even at the very height of the haying season, is allowed to interfere with this act of worship. Immediately after breakfast the family group themselves about the dining-room, drawing off a little from the table, and Mr. Barton, taking down an old Bible from the mantel-shelf, seats himself in the rocker and begins to read the morning lesson. The passages have been from the prophecy of Ezekiel, and, stronger than any other association with that book, will hereafter be for me the sturdy figure of Mr. Barton in his working clothes, seated in a rocking-chair with his head bowed over a Bible as he reads, reverently, the oft-recurrent phrase:

The Word of the Lord came again unto me saying, Son of Man,----

The prayer that followed has been always a simple, earnest appeal for help and guidance. It was as though our dependence upon God and His right to supreme devotion in every act of life was instinctively recognized, and that the worship was a natural expression of love to the Father of us all, thus renewing our wills and bringing us into captivity unto the obedience of Christ, and sending us forth to the duties of the day strong in the sense of the sacredness of work as service to the Lord, and of His presence with us as the source of all life and hope and strength.

Monday was the Fourth of July. Harry and Al were early off again with buggies and best girls, and Mr. Barton invited me to join the family in celebrating the day in town. We hitched a team to a four-seated market wagon, and Mr. Barton’s son and his wife, who live on an adjoining farm, drove with us to Blue Earth City, where we were to attend the festivities and go for dinner to the home of a married daughter of Mr. Barton, whose husband is a merchant there.

All along the country roads converging toward the county seat we saw lines of farmers’ wagons driving to the common centre. There was great variety of equipage; some were very rude and plain, but others were exceedingly well appointed, and not a few of the low phaeton-buggy type rose to a degree of elegance.

Many of the nearer dwellers were walking in, and as we approached our destination the foot-paths were crowded, chiefly with young men and boys, and the town itself, when we entered it, we found thronged with holiday-seekers, the women in light dresses and bright ribbons, the men in sober black, and all of them in their movements giving the sense of heavily conscientious merry-making in spite of the glorious sunshine and the air that throbbed with the joy of a ripe summer’s day.

When the horses were put up we fell in with the stream of people moving toward the main street, and there in the thick of the serious throng we stood on the curb watching a procession of local organizations file past, headed by a brass band from Winnebago, all gorgeous in new uniform and led by citizens on horseback as important and uncomfortable as the marshals in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

There was a common movement then of the crowd, through streets which cracked to the continuous discharge of explosives, toward a wood on the outskirts, where a rough booth had been erected and row on row of benches placed before it in the shade. We found seats near to the front, and presently there fell a hush upon the assembly which quieted the flutter of fans and the mingled interchange of neighborly conversation. A procession of little girls in white, with bright blue sashes, each wearing the name of a State or Territory in silver letters across the band of her sailor hat, which had long blue streamers behind, came filing in among the crowd, all intensely trim and self-conscious with their fingers protruding stiffly from white cotton mits. Following them were a minister and a schoolmaster and a small group of other prominent citizens, from among whom towered the tall, massive figure and the clean-cut, rugged, beardless face of an old ex-senator who was the orator of the day.

The little girls grouped themselves on benches which rose like steps from the ground to the level of the floor of the booth, and the citizens took seats assigned them on the platform. One of their number, the chairman of the occasion, introduced the minister, who led the company in prayer. Then the schoolmaster was presented as the reader of the Declaration of Independence. A few explanatory sentences in unconventional English served to bring vividly to the minds of the people the familiar circumstances of the signing of the Declaration, and then in sonorous, ringing voice he read, amid breathless stillness, the deep natural stillness of the woodland, the well-remembered phrases of that great document. There was no applause when he ceased, no outward demonstration of any kind, but through the great still company one could feel the strong movement of the sense of national life.

