Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: "THE TRAIL LIFTED ZIG-ZAG OVER THE COYOTE RANGE"
--Page 283]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE FORBIDDEN TRAIL
By HONORE WILLSIE
Author of
"The Heart of the Desert,"
"Still Jim," "Lydia of the Pines," etc.
A. L. Burt Company
Publishers--New York
Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1919, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages
Printed in the United States of America
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE DREAMER 1
II. HOPES DEFERRED 32
III. THE NEW DAY 52
IV. CHARLEY 81
V. VON MINDEN 105
VI. THE LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 130
VII. THE RUNAWAY 151
VIII. THE LONELY HUNTER 176
IX. GUSTAV 186
X. DEATH IN THE DESERT 206
XI. DICK'S SICKNESS 228
XII. DICKY'S LAST BOUT 249
XIII. THE GREAT DIVIDE 265
XIV. WASHINGTON 275
XV. RABBIT TAIL'S GANG 295
XVI. THE RIVER RANGE 314
XVII. THE BLACK BOX 345
XVIII. PAPA WOLF 358
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE FORBIDDEN TRAIL
CHAPTER I
THE DREAMER
Roger was only seven. He was tall for his age and very thin. He had a
thick crop of black hair and his eyes were large and precisely the color
of the summer sky that lifted above the Moores' back yard. These were
the little boy's only claims to beauty, for even at this time Roger's
face was too much of the intellectual type to be handsome. Beauty is
seldom intelligent. Roger's long, thin jaw, his thin, thoughtful mouth,
his high forehead, were distinctly of the thinking, dreaming type.
It was midsummer and Roger's tanned legs and feet were bare and
scratched and mosquito bitten. He wore a little blue gingham sailor
suit, which was much rumpled and soiled.
Charlotte was five. She was tall for her age too. In fact at five she
was nearly as tall as Roger. But she was not as thin as he. She had
large brown eyes of astounding depth and softness and bronze brown hair
that was short and curly. There were lovely curves in her scarlet,
drooping lips and a fine arch to her head above the ears. There was a
dimple in her round chin. She sat in front of Roger who was astride one
end of a great plank that was up-ended on a barrel.
"You go over and get Ernie and Elschen, Charley," commanded Roger in a
deep, boyish voice.
"I won't!" returned Charley, succinctly, crowding closer to Roger, as
she spoke.
"Well now, do you think I'm going to play alone all the afternoon with a
baby?" roared Roger. "You're too little to work this teeter-tauter with
me. I'm not going to stand it, I'm not. You get off!"
"I won't," repeated Charley, none the less firmly that the red lips
trembled. "I runned away from our house to play with you and I'm going
to play, I am."
"You ain't going to play alone and Mamma says I gotta take you home in
half an hour if nobody doesn't come for you."
"I won't go home." Charley ended this time with a sob.
"Now don't bawl!" exclaimed Roger, in alarm, twisting the little girl's
head around so that he could peer into her face. He kissed her in a
paternal manner. "Don't bawl! I'll take care of you."
Charley wiped the kiss off on the sleeve of her checked gingham dress
and smiled. Roger left the see-saw and climbed to the top of the board
fence.
"Ernie!" he shouted in a tone that sounded through the quiet village
like a siren horn. "Ernie! You and Elschen come on over!"
Mrs. Wolf appeared at the back door of the house next door.
"Ernie and Elschen are doing the dishes. When they finish they will be
over."
"Will it take 'em long?" asked Roger. "I got all my chores done."
"They're nearly done. Here's Elschen ready to go now."
"It was my turn to wipe, so I got through quick. Ernie's awful mad,"
cried a small girl, scrambling hastily over the fence.
Elsa was six. She was short and plump, an almost perfect miniature of
her pretty mother, who stood smiling in the doorway. Her hair was true
gold. While it was not curly it was full of a vitality that gave it the
look of finely spun wire as it stood out over her head in a bushy mass.
She was red of cheek and blue of eye, a jolly, plucky little girl, much
more enterprising and pugnacious than Ernie, who followed her shortly
over the fence.
Ernest was Roger's age and he looked so much like Elsa that a stranger
might have thought them to be twins.
He landed with a thud. "Where'd you get the teeter-tauter, Roger?" he
cried.
"Don't you see, you old ninny? I heaved up the plank Papa put down for
the walk to the clothes-reel, and the barrel, I sort-of--now I kind of
borrowed that out of the Sauters' barn. I guess they wouldn't care. I
left a penny on the barn floor to pay for it. It's the strongest barrel
I most ever saw. You go on the other end and Charley and I'll stay here.
Elschen, you can be candlestick."
"I ain't going to be candlestick very long, I ain't. Not for you old
boys," said Elsa, climbing, however, to the place assigned her, where
the board balanced on the barrel.
The children see-sawed amicably for perhaps five minutes when Roger
roared--
"Hey! All of you get off! I got to fix this better."
"I'm not agoing to move," replied Elsa.
"I ain't agoing to move," agreed Charley.
"Come on, you girls, get off," cried Ernie. "What you going to do,
Roger?"
"I'll show you! If you girls don't get off, I'll dump you," suiting
action to words, as he tilted the plank sidewise. Elsa got a real bump,
from the barrel to the ground. Charley's end of the see-saw was on the
ground so she scrambled up laughing. Not so Elschen. She was red with
anger. She flew at Roger and slapped him in the face.
