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.”
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 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 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 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.
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 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.