The ex-senator then rose to speak. He was himself a frontiersman, having known the Northwest from its early settlement and having represented it in Congress a generation ago, and he spoke to people whose history he knew and whose temper he thoroughly understood. It was inspiriting to catch the dominant note of what he said and to watch its effect upon his hearers. There was talk of national growth, but without boasting, and there was very serious reckoning of national problems, but without carping, and there was high appeal to national responsibility, but without canting, and when at the end, out of the wealth of his own personal association with the man, he spoke of Lincoln and enforced all that he had said with homely, cogent teachings drawn from the life and the words of the great apostle of the common people, the assembly was moved and stirred as no other appeal could have affected it.

After this the crowd scattered for dinner, most of the people re-entering the town, and the spirit of fun, no longer to be restrained by a conscientious sense of the seriousness of enjoyment, broke loose in a bit of genuine American horseplay, when a company of boys and young men, in most fantastic disguise, passed in grotesque procession through the streets, and for a few minutes the solemn crowds really lost self-consciousness in true _abandon_ to the spontaneous sport.

The Barton family had soon gathered at the married daughter’s home, and there with the greatest good cheer we had a picnic dinner of delightful cold meats, and the thinnest of bread and butter, and olives, and dainty home-made cakes, and the reddest of ripe cherries--all served to us as we sat just within the dining-room door or ranged in a semicircle about it in the shade on the lawn.

When it was over everyone was eager to start for the public green outside the town, where the afternoon’s sports were to be held. It was not far, and we walked out, but almost a continuous stream of carriages was passing us in a common movement, and when we reached the bridge just outside the town the stream had narrowed to an unbroken line of vehicles moving slowly in single file. At the centre of the bridge which spans a narrow stream below the public green stood an interesting figure as we drew up. He was a tall, lean man of sixty, perhaps, but without a suggestion of old age in his lithe, sinewy frame; a Yankee by every gift of nature, with the sharply inquisitive face of a ferret and shrewd blue eyes with a gleam of humor in them and a little tuft of whiskers on his chin. Every vehicle, as it passed, underwent an interested scrutiny from him, and his whiskers worked comically up and down as he cordially greeted the occupants whom he knew. I was walking with Mr. Barton, and seeing us in the crowd on foot, he eagerly hailed Mr. Barton as a sympathetic old acquaintance.

“John,” he said, “I was just thinking as I stood here how I was to the Fourth of July celebration in these parts thirty years ago to-day, in ’62. And my gracious, it’s hard to realize the change! Why, there warn’t a team of horses in the hull county then, and everybody come on foot or else behind a yoke of oxen. But just look at that percession now! There ain’t a ox-team in the hull outfit, and ther’s some rigs here that’s fine enough for the President to ride in.”

The common presented a truly festive scene when we reached it. As large as a ten-acre lot, it was covered with a soft, rich turf and enclosed on three sides by beautiful woodland and on the fourth by the main-travelled road. Horses, tied in the shade along the outer rim of trees, were munching hay from piles which had been thrown down before them. Deserted vehicles, ranging from white-canopied prairie-schooners and rough market-carts to the smartest of new buggies, stood idly among the trees, and, with changing lights and shadows playing over them, were groups of picnickers seated on the mossy ground about white table-cloths which bore their viands, and some on rustic benches at rough tables hastily put up for the occasion.

But the dinner-hour was nearly over, and those who had picnicked in the woods were fast joining the crowds who poured in upon the common from the town. The peanut and popcorn and lemonade venders were out in force, and you could hear from many quarters the professional tones of fakirs who invited the crowds to throw rings at walking-sticks, or rubber balls at stuffed dolls for cigars, or to various tests of strength on a variety of ingenious machines. These had their votaries for a time, and there was much laughter and chaffing about the jousts, but the current of the crowd soon set overwhelmingly toward a quarter of the field where a baseball game was being started. Two townships were to play each other. There was no organized nine in either, but a volunteer one was presently secured from both. Not without some difficulty, however. I saw one sturdy young farmer offer his services as pitcher, and his wife, who stood by with her baby in her arms, pleaded with him to desist.