Roger turned white, and struck back, the blow catching Elsa in the
stomach. She doubled up and roared. Roger's voice rose above hers.
"I'll kill you next time! I'll kill you, you low down old German pig,
you."
Slow moving little Ernie ran to put his arm round Elsa.
"Don't you hit my sister again, Rog Moore!"
Roger jumped up and down and kicked the barrel. "You get out of my yard!
I hate you all!"
"Not me, Roger?" cried Charley, anxiously, running up to take his hand.
Curiously enough even in his blind passion, the boy clung to the
childish fingers, the while he continued to kick the barrel and to roar,
"I'll kill you, Elsa!"
The screen door clicked and Mrs. Moore hurried down the back steps. She
was very tall and slender, with Roger's blue eyes and a mass of red
hair piled high on her head. She carried one of Roger's stockings with a
darning ball in the toe in her left hand and the thimble gleamed on the
middle finger of her right hand as she put it on Roger's shoulder.
"Roger! Roger! You're rousing the whole neighborhood!"
Roger struck the slender hand from his shoulder. "I hate you too. Let me
alone!"
Mrs. Moore turned to the others. "Children, take Charley over in your
yard for a little while. Roger is being a very bad boy and I must punish
him."
Roger hung back, still roaring, but his mother dragged him into the
kitchen. Here she sat down in a rocker and attempted to pull him into
her lap, but he would have none of her. He threw himself sobbing on the
floor and Mrs. Moore sat looking at him sadly.
"I don't know what we're going to do about your temper, Roger. This is
the third spell you've had this week. I don't see why the children play
with you. Some day you _will_ murder some one, I'm afraid. I used to
have a temper when I was a child but I'm certain it was nothing like
yours. One thing I'm sure of, I never struck my dear mother. Thank
heaven, I haven't that regret."
Roger wept on.
"I've tried whipping and I've tried scolding. Perhaps I'm the wrong
mother for you--" A long pause, during which Roger's slender body did
not cease to writhe in sobs. Then his mother continued: "Poor little
Elschen, that was an awful knock you gave her! I shall have to apologize
to Mrs. Wolf again. She's always sweet about your badness."
She began work on the stocking once more. Roger's sobs lessened and his
mother rose to wet a towel-end and bathe his face. But when she returned
from the sink, the child was asleep, his head pillowed on his arm. It
was thus that his temper storms always ended. Mrs. Moore had observed
that when she had whipped him for one of his explosions, he always slept
much longer than when she merely allowed him to sob himself quiet. So
though his father still advocated whipping, she had concluded that
whipping led only to further nerve exhaustion and she had stopped that
form of punishment.
Half an hour later Roger rolled over on his back and stared for a moment
wide eyed, at the ceiling. Then he got up quickly and running over to
his mother, he threw his arms about her neck and kissed her
passionately.
"Oh, Mother! Mother! I love you so! I'm so sorry I slapped your hand. I
will be good! Oh, I will be good!"
He took the hand which he had struck in both his own and kissed it.
"Poor hand," he half sobbed, "poor hand!"
"All right, dear," said his mother, freeing her hand gently. "Now, go
make up with the other children."
Roger darted out the door and his mother heard him shouting to his
playmates.
It was an hour later that she went to the back door, to send Roger home
with Charley. What she saw there sent her flying once more to interfere
with the children's play. Fastened by bits of rope and twine to the
plank were her three choicest sofa cushions, of white silk which she
herself had embroidered. A child lay on its stomach on each of these,
wildly gesticulating with legs and arms while Roger played the garden
hose on them.
The four culprits in a sodden row before her, Mrs. Moore sought counsel
from Mrs. Wolf, who had come hurrying at her neighbor's call.
"What shall I do with him? It was his idea, he says."
"Sure it was," exclaimed Roger stoutly. "We were shipwrecked sailors.
The tempest had raged for three days like in 'Swiss Family Robinson.'"
"But why did you get the sofa cushions?" asked Mrs. Wolf.
"Oh, that was my invention to make the teeter-tauter more comfortable.
Then they made nice waves for us to rest our stomachs on when we swam."
"You knew how I prize those cushions. That one with the roses took me
all last winter to do," said Roger's mother sternly.
"I--I--yes, I kind of knew, but I forgot. I always forget when I'm
inventing. Don't I, Ern?"
Ern nodded and put his arm over Roger's shoulder.
"I must try to help you to remember, little son." Mrs. Moore sighed.
"For three days you cannot play with Ernie and Elschen."
Instantly a howl rose from the two little Wolfs. "We can't play without
Roger! It was our fault too!"
"Indeed, that's too hard on all of them, Mrs. Moore. We'll have bedlam
for three days," protested Mrs. Wolf.
"But he's always losing his temper and hurting your children," exclaimed
Mrs. Moore.
"But he keeps them interested, anyhow," replied the little German
mother. "They never ask to go away when Roger is with them. There's
something so lovable about him in spite of his temper."
"He hit me in my poor little belly--" began Elschen.
"Elschen!" shrieked her mother.
"Stomach," Elschen substituted hastily. "My poor little stomach. But I
don't care, I love him anyhow."
