As the boys sat in their room that evening in their pajamas talking over
the events of the day Scott was impressed more than ever with Johnson’s
strange philosophies, apparently gathered from almost unlimited
experience. Johnson was in a very good humor over the results of the
boxing match and Scott thought it a good opportunity to get him to tell
his story.
“Johnson,” he asked curiously, “where haven’t you been? You don’t look
very old but there does not seem to be any place that you have not
worked in all the United States.”
“Well,” Johnson answered, “I have never been to the South or East, but
there are not many sections of the West that I have not seen.”
“How did you do it?” Scott urged. “You said that I could sit up all
night, you know, and I could listen very contentedly to an account of
all your wanderings. They must be interesting for I suppose you beat
your way everywhere. Come on, let’s have the whole story,” and he
settled himself down to listen.
Johnson, who loved to have an audience for his adventures, was in his
glory. He had had adventures galore and they lost nothing in his telling
of them.
“If you really do not want to sleep for an hour,” he said, “I’ll tell
you about them, but there is no use in trying to do it in less. It
covers a great many years in spite of my young and boyish face.
“You asked me to tell you about my work. Well, that began when I was six
years old. My father was a teamster in Duluth, and I was the oldest of
eight children. The old man did not believe in any idlers in the house,
and one morning when I was about six he kicked me out the front door and
told me not to come back till I had earned something.” Johnson had never
been taught any family pride and made no attempt to shield either his
family or himself.
“There are a good many things I have forgotten since then, but I
remember perfectly well what a pickle I was in that morning. I had had
too many of those kicks to try to go back so I paddled away right up to
the main street howling like a good fellow. Nobody paid any attention to
me till I ran into a newsboy.
“‘Hello, sonny,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter with you? Lost a million on
the races?’ I told him my troubles and he handed me a bundle of papers
and told me he’d give me a cent for every ten I sold. ‘Don’t quit
crying,’ he said, ‘keep it right up. That ought to sell them if anything
will.’
“I made five cents out of it that morning and went home happy. The old
man came in to dinner, took the money for my board and told me to get
some more that afternoon. The newsy stocked me up again and I was such a
little kid that lots of people bought from me. Well, I kept at that
paper business for a long time, but the old man kept taking all of my
money for board and it was not encouraging. At last I got wise enough
not to take home all I earned and began to get ahead a little.
“When I was not selling papers I took to running errands and finally
became a regular messenger boy. I learned to read the papers while I was
selling them. I tell you I learned things on that messenger job. A
messenger boy on a night shift sees everything in a town except the
inside of the churches. One night about two A. M. I took a message away
up town. It took a long time to get anybody up, but finally an oldish
man came to the door. He looked at me a minute without taking the
message I was trying to give him, and then pulled me into the house by
the back of the neck.
“‘What are you doing out at this time of night?’ he asked sternly.
“I was sassy and told him that it was his fault for getting a message at
that time of night.
“He took my number, and I thought for a while that he was going to have
me fired, but he was not that kind. He was a Catholic priest. When he
turned up at the office the next afternoon I was scared. He simply
collared me and led me away. He took me to one of the big hotels and
right up to the proprietor. ‘Here he is,’ he said. Then he turned to me.
‘You’re going to be bellhop here from four o’clock in the afternoon on,
and in the daytime you’re going to school. I’ll come here in the morning
with you and see that you get started.’
“Well, that suited me fine. I had always wanted to go to school. He
started me in in the morning and kept tab on me as long as I stayed
there. When my old man found that I had a good job he tried to get me
back home, but the priest settled him and I have not been home since. By
the time I had reached the eighth grade I had worked in about every job
there was in Duluth. But it was in the bellhop job that I got my hunch.
A couple of foresters stopped there one evening and sat talking where I
could hear them. Their talk showed me what I wanted to do. I talked to
one of them and found out something about it.
“That meant that I had to go to the University, and if I went to the
University I had to have some money. Then I had heard those fellows say
that what a man wanted was experience in the woods and with men. That
summer my wanderings started. I learned at the employment agency that
they needed men on a construction crew in North Dakota. They booked me
and I went. I drove team on a slusher for two months. It was a tough
outfit, but they did not have anything on me there, and I learned to
handle a team. I had never had anything to do with one before. When the
harvest started I skipped the crew and went to hauling water for a
threshing crew. They paid twice as much.”
“Had to work about twenty hours a day, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I did not mind that. That fall I entered the high school. When
summer came times were pretty hard and work was scarce. I jumped a
freight and beat my way to the Pacific Coast. The brakeman happened to
kick me off in the apple region of Washington—I did not have any more
money to tip him—and I got a job there packing apples. Paid pretty well,
but the Chinks were a dirty lot to work with. When the apples were all
packed I beat my way up to the Puget Sound district and got another job
in a lumber camp cutting wood for a donkey engine. That was some hard
work but I learned a lot about the logging. I had a fierce time trying
to get home. I got kicked off so many times that I finally had to pay my
fare back from Missoula. Got back a month late for school then.