“Charlie,” she repeated with whining petulance, “you hadn’t ought to; you _know_ you hadn’t ought to. Just think how stiff and sore you’ll be to-morrow. You won’t be fit for the haying.” But the spirit of the sport was upon Charlie, and not only did he pitch for his township, but he took off his boots and played in stocking-feet to facilitate his base running.

Another young farmer, a gorgeous swell, with his best girl beside him in a phaeton-buggy, and with no end of a white waistcoat and a white cravat, and with a high, stiff collar chafing his well-burned neck, sat spectator to the scene for a time; then, unable to resist longer the demand for a catcher for his township nine, he asked the young woman to hold the horses, and, leaving his coat and waistcoat and high collar in her care, he caught a plucky game without a mask or a breast-pad and with only an indifferent glove, and he threw so well to second that the other side had to give up trying to steal that base.

It was a perfectly delightful game; not at all a duel of batteries, but like a contest between two newly organized rival freshman nines before any team-work has been developed, for both pitchers were hit freely, and there were plenty of the most engaging errors and the wildest of excited throwing, and at times a perfect merry-go-round of frantic base-running, during which it was difficult to keep track of the score.

We drove back to the farm in the cool of the evening in time for supper and the chores before nightfall, and at five o’clock on the next morning began again a day of work in the hay-fields.

* * * * *

DENVER, COL., September 21, 1892.

It is a long cry from Mr. Barton’s farm to this beautiful Western city, but the story of the journey can easily be shortened to a few pages, which will serve to picture its salient incidents. Even at this distance of time and space I cannot touch in passing upon my parting with the Barton family without feeling again the sense of homesickness which accompanied me as, in the glory of an early July morning, I walked down the garden-path to the road, with her good-by and a gentle “God bless you!” from Mrs. Barton sounding in my ear, and a last repeated generous offer from Mr. Barton of a permanent home, if I would stay with them, almost following me to the gate. It was the best of the many chances which I have found open to men who are honestly in search of work and willing to work their way industriously and patiently to advancement. I have found many jobs thus far, and in scarcely one of them have I failed to see the means of winning promotion and improved position, while not a few have seemed to me to open a way to considerable business success to a man shrewd enough to seize it and persistent enough to develop it. Often, as I look back upon two thousand miles of country crossed--apart from the splendor of it--the almost overwhelming impression that it leaves of boundless empire wherein a growing, intelligent, industrious, God-fearing people are slowly working out great ends in industrial achievement and personal character and in national life, an impression which thrills one with a new-found knowledge and love of one’s country, with her “glorious might of heaven-born freedom” and the resistless resurgence of her boundless energies, and, notwithstanding all waywardness, a deep-seated, unalterable consciousness of national responsibility to the most high God; apart from all this, the strongest sense which possesses one in any retrospect of a long, laborious expedition like mine, is that of a wide land, which teems with opportunities open to energy and patient toil. Local labor markets there are which are terribly crowded, as I found in Chicago to my cost. Awful suffering there is among workers who are in the clutch of illness, or, bound by ties which they cannot break, are unable to move to more favorable regions; pitiful degradation there is among many who lack imagination to see a way and the energy to pursue it, and who, without the congenital qualities which make for successful struggle, sink into the slough of purposeless idleness; deep depravity and unutterable misery there are in the great congested labor-centres, many of whose conditions are the price which we pay for our economic freedom. But the broad fact remains, that the sun never shone upon a race of civilized men whose responsibilities were greater and whose problems were more charged with the welfare of mankind, among whom energy and thrift and perseverance and ability were surer of their just rewards, and where there were so many and such various chances of successful and honorable career.