"But how about my sofa pillows?" asked Mrs. Moore.
"We'll give you the money out of our banks," said Ernie.
Elsa jumped up and down. "So we will! And you too, Roger!"
"Sure I will. And I'll iron the roses out for you."
The two mothers looked at each other with a glimmer of a smile in light
and dark blue eyes.
"You can each put a quarter in the Sunday School contribution box next
Sunday and we'll call it square. Do you agree, Mrs. Wolf?" Then as her
little neighbor nodded, Roger's mother went on. "Go change your wet
suit, Roger, and take Charley home. Lend me some of Elschen's little
things for her, Mrs. Wolf. The child is soaked."
"Mamma! That's a _mile_ out to Prebles'," roared Roger.
His mother looked at him, completely out of patience. "Well, _Roger_!
after this afternoon's various performances!"
"Oh, I'll go!" cried Roger hastily. "I was just talking, that was all!"
and he fled to the house.
Roger and Charley, hand in hand, trailed up the street in the haphazard
manner of childhood. The Prebles lived on a farm half a mile beyond the
limits of the town of Eagle's Wing. The board walk ended not far beyond
the Moores' house and the children automatically chose the center of the
road where the dust was deepest. By scuffling their bare feet
continuously they managed to travel most of the distance to the farm in
a cloud of dust which Roger explained was a deep sea fog.
Dick Preble met them at the door of the farm house. Dick was a stocky
boy of ten with a freckled face surmounted by a thatch of sandy hair.
"Charley! Where have you been? We thought you were asleep upstairs.
Mamma was just getting scared. And whose clothes have you got on?"
Charley rushed headlong past her brother, shrieking for her mother,
while Roger struggled with his explanation of certain of the afternoon's
complications.
"Gee!" was Dick's comment, "I'll bet Charley gets the paddle whacks for
running away."
"You weren't thinking of driving into town, were you?" asked Roger.
"Naw, lazy bones! You can just foot it, after half drowning my sister."
"You better keep your old sister home then," replied Roger, starting for
the gate.
It was a long walk for seven-year legs. Roger was considerably less
active on the return trip than he had been plowing through the sea fog
on his way out. But his mind was hard at work.
"It would be nice to have a railroad all the way out to Prebles'. One
that just us children could use--under the road. And I'd have little
doors that would open up in the road and we'd peek out. And if we saw
any grown ups coming we'd close the door quick. I'd be the engineer and
Ernie the fireman. And we wouldn't have that old Dick at all. He's too
big and cross. The girls could ride if they'd behave and run errands for
us. Let's see. We'd have to dig it out first. Then we'd want ties and
rails and a little engine. I wonder how much it would cost. But it would
be very useful. 'Specially if we let Mr. Preble send his corn to town on
it. He wouldn't have so much trouble with his hired men if they could
ride on my engine, I bet."
This delectable dream, with infinite variations, carried Roger home.
Supper was on the table and Mr. Moore was already in his place. A thin
man, Roger's father, with a deeply lined face and good gray eyes, under
a thatch of iron gray hair. He was a master mechanic, now owner of a
little factory which turned out plowshares. Moore had devised machinery
which enabled him to turn out plowshares of a superior quality, in
greater quantity and at a cheaper rate than any of his larger
competitors in neighboring states. His was only a small concern,
employing twenty-five or thirty men, but even this made Moore the chief
manufacturer of the town of Eagle's Wing, whose only other glory was
that it housed the state university. The members of the college faculty
did not recognize many of the town people socially. But Dean Erskine,
the young new dean of the School of Engineering, had visited the plow
factory and had been so enthusiastic over Moore and his work that he had
come a number of times to the house, bringing Mrs. Erskine with him.
Factory management was a new theme in these days and Dean Erskine found
Roger's father open minded to his theories.
"Well, old son, have you been a good boy to-day?" asked Mr. Moore as
Roger slid into his place at the table.
"No, sir. I've been pretty bad. Say, Papa, how much would it cost to
build a railroad, under the ground, from our house to Prebles'?"
"A good deal of money. What way were you bad, Rog?"
"Oh, about every way, temper and all. Papa, I guess I'll build that
railroad. I got a big piece of pipe and a gauge that might work. Guess I
might begin to make a engine. Aren't I a pretty good inventor, Papa?"
"I don't know, Son. Nothing you've ever said or done makes me think
you're one yet. In the first place an inventor is the most patient
animal in the world. An inventor just can't lose his temper. Why don't
you begin by inventing a way to control your temper, Son?"
Roger subsided into his bowl of bread and milk.
Mr. Moore was smoking on the front porch when Mrs. Moore joined him
after putting Roger to bed. She sat down on the steps beside him while
she told him of Roger's day.
"He's so contrite and so sweet, after one of his passions!" she said.
"And yet, well, maybe it's his age, but he's so sort of casual about his
temper. To-night, for instance, after he'd said the Lord's Prayer, he
added, 'And please God, help me to find some pipe to make that engine
and some rails too. And bless Charley, she's so little. And bless Mamma
and Papa. And Lord, you might do something about my temper if you have
time. Amen.'"
