"You'll have to come to some of our frat jamborees ... Jack'll bring you
up."
"We and the Sigma Deltas are Southern fraternities ... we have a hell of
a sight more fun than the others ... there's the Sigma Pis--though they
have some live birds, they're mostly dead ... and the Phi Nus put on too
much side ... the Beta Omicrons are right there with the goods, though."
"I see."
A little freshman made an off-colour remark.
"You'd better go and see Jennie!" advised a genial young senior, who,
for all his youth, was entirely bald.
"Jennie, who's Jennie?" I asked, curious.
"Our frat woman!" answered Travers casually.
"Frat woman?" I was groping for further information, puzzled.
"Yes, often a fraternity keeps a woman for the use of its members ...
when a kid comes to us so innocent he's annoying, we turn him over to
Jennie to be made a man of."
"This innocence-stuff is over-rated. It's better to send a kid to a
nice, clean girl that we club in together and keep, and let him learn
what life is, once and for all, than to have him going off somewhere and
getting something, or, even worse, horning around and jeopardizing
decent girls, as he's bound to otherwise."
* * * * *
There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious
farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the
country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could
obtain credit.
But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the
wheat harvest.
* * * * *
The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my
song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed
several of my effusions.
I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of
labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around
me.....
In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power
with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the
very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact
that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant
and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was
continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a
moral.
For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering
frenzy of belief in what I was doing.
* * * * *
The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.
There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard
he was in need of hands for the season.
I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of
Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to
Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the
superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's.
Bonton looked me over.
"You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard."
"I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask. If I buckle in, I won't
mind walking back to town."
Bonton's buckboard carried us the matter of five miles to where his
machine, separator and cook-shack stood ... lurking behind a grove of
Osage orange trees.
Bonton had brought two other men besides me, as accessories to his gang.
We found the gang just tumbling forth from the cook waggon, a small,
oblong sort of house on wheels ... a long table in it, with benches ...
much like the lunch waggons seen standing about the streets in cities.
"Hello, boys, is it dry enough to begin loadin' yet?"
"Naw; the dew's still as heavy as rain on the bundles."
"We'd best wait a little longer, then."
* * * * *
Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven
o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it,
tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and
there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.
I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a
fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.
"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically,
peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had
missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....
"I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls."
"Just give me time till I learn the hang of it."
I was better with the next load. The waggons came and went one after
the other ... there was a light space of rest between waggons. It was
like the rest between the rounds of a prizefight.
From the cloudless sky the sun's heat poured down in floods. A
monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ...
and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned wood doves....
By noon I had achieved a mechanical swing that helped relieve the
physical strain, a swinging rhythm of the hips and back muscles which
took the burden off my aching and weaker arms.
That afternoon, late, when the old man drove his waggon up to me for the
hundredth time it seemed, he smiled quizzically.
"Well, here you are still, but you're too skinny to stand it another day
... better draw your two bucks from the boss and strike out for Laurel
again."
--"that so, Daddy!" and I caught three bundles at once on the tines of
my fork and flung them clear to the top, and over. They caught the old
man in the midriff.... I heard a sliding about and swearing ... the next
moment he was in a heap, on the ground ... on the other side of the
waggon.
"What th' hell did ye do that for?"