In leaving Mr. Barton’s farm I found much the same external conditions as those with which I had grown familiar ever since I left Chicago. It was a rich agricultural region, and was inhabited throughout this section in curious, clearly defined communities. In one quarter was a German settlement, and in another a Norwegian, and a Swedish settlement in a third, while I heard of a French colony as a curiosity in another direction, and even an organization of Quakers. But there were native-born Americans in plenty, and chiefly of New England antecedents, as I found in my chance acquaintance with farmers by the way, and from observations of such a charming town as Algona, in northern Iowa, where I spent several days. On every hand it was borne in upon one, not merely from what appeared but from the invariable assurances of those who have lived long in the region, that among the foreign population no fact is more thoroughly established than that of its swift assimilation. So swift and sure a process is this said to be that the children born upon the soil, of immigrant parentage, seem to lose certain physical characteristics which would link them to an alien ancestry, and to take on others which approximate to recognized American types. Their children, in turn, are said to be natives of established character; but of them all none surpasses the first-comers, when once they are settled and grown familiar with our institutions, in a stanch, honest conservatism and in a loyal, patriotic devotion to their adopted country.

It was nearly the end of July when I reached Council Bluffs. I was well worn with walking, for the last two hundred miles I had covered in six days’ march, and I was glad enough to stop for a time. But I did not wish to stop there, for my letters for several weeks past had been forwarded to Omaha, and were now awaiting me across the river. Unluckily for me, there was a five-cent toll for foot-passengers on the bridge, and I had only one cent left.

It was the middle of an intensely hot afternoon. I was too tired to begin an immediate search for work, and so I took a seat on a bench in the shade of the public square, near to a fountain which played with a delicious sound of coolness under the trees. The park walks converged toward the fountain as a centre, and thither came the people who wished to rest in the shade or whose errands carried them through the public square. Presently a sharer of my bench got up and walked on, leaving behind him a copy of a local paper, which I eagerly seized upon and read and re-read until I became conscious of the dimming light of early evening. I was stiff and sore with the long, hot, dusty march, and uncomfortable at failing to get the letters upon which I had long counted, and I lacked utterly the energy to surmount even so slight a difficulty. But with the cool of the early evening came the natural hunger bred of a day’s march, and the necessity of providing for that and a shelter for the night.

One of the streets of the city through which I had walked to the central square was named Fifth Avenue, and from one point on its pavement I could see through the open windows of a cheap hotel the tables in the dining-room spread for supper. There were screens at the windows and light cotton curtains, and the table-linen appeared clean and the shaded depth of the room looked to me, from the blistering pavement, like the subdued, fragrant coolness of real luxury.

I retraced my steps to the hotel and asked for work, but there was none for me. I found the way to the stables and applied there, but an old man with a long nose and a white, patriarchal beard told me that they were in no need of more men. This was very different from my experience in the country, where everyone was in need of men and one had not to ask for employment but was everywhere urged to accept it, and I began to wonder whether for the sake of work I should be forced out again to the farms.

Near this “Fifth Avenue” hotel I had noticed a livery-stable which fronted on one street and extended through to another bordering the public square. I went there next, and found its keeper seated comfortably in the wide, open doorway. Taciturn and non-committal at first, he confessed eventually to his needing a man in addition to the two already at work in the stable, and, after some questioning, he told me to come back at nine o’clock that evening and receive his decision.

I was supperless and without the means of securing anything to eat, and there remained an hour and a half before nine o’clock. In this predicament I had the good fortune to chance upon a delightful public library on the second floor of a building overlooking the square. It was like the library at Wilkesbarre in its charming accessibility; and, without a trace of the feeling of weariness or hunger left, I was reading ravenously, when, by some happy chance, I caught sight of a clock that was almost on the stroke of nine. With thanks, which were exceedingly short and abrupt, I returned the books to an attendant in the library and then bolted for Mr. Holden’s livery-stable. He was standing in the door when I came up, and, without preliminary remarks,

“I will take you on,” he said, and then he added, almost without a pause,

“I will give you twenty dollars a month and arrange for your board at the hotel [indicating the “Fifth Avenue” one], or thirty dollars a month and you manage for your own keep. You will sleep in the loft over the harness-room.”

Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted the first offer, and wishing us good-night Mr. Holden left the stable in charge of Ed, one of the other hired men, and me.