The father and mother laughed together, then Mr. Moore said, "I do hope
the boy will keep up his interest in mechanics. It's the coming game for
real he-men. The world's going to turn into a big machine. The way
things are going now with me, I'll have a real place for the boy when he
finishes school. Dean Erskine's about persuaded me to let him go to
college. I've been dead set against a college engineer until I met
Erskine. He's made me feel as I'd have had less of an uphill pull if I'd
gone to engineering school, and he says I've made him feel as if he
never had enough shop practice."
Moore stopped to chuckle. Then he went on, after refilling his pipe,
"Yes, machinery is the greatest thing in the world. I took on five more
men to-day, Mamma. All union men. I've decided to give in on that point
and have a strictly union shop."
"I think you're right," said Mrs. Moore. "After all the union is the
working man's only protection."
Moore grunted. "I don't care so much about the right of it as I do the
expediency. And I haven't time to buck the union."
"You've changed a lot since you left off working with your hands,"
commented his wife, noncommittally.
"A man has to change his point of view when he becomes an employer
instead of an employee. Old girl, we're on our way up the ladder and
nothing but old Grim, himself, can stop us. And when I came in from the
old farm, when I was twelve years old, I had only my two hands and the
clothes I stood in."
"You've been wonderful!" murmured Mrs. Moore. "Do you know, Mr. Wolf has
done well too. His wife said he couldn't speak a word of English when he
came to this country--at just twelve, too, and now he's manager of the
Grand Dry Goods Company."
"He's a nice fellow with a mighty pretty wife."
It was Mrs. Moore's turn to grunt, which she did, in the manner of a
wifely sniff. And the two sat in silence, hands clasped in the lovely
summer night.
After all, Roger did not get beyond a first attempt at the railroad
building. He began the tunnel the next day, he and the two little Wolfs
digging vigorously until a hole as large as a bath tub was completed.
While resting from this toil, Roger conceived the idea of making a
wading pool, with the aid of the hose. Some vague lesson won from
previous experience made him ask permission of his mother and this
given, the three children spent an ecstatic, though muddy, day in the
improvised pond.
Roger's father suggested that evening that the pool be gradually
enlarged to make a swimming pool. He enlisted Mr. Wolf's aid for the
summer evenings and in a couple of weeks a very creditable pool, brick
and concrete lined, made a summer heaven of the back yard for the little
friends.
It was the pool that made this summer perhaps the most memorable one of
Roger's childhood. It was the one, anyway, to which in after years his
mind harked back with the most pleasure and with the greatest frequency.
Even little Charley learned to swim. Roger never was to forget her
slender beauty, as she stood ready for her dive on the pool edge. This
was his last memory of the little girl, for the Prebles gave up farming
that fall and moved away. Somebody said that Mr. Preble drank up his
farm, which at the time seemed mere nonsense to Roger.
Roger's tenth summer was memorable too. But he ceased to think of
himself as a child then, because that was the summer his mother had
typhoid fever and all summer long he was practically his own man. His
father could give him no time, for there was a strike in the factory
that lasted during the six weeks that Mrs. Moore was the sickest. The
night that his mother was passing through her crisis, men threw stones
in the kitchen windows.
Mrs. Moore believed that she was going to die. One day when her mind was
clear, despite her deathly weakness, she made them leave the little boy
alone with her while she told him of her consuming anxiety over his
temper. And she talked to him too about a motherless young manhood and
how he must try to keep clean and straight. She made him promise that if
any of the facts of life puzzled him, he would go to his father and not
let naughty minded little boys tell him bad stories. Then while Roger
sobbed, she fell asleep and when she woke she was definitely better. But
Roger never felt like a child again. He felt that he knew all that men
knew about life, and death as well.
Mrs. Moore never was really strong again. Their keeping a servant dated
from that summer and so did a little electric car, the first one in
Eagle's Wing. Yes, perhaps this was as memorable a summer as Roger's
seventh. Yet it lacked the magic and the beauty that made imperishable
the joy of the swimming pool summer.
And then came his fourteenth summer.
Roger was a strapping big lad at fourteen. He was as tall as his father,
who was five feet ten, and was still growing rapidly. He was thin but
hard-muscled, with good shoulders that were not as awkward as they
looked. After a year of pleading, his father agreed to let him spend his
vacation in the plow factory; and Roger in overalls, his dinner pail in
hand, was his father's pride and his mother's despair. She did like to
see her only child well dressed.
Ernest's father wanted Ernie to come into the store that summer. But
after his years under Roger's tutelage, Ernie was all for mechanics, so
he too acquired overalls and a dinner pail and went into the plow
factory. Elschen was broken hearted because there was no way in which
she also could become a wage earner.
The university lay at the south end of the little town. The plow
factory, now employing two hundred men, lay at the north end. Jim Hale,
the chief engineer, blew the whistle every morning at seven o'clock and
again at five o'clock. There was an hour off for dinner pails at twelve.
A nine hour day, a few years ago, was not considered a long day, that
is, not by employers of labor. That the employees were beginning to feel
differently, Roger was to learn that summer in a manner that was to
shape his whole life.
The workmen were of a type little known now in our big industrial
centers. Without exception they were North Europeans: Germans,
Norwegians, Swedes and Danes. About fifty per cent. of them were foreign
born. The rest of them were American born. A good many of the German
born had not taken out first citizenship papers, but the Norwegians and
Swedes had done so, so had the Danes. Enough of them had a certain
amount of pride in their work to make the factory an interesting and
profitable place for a boy to serve his first apprenticeship in.