“Back in school again I still held onto the bellhop job. I knew that if
a man was going to get along well he had to be a good mixer. I learned
that at the hotel. Gee, it was tough. I had such a poor start at home
that every summer I lost nearly all I had gained in the winter. What
little manners I have are only smeared on the outside and they keep
cracking off.
“The next summer I shipped to Colorado to work in the mines. That did
not last long. It paid pretty well, but I had to work on the graveyard
shift from eleven at night till seven in the morning, and I could not
stand being shut up all the time. So I wandered down into the southwest
part of the state, and worked in a lumber camp there. Great sport
working up on top of a mesa nine thousand feet above sea-level, trying
to swing a five-pound ax when you hadn’t the breath to lift a paper
weight. You could puff with all your might there but the air did not
seem to be any good; the more you puffed the more you got winded. I got
used to it after a while. There were some queer duffers in that camp,
‘lungers’ who had come out for their health. One fellow was a school
teacher from Philadelphia. We worked together on a saw crew, and he
undertook to teach me Spanish. Before the summer was over he had me
chattering like a greaser. I managed to teach him a little Swedish. The
combination was fierce.
“I beat my way home through Kansas City, and was a month late for school
again. The old priest offered me a job as a sort of secretary. Said it
would help to give me a little culture, and as that was what I was after
I took it. It was great experience and he saw to it that I was not
overworked. He was certainly a dandy. That spring he gave me a letter to
some friends of his up north of Lake Superior and I worked on a summer
logging job.”
“That was great luck, wasn’t it?” Scott commented.
“Yes, I thought so at first. Those people were very good about giving me
a job, but I never came so near earning my money in my life. I was ‘bull
cook’ and messenger boy. They had me up at daybreak, which is shortly
after two o’clock in that country in the summertime, and kept me going
till dark, about ten. I had to cut the wood for the kitchen stove and
keep the whole camp supplied with water, sweep out all the buildings
every day and do anything else that blamed cook could think of. He had
the indigestion so badly he could not see straight—most of those camp
cooks have from ‘lunching’ so much between meals—and it had ruined his
disposition. The only rest I got was when he sent me out to the woods at
noon with the men’s dinner. I usually stayed out most of the afternoon
watching the logging. The boss was onto the game, but knew what the cook
was and did not kick. The cook did, though. I used to be so sore
sometimes when I had been out a little later than usual that I would eat
supper standing up. But when fall came I knew something about summer
logging, and more about the northern lumberjacks, especially cooks.
“The last year of the high school with the job as the priest’s secretary
to help out was a cinch. Everybody knew what a rough kid I had been and
helped me along. That summer I made the longest jump of all. There are a
lot of people in Duluth who are interested in copper mines in the
southwest, and one of them offered me a job as timekeeper. That took me
down into Arizona near the Mexican line. The office work kept me so busy
that I did not have a chance to see anything, and the thought of being
in that new country without seeing things was too much for me.
“I jumped the job at the end of the first month and struck down into
Mexico. My greaser talk came in handy then. I finally picked up a job as
timekeeper on a railroad construction crew. That was great, for they
were just putting the finishing touches on a road, and moved fast. I saw
lots of the country.
“I had one pretty strange experience there that scared me badly at the
time. One of the engineers who was superintending the job was an
American and a dandy fellow, but he was pretty sharp to those Mexicans;
used to make them work harder than they liked. One day he kicked a
fellow who refused to dig out a grade stake for him. The greaser did not
do anything at the time, but when you insult one of those fellows you
ought to kill him right there, for he’ll lay for you.
“That afternoon I was asleep on a flat car while the train was running
around the side of a mountain to a new work station, when I heard
someone jump down onto the flat from a box car. I opened one eye and saw
that it was the greaser who had been kicked. He glanced at me, thought I
was asleep, and started to climb onto the next box car behind. I didn’t
think anything of it till I saw that he had a knife in his hand. That
woke me up pretty quick for I knew how they fought. As soon as he was up
the ladder I started up after him to see what was going on.
“When I peeped over the edge of that box car there was the greaser
sneaking slowly up on the engineer, who was asleep on his back. There
wasn’t any time to lose and I yelled like an Indian. I never saw
anything so cool as that engineer. He opened his eyes with a jerk,
rolled over once to dodge the knife, jumped to his feet, and knocked
that greaser off the box car down the side of the mountain with one
blow. He did not even look to see where he landed. He saw me staring
over the edge of the box car with my eyes hanging out on my cheeks