It was too late to get anything to eat at the hotel, and so I sat up with Ed and helped unhitch the horses and put up the traps as they came in. The last horse was housed by eleven o’clock. I then found that with the aid of a hose a capital bath was possible in the carriage-washing section of the stable, and then I went to bed on a cot in the well-ventilated loft, very content in the knowledge that I had found a good place and should have a breakfast in the morning.

Ed called me at five o’clock as he was going below, and when I followed him he assigned me the two rows of stalls next to his own, which contained twelve horses and which were to be my first care. All these stalls had to be cleaned and the horses fed before I was at liberty to go to breakfast, and it was with a royal appetite that about seven o’clock I applied at the hotel. It was a very decent hostelry, largely made use of by farmers apparently. I was at once accepted as an employé of Mr. Holden, and served to an excellent meal by a trim little waitress, at one of the very tables which I had looked in upon on the previous afternoon with such genuine longing, and with the feeling of its belonging to a degree of luxury far beyond my reach.

The twelve horses which had fallen to my share had all to be curried after breakfast and got ready for the day’s orders. Calls for vehicles began to arrive in the middle of the morning, and they continued to come at intervals throughout the day, so that there was much hitching and unhitching to interfere with regular tasks.

Jake, the third hired man, was boss in the absence of the owner. He had long been in Mr. Holden’s employ, and had a wife and several children in a home of his own somewhere in the outskirts of the city. All the feeding, and cleaning, and currying, and carriage-washing, fell to Ed and me, while Jake, in addition to a general superintendence, had as his special trust the care of all the harnesses. He took great pride in them, and certainly kept them in admirable condition. Ed was chief carriage-washer and next in command under Jake, while to me, when my regular work was done, fell the odd jobs of keeping the carriages oiled, and watering the horses at the proper hours, and lending a hand at the unloading of the hay and feed as they came in--of holding myself in readiness, in short, to do anything that anyone in the stable asked of me. A very good position it was, as I very soon found. I had no great difficulty in learning the various tasks, and in a stable which, even in the fierce heat of August, was always comfortable, and at forms of work which were always interesting, and with every cost of living provided for, I was clearing five dollars a week.

By no means were the demands of our work continuous. Nearly every afternoon we had an hour or two or even three together, when there was little to be done. I found a book-shop across the way from the stable, where second-hand books could be rented at the rate of six cents a week and the books exchanged as often as you pleased.

Then in the evenings, when we all had supped in turn, and the stalls had been made ready for the night, and the traps sent out in answer to the evening trade, Jake and Ed and I used to sit out in front, within easy hearing of the telephone-bell, with our chairs tilted against the stable-wall and our feet caught by the heels on the chair-rounds, and there we talked by the hour together, until Jake went home and left Ed and me to care for the outstanding horses and traps, and lock up the stable for the night.

I was at a disadvantage in these conversations. Jake and Ed were Yankees, both of them shrewd, hard-headed, steady fellows. Jake was the father of a family, and Ed an unmarried man of three-and-thirty, who was working with all his might to pay off the mortgage on his father’s farm back in Illinois. Both of them had had some district-school training, but nothing beyond, and while they had a perfectly intelligent knowledge of affairs which concerned them as men and as citizens, their farther intellectual horizon was limited.

One evening as we sat under the stars the talk turned upon astronomy, and Ed began to comment disparagingly upon the claims of astronomers of an ability to weigh the heavenly bodies, and to measure their distances from one another and from the earth. Jake heartily agreed with him, and insisted that not until a line could be carried from one to another, and each star weighed accurately in a scale, would he put any confidence in these pretended results. My attempt to point out that there were methods of determining weight and distance other than the very direct ones which they insisted upon, was very damaging to my reputation for intelligence, and was set down as of a piece with the general ignorance which I had shown in the work of a livery-stable. And when, later in the discussion, I stood out for the validity of the doctrine of the conservation of energy, against Ed’s immediate demonstration of its falsity in the heaps of refuse which he pointed out were thrown every day from our stable alone, and which must to some degree effect a variation in the totality of matter--I found that my position in the crew was threatened with unpleasantness.