Practically all married men in the factory wanted to settle permanently
in Eagle's Wing and send their children through the town's splendid
schools. A majority of them planned to send their sons through the State
University.
John Moore had a good eye for men. He had built up an apparently solid
and permanent organization. Yet for all his keen eye, the more
successful he became, and the larger his business, the more incapable he
grew of winning his men's liking. He had worked unbelievably hard from
his boyhood up. He had given himself to his work without stint. He had
no sympathy with any of his employees who would do less. His wage, as a
mechanic, had never exceeded two seventy-five a day. He bitterly
resented any man's wanting more.
Moore was the entire brains of his factory. He was his own manager, his
own superintendent, his own purchasing and sales agent--a man of
splendid mind, hidebound by the egotism and prejudices of the self-made
man. At fifty, he was going at his highest speed, every nerve taut,
ready to break at the least disturbance of the load.
Roger admired his father with a blind idolatry that was quite foreign to
his ordinary mental attitude. He was naturally critical of men and
things. To be a forge boy in his father's factory was to Roger to be
touching the skirts of real greatness.
"Father," he said one night at supper, "I had a row with Ole Oleson
to-day."
"Which Ole Oleson?" asked his father. "There are nine of them in the
factory."
"The second forge foreman. His girl Olga is in my grade at school."
His father nodded. "What was the row about? As I warned you, Rog, if I
catch you with the lid off that temper of yours, I'll treat you exactly
as I would any other employee."
"But you didn't catch me, this time!" Roger grinned. He had fine white
teeth and his eyes were still the wonderful sky blue of his childhood.
"Ole said you were as hard as one of the plowshares and that some day
the men would soften you like they take temper out of steel and that
then you'd never be any good again."
John Moore snorted. "And you let the fool get a rise out of you, of
course!"
"I knocked him down."
"And what did he do?"
"He knocked me down."
"Then what?" asked Moore.
"We shook hands and went to work again." Roger grinned at his mother's
horrified face.
"I'd have fired you both if I'd seen it," said his father. "You were
late again this morning, Son. Remember you're docked for that."
"Anyhow," Roger went on without noting apparently his father's warning,
"he got confidential, while we were eating dinner, and told me that if
you didn't give them an increase they were going on a strike that would
make you sit up and take notice. He says you won't give the increase so
the strike's due about the middle of July."
"Oh, the fools!" exclaimed John Moore. "I can't have a strike now with
that big Russian order to fill. That order makes or mars me."
"Then you'll give 'em the raise! That's good!" Roger gave a sigh of
relief.
"Raise nothing! Why, I can't raise them! Roger, you're old enough to
begin to understand these things. The only way I'm able to compete with
the trust is by working on such a narrow margin of profit that it makes
their overhead look like Standard Oil profits. So far they've let my
patents alone, chiefly, I suppose, because my machinery is efficient
only for the comparatively small output. I never have been able to
accumulate much working capital. A protracted strike would put me out of
business. On the other hand a material increase in wage would kill that
Russian contract and I've already borrowed money on it."
"Roger, you shouldn't have told your father that when he was tired,"
said Mrs. Moore, handing her husband his third cup of tea.
"Don't be a goose, Alice," returned Roger's father. "What are they going
to ask for, Son?"
"A minimum of three dollars a day and eight hours."
"Then I'm finished!" exclaimed Moore, setting his lips.
"Why don't you tell them when they come to you just what you've told
me?" asked Roger. "They'll understand."
"They won't believe a word of it. Nobody knows so much about a business
as one of the workmen. And the poorer the workman the more he knows. I
think I'll go up to see the Dean."
Roger and his mother sat late on the porch, while Mr. Moore conferred
with his friend. Mrs. Moore summed up her own feelings on the matter of
the strike when she said just as Roger started for bed:
"Well, as far as I'm concerned, I've never been so happy as I was when
your father was just a plain mechanic, earning his two and a half or so
a day and with no responsibility except to do his work well. Ever since
he's been his own boss, he's been changing. I don't feel as if he were
the same man I married. And what does he get out of it? Worry, worry,
fuss, fuss. I tell you, Roger, my dear, I've come to the conclusion that
the more complicated life gets, the less happiness there is in it."
Roger bent and kissed his mother. "Maybe I'll feel like that when I'm
older," he said, "but I don't now. And I guess Father likes the worry.
It's like playing a game. I'm going to get into it, you bet, just as
soon as I get through school."
His mother made no reply.
On the morning of July fifteenth, a delegation of three workmen waited
on John Moore in his office. They made exactly the demands that Roger
had reported and they received the same reply that Roger had received,
with just about the same amount of detail as to the running of the
business. The strike was scheduled to begin on the first day of August.
Roger and Ernest, plugging away at the forge, heard the men's side
constantly. At night Roger heard his father's. At first, naturally
enough, both boys' sympathies were all with Roger's father. Then,
because he was now a working man himself, Roger began to notice that
his father had brutal ways with the men. Three or four times a day Moore
always went through the factory. A careless mechanic would receive a
cursing that, it suddenly occurred to Roger, no real man ought to
endure. The least infringement of the factory rules was punished to the
limit by a system of fines. Moore drove the men as relentlessly as he
drove himself. This aspect of his father Roger naturally never discussed
with his chum, but he spoke of it to his father on the morning of the
first of August as they made their way to the factory.
"They think you feel to them just like you do to a machine and it makes
them sore, all the time," said the boy.
"Heavens! what do they want? Must I kiss them good morning?" exclaimed
Moore.
Roger laughed. "No, but I know what they mean. I've seen you when you
talked as though you owned them--and not that either. It's sort of like
if you could recollect their names, you'd hate 'em."
"Shucks, Rog! You're getting beyond your depth!" said his father.
The seven o'clock whistle did not blow that hot August morning. All the
neighborhood of the factory was full of lounging men with clean faces
and hands. It was like Sunday. Ernest went to work in his father's
store. Roger spent the morning in the office with his father. In the
afternoon he circulated among the men. At first many of them resented
this. Naturally enough they looked on the boy as his father's spy.
But Moore had nothing to conceal nor had the men. Roger was intelligent
and thoughtful far beyond his years, and little by little the men got
in the habit of debating with him the merits of the case.
Roger forgot that summer that he was a boy. Even at Saturday afternoon
baseball, his mind was struggling with a problem whose ramifications
staggered his immature mind.
Ole Oleson, the forge boss, talked more intelligibly, Roger thought,
than any of the others. There was a bench outside the picket fence that
surrounded Ole's house, and Ole's house was not a stone's throw from the
forge shed. Here nearly every afternoon Ole, with some of the strike
leaders, would gather, and when not throwing quoits in front of the
shed, they would talk of the strike.
Roger, his heavy black hair tossed back from his face, his blue eyes
thoughtful, his boyish lips compressed in the effort to understand,
seldom missed a session. The strike had lasted nearly a month when he
said to Ole.
"My father says that if the strike isn't over in two weeks, he's
ruined."
"That's a dirty lie!" exclaimed a German named Emil.
Before Roger's ready fist could land, Ole had pulled the boy back to the
bench.
"What's the good of that!" said Ole. "Emil, this kid's no liar. Don't be
so free with your gab."
There was silence for a few moments. The group of men on the bench
stared obstinately at the boy Roger and Roger stared at the group of
factory buildings. Unpretentious buildings they were, of wood or brick,
one-story and rambling. John Moore had bought in marsh land and as he
slowly reclaimed it by filling with ashes from his furnaces, he as
slowly added to the floor space of his factory. Roger could remember the
erection of every addition, excepting the first, which was made when he
was only a baby. He knew what the factory meant to John Moore and with
sudden bitterness he cried,
"I don't see what good it will do you to ruin my father!"
"'Twon't do us no good," returned Ole. "He ain't going to be ruined.
Look here already, Rog. I got a girl, your age. She goes in your class.
What kind of girl is she?"
"She's a smart girl. Smart as lightning," answered Roger.
Ole nodded. "Sure she is. Now Emil, he's got two boys and three girls.
Canute, over there, you've got three little girls, ain't you? Yes--and
Oscar, you got one boy, and John Moore, he's got one boy. Now, listen
once, Rog. I tell you about myself and that tells you about all of us
here.
"I am born in Norway, the youngest of nine, and when I am ten years my
folks come to America. They come to give their children a chance to live
comfortable and not have to work like dogs all the time, just to keep
alive. All right. They come here to this town. My father gets a job and
my big brothers get a job and we all do fine. They put me into school
and my father says I can go clean through the University. Then he dies
and my brothers all marry and when I have just one year in the High
School I have to quit and go to work.
"All right! I get a job in a machine shop where a fellow named John
Moore has a machine next to mine. He's a good smart fellow. We're good
friends, many years. But he has a good education."
"He has not!" interrupted Roger, flatly. "He's never been in school
since he was twelve and he's supported himself ever since he was
twelve."
"He's educated all the same," insisted Ole.
"He taught himself everything he knows," Roger cried.
"All right! All right! Anyhow, he makes a new kind of a machine and
takes his savings and starts to make plowshares, ten a day, over in that
little brick house, there. And he works like the very devil. Why? Why,
so that little Roger Moore that's come along can have it easier than he
had. Same as I'm working for my little Olga and same as Canute and Emil
and Oscar is working."
"That's only part of it, with father, anyhow," Roger exclaimed. "Of
course, he's ambitious for me, but, you see, he has these ideas inside
of him that have to come out. He'd have done it if I'd never been born."
"He does it so's his children gets ahead. Every married man's that way.
Otherwise, why work?" This was Emil's contribution.
"All right," Ole pushed on. "Anyhow first thing I know I'm working for
John Moore and he's getting ahead while I'm staying in the same old
place, same old pay. And now listen. Already, when he gets ahead he
changes. He gets bossy and ugly. Seems like a man can't be a boss
without changing, without getting so he curses the fellow he bosses. And
Emil and Oscar and Canute and I and all of us say, 'Here's Moore getting
ahead. His boy goes through the university on what Moore makes us earn
him. He has a hired girl for his wife. Now our children can't go to the
university on what Moore pays us. And our wives can't keep a hired girl.
Moore couldn't earn a cent without us. He's got to give us enough of
what we earn him so's we can live easy as he does.'"
"He don't live easy," retorted Roger. "You ought to see him. He works
harder than any of you, day and night, he never stops. My mother's
always complaining that she's lost him. And if he's your age, Ole, he
looks ten years older. I tell you carrying that factory is an awful
load. None of you folks could run it. You haven't got the brains. Father
ought to be the big earner. He's got the big brains."
"He can be the big earner," said Canute, a thin, slow speaking Dane, "if
he gives us a chance to save and enough time to enjoy a little every day
the sunshine and make gardens or bowl or play with our children. That's
what we came to America to get and, by God, we're going to get it."
"He doesn't get it." Roger spoke with an unboyish sadness in his voice.
"That factory has him body and soul. I don't see what's the use."
Again there was silence. Then Ole said, "I guess the thing that makes me
hate him is how he's changed already. Look, Rog, I'm an American
citizen. I can't have any man curse me like I was a slave. No money can
pay for it. And one reason this strike's going to hang on till your
father gives in is because he don't know how to boss men. And they all
hate him."
"And envy him!" cried Roger.
"Sure," agreed Emil. "Envy him, we do. That's why we're striking."
"And supposing the factory goes out of business?" Roger asked. "You'll
all have to move away or take any old job. This is the only factory in
this town."
Ole laughed. "Your father's got you bluffed too, Rog."
"You'll see!" returned Roger, through his white teeth. "You'll see." And
he started abruptly for home.
The first week of September slipped into the second. The night of the
fourteenth, John Moore said at the supper table, "I bought the old
Preble place, to-day. Traded in this place for it, so we'll have that
free and clear out of the wreck."
"What do you mean?" faltered Mrs. Moore.
"What I say," he snapped. "The Russian contract has been canceled. Money
never was so tight in thirty years as it is now. Wolf says he thinks
there's a panic coming, and so does the bank. I can't borrow a cent
more. I'm through with my fling, Alice, and I'm going back to a farm."
Roger choked a little on his tea. His mother said, unsteadily, "John
dear, if going back to the farm brings you back to me, I shall thank God
for the strike."
Roger's father scowled at his wife for a moment, then suddenly
something, perhaps the gentleness of her voice and the sweetness of her
eyes, caused him to push his chair back and going around to her side to
kneel with his head against her shoulder.
Roger slipped out of the room, blowing his nose. He went into the back
yard and sat scowling at the swimming pool until he heard the front door
click on his father, then he went to bed.
The following day when Roger went into the office, his father's coat was
hanging on the accustomed hook, but his father was not there. Vaguely
alarmed, Roger started a search through the factory. His alarm proved
unfounded, for he discovered his father in the little building that had
been the original factory. He looked up when Roger came in.
"Look, Rog," he said. "I'd like to take this old machine up to the farm
with us. We could store it somewhere. It's the first machine--the one I
started business with."
Roger nodded but could not speak. Moore looked around the room.
"Well, I've had a good run for my hard work," he said, bitterly. "An old
man at fifty and a worn out farm to spend my old age on."
"You've got Mother and me. And why don't you start again, Father? I'd
help."
"I'm too old, Roger. I've lost my vim. We'll close the shop, to-day. A
man's coming up from Chicago to buy in the machinery."
A half hour later, Moore posted a great sign on the office door. "This
factory goes out of business to-day." Then with the various keys of the
buildings in his pocket, he went home. Roger hung about to see how the
men took the news.
By noon, the two hundred employees of the factory with many of their
wives and children were gathered in the factory yard. At first they
seemed cynically amused by what they called Moore's bluff. By
mid-afternoon, however, after repeated assurances from Roger that his
father was going to be a farmer, the crowd became surly. A strange man
got up and made a speech. He said that capitalists like Moore should be
destroyed, that men such as he were a menace to America. Roger, standing
by Ole's side, saw suddenly in his inner mind his father's gray head on
his mother's shoulder.
"You lie, you dirty anarchist!" he roared, and heaved a brick at the
speaker's head.
There was an uproar. Some one helped the speaker wipe the blood out of
his eyes and tied his head up, while Ole pinned both Roger's arms behind
him.
"They say that's Moore's boy threw that brick," cried the speaker. "Come
up here, you hell cat, and show yourself to these downtrodden workmen."
"Let me go, Ole," said Roger, with sudden calm. "I want to say
something."
Ole looked into Roger's blue eyes. "All right," he said, after a moment,
"only if you get mad again, I can't answer for this crowd. They're
sore."
"I'm all right," muttered Roger, and he pushed his way to the office
steps where the speaker stood. "Here I am," he cried; "what about it?"
"Here he is," roared the stranger, pulling Roger round to face the
crowd. "If he tries murder now, what'll he do when he has a factory of
his own?"
Roger thrust his trembling hands into his trousers pockets. "Don't you
think it!" he shouted. "What do I want of a factory? To let a crowd of
ignoramuses like you ruin me--just out of ignorance and envy? Not on
your life! My father's going onto a farm and I'm going with him. I hope
you're all satisfied."
"Farm!" sneered the stranger. "Why, he'll have a bunch of scabs up here
to-morrow. I know Moore!"
What Roger might have said, one cannot know, for at that moment a man
drove up in an automobile and shouldered his way up to the office door.
He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket as he mounted the steps.
"Who are you?" asked Roger. "I'm Mr. Moore's son!"
"I'm Mr. Wrench of Chicago. Trouble serious?"
"No," replied the boy. "Just a lot of hot air."
"One moment please," said the strange speaker. "There'll be serious
trouble here if some questions aren't answered. What is your business
here?"
"I'm to see to the dismantling of the factory," answered Mr. Wrench,
indifferently.
A long breath seemed to rise from the listening crowd. Automatically it
broke up into little groups and the best efforts of the strike leaders
could not pull it together again. Roger felt that the excitement was all
over and he made his way slowly home.
At midnight that night a terrific explosion shook the little town of
Eagle's Wing. Roger had not finished pulling on his clothes when the
fire bells began to ring. He caught his father rushing out of the front
door. Ernie and his father joined them and they followed other hurrying
groups toward the factory.
It was all ablaze, as well as several of the workmen's houses, which
with the main factory building had been demolished by the explosion.
Everybody asked questions at once and a hundred pairs of hands tried to
help unreel the hose and bring it to bear on the main blaze.
"Turn on the water!" shouted a fireman.
"No! No!" roared a voice, and a man in his undershirt rushed up and
tried to tear the hose away from those that directed it. It was Oscar.
"No! Let her burn! Let her burn! We'll show that infernal hound of a
Moore if he can take our chances away from us!"
"Oh, then 'twas you!" cried Moore, and he leaped for Oscar.
A dozen men sprang to pull them apart, but Roger was there first. He
hung onto his father in desperate silence, while others pulled Oscar
away. Mr. Wolf and Ernest followed the Moores as Roger led the way to a
seat on a heap of debris.
"There, old friend, there!" said Wolf. "Don't take it so hard! I know! I
know! If it was my store it would break the heart of me. But we cannot
break. We cannot."
Roger kept his hand on his father's shoulder. Moore rested his head on
his hand and said nothing.
"It's all right, Daddy! You walloped him a good one," said Roger.
"His old snoot was all over his face," added Ernest in a cheerful voice.
"Hush, boys, come away for a little bit," said Mr. Wolf. And he led the
two back toward the hose. But Roger would not go far. He loitered behind
lest some one should molest that silent figure on the heap of debris.
All the vicinity was brilliant with firelight. And standing waiting thus
he saw a sight that he never was to forget. It was his father, bowing
his head on a piece of the twisted, wrecked machinery--the machinery
into which he had put the passionate hopes and dreams of his manhood.
And moving nearer lest some one else should see, Roger saw that his
father was sobbing as if indeed his heart was broken.
That picture was to direct the entire course of Roger's life. For it
never left him. And at first it filled his boyish mind with such
bitterness that he could not hear of labor and its strivings and
troubles without seeing red.
But as the years on the farm slipped by and the atmosphere of
competition and of feverish ambition gave place to the sweet silences,
the quiet plodding, the placid sureness of farm living, the bitterness
gave way to a dream.
Gradually Roger ceased to blame the factory workmen who had destroyed
his father, or to blame his father for the egotism and selfishness that
had driven his employees into reckless stubbornness. He saw behind both
the urge of the inevitable, unquenchable desire of human beings for
happiness; for the happiness that comes only when men have sufficient
leisure in which to expand their minds and souls.
And as he grew older and read deeper it seemed to him that the solution
lay only indirectly in any system of government. It seemed to him that
until man had learned how to use directly and freely the power sources
of nature, inequalities of wealth would always persist. And he had
learned in one bitter lesson that unhappiness and economic inequality go
hand in hand.
And so Roger dreamed his dream. For many years it was such a mad seeming
dream that he was ashamed to speak of it, even to Ernest. And yet it was
simple enough in its first outlines.
This was, Roger told himself, a machine age. The more perfect became
man's use of machinery, the more leisure could he have and the more
wealth. Ultimately man's efforts must concentrate on the effort to find
power with which to drive the world's machinery. Coal was disappearing,
water power was coming into its own. Was there not, however, some
universal source of power that could be harnessed and given to the use
of man? Some power that capital could not control nor labor misuse and
destroy?
It was thus that Roger came to study the possibilities of Solar Heat
utilization. It was thus that he became the world's first and greatest
pioneer in a new field of engineering--a field so mighty that it was to
become the dean of all other fields of power engineering.
He dreamed a dream of solving the problem of labor versus capital. He
was to learn through years of heart breaking endeavor that neither
capital nor labor has use for a dreamer of dreams no matter how
practical the dreams may be, unless the dreamer is selfish enough, is
grasping and ruthless enough to trample over other men to the top.
Roger was to learn, before he achieved success, that a man's genius can
go no higher than his character permits it to go. He was to learn that
only out of a man's will to conquer himself can come the finest
accomplishment of his work. And he was to learn that for most of us fate
works with curious indirection. So that the story of Roger's dream deals
not with a struggle between capital and labor, but with a man's struggle
with solitudes; it deals not so much with machinery as with nature; and
not so much with scientific facts as with human passions.
Thus for most of us, if we could but see it so, life is not a matter of
colorless and naked straight lines but is a rich mosaic made up of a
thousand seemingly unimportant items.