But in reality both Jake and Ed were exceedingly friendly to me. They were at pains from the first to teach me my work, and to give me a hint now and again, which counted for much, in the matter of getting the job well in hand. Soon the days began to go by with astonishing rapidity. I had told Mr. Holden that I should not be with him very long, and at the end of two weeks I left the livery-stable with ten dollars and one cent in my pocket, minus the twelve cents which were due for book-hire, and which I felt had been well invested.

At Omaha I stopped for several days. Like Minneapolis and Denver, of the Western towns which I have seen, it is a splendid type of the American city of a generation’s growth, where almost miraculous progress has been made in actual material development, and where the higher demands of civilization are responded to with an energy and enthusiasm which are inspiring, and which are prophetic of splendid results.

Then out I walked one perfect afternoon upon the level plains of Nebraska, with wild sunflowers in prolific bloom and square miles of Indian-corn fields standing lusty and stark to the very horizon with puffs of belated pollen powdering the warm red light, and the corn-silk turning black at the ends, and the long, drooping, cane-like blades beginning to show the ripe yellow of the autumn.

The mere writing down the bare fact of the journey stirs in one’s blood again the joy of that free life. The boundlessness of the world and your boundless enjoyment of it, the multiplicity of abundant life and your blood-kinship with it all, some goal on the distant horizon and your “spirit leaping within you to be gone before you then!” There is scarcely a recollection of all the tramp through Illinois and Minnesota and Iowa and eastern Nebraska which is without the charm of a free, wandering life through a rich, beautiful country. What I saw of the wealth of a fertile region in central Illinois I found again enhanced in beauty and productiveness in southern Minnesota, and, varying in outward configuration but scarcely less attractive or fruitful, across the face of Iowa, losing only its variety as it modulates in Nebraska to the plains which slope upward gently for five hundred miles to the Rockies.

My mind throngs with the pictures of splendid cultivation, of leagues on leagues of farms which were had for the taking or were purchased from the Government at a dollar and a quarter an acre, and where I saw countless comfortable homes and fields white to the harvest, with no demand so strong as the one for laborers.

It was not wealth in the sense of opulence, but it was the plenty which is beyond the fear of want that marked the character of that broad domain. The poor were there, and the suffering and the deeply discontented, and there were hard conditions of life and very sordid ones, but never the hopelessness which gives to town-bred destitution its quality of despair. In the gradual development of actual resources about you appeared to be the remedies of most of the obvious ills.

“This is a rich region,” said a handsome young farmer who had offered me a lift one blistering hot day in Iowa--“this is a rich region, and it is more than rich, it is reliable. We never know a total failure of crops here; we can always make a living. This country, for hundreds of miles around, is a garden, and we live in the heart of it.” And he was one of the discontented. I only regret that I have not space here for his interesting account of the tyranny of capital under which, from his point of view, the farmers live and work, and the imperative need of monetary reform as a means of bringing about their emancipation.

It was the thing which I had heard many times from many farmers at the West, only never presented with quite equal cogency before. The opposite views had been represented to me, and there was often a singular alternation of presentation within the course of a day or two, and I had come to recognize a comical uniformity between condition and views.

If I chanced upon a farmer who had no particular quarrel with the existing order of things, who was conservative and cautious and sceptical of the efficacy of change, I was quite sure to find that he was an admirable farmer, thrifty and energetic and industrious, with a thorough knowledge of his business down to a frugal care of minor details. But if, on the other hand, I fell in with a farmer who was clamorous for radical economic change, on the ground that he and his class were being ruined by the injustices of existing economic conditions, I soon began to feel a suspicion, which all my observation deepened into a conviction, that the man of this type was fundamentally a poor farmer; his buildings and fences were sure to be out of repair, and his stock showed signs of suffering for want of proper care, and the weeds grew thick in his corn, and his machines were left unhoused and suffered more from rust than ever they did from wear.

This would be absurd as a generalization with any claim to wide applicability, as would be any generalization based upon my casual experimenting; it was the comical uniformity of my experience in this case as in some others that impressed me.

The real difficulties of the situation for many of the Western farmers one could not fail to see. Apart from material misfortune and apart from sickness and ill-luck, there is the inexorableness of conditions which seem at times to hold them to a life of servitude with no escape from unprofitable drudgery, and from the carking care which burdens men who are hopelessly in the clutch of debt.

I grew impatient at times with the tone of Philistine patronage and superiority adopted by the sturdier farmers. Theirs was the harder work no doubt and theirs the shrewder carefulness and the more provident handling of their instruments, but even hard-won success is sometimes so strangely blind to the obligations which arise from the fact that subjective difficulties are as real and are often far more difficult of mastering than those which are objective. Often it appears at its worst as, with utter disregard of the duty of helpfulness, it chants its heartless creed in the terms of the fore-ordination which lightly dooms all the non-elect of high efficiency to the deep damnation of beggarly dependence or of endless failure in the struggle of life.

Two hundred miles west of Omaha the wages earned at the livery-stable in Council Bluffs were exhausted, and I was obliged to look for another job with which to replenish my store. I was following the line of the Union Pacific Railway, and, having spent my last cent one mid-day for a dinner, I went up to the first section-boss whom I met in the afternoon’s walk and asked him for a job. He was a burly Irishman of massive figure. Without a moment’s hesitation he told me that he was in no need of a man, but that Osborn, the boss of the next westward section, the thirty-second, with head-quarters at Buda, he knew was looking for one.

About eight miles farther on I came upon Osborn and two men at work near the little station at Buda, a scant four miles east of Kearney, and it was as the Irishman had said, for instantly, upon my application, Osborn accepted me as a section-hand at wages of a dollar and a quarter a day for ten hours’ work, and offered me board and lodgings at his home for three dollars a week, an arrangement with which I instantly closed.

For the remaining afternoon and until six o’clock I lay resting in the tall prairie grass in the shade of the railway station, and at seven o’clock on the next morning I began a term of three weeks’ service as a section-hand under the orders of Osborn the boss, and with a strapping young Irishman, “Cuckoo” Sullivan by name, as my partner.

That was the last long stop before I reached Denver. And now, as I am about to leave this city for the remaining thousand miles of my journey, I look back over a summer and autumn spent in the country and in towns and villages of the thousand miles from the seaboard to Chicago, and then a winter and a spring within the limits of the foremost city of the Middle West, and then a summer in the vast farming region between Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver. A thousand miles remain, but with what eager anticipation do I look forward to them! I shall strike in among the mountains, and then leave to the natural development of events the determining of my westward journey. Whichever course it takes, my way must lie through the frontier, and by force of necessity I must come into contact with a life which is something other than the monotonous daily round of work. There will be mining regions with the chances of prospecting, and the ranches with the wide range of their free living, and Indian reservations to be crossed, and many lonely mountain-trails to be followed.

It was never without interest and charm, this summer’s walk with its intervals of work, over a thousand miles of the mid-continent. It varied in beauty with every day’s march, and even the dead level of the Nebraska prairies as the Indian-corn fields grew thinner and faded completely into boundless plains of sage-brush, where the alkali lay white on the glittering soil, and the bleaching skeletons of cattle joined their mute appeal to the cloudless sky for water to quench a burning thirst--even here was an attraction and an interest of its own.

Days ago I caught sight of the mountains rising from out the level plain, and, through the haze of distance and above the mists which shrouded their gaunt sides, I saw their “silent pinnacles of aged snow” appearing clear against the blue of high heaven. Now, as I have drawn nearer in this marvellous air, a hundred miles of the range stand out in glorious vividness of color and of every detail of configuration, and my heart leaps again to the joy of their companionship, and I realize with a tingling of blood that the best of the journey, in any sense of adventure, lies before me in the life which they hold upon their slopes and fertile valleys, and in the gloomy depths of their vast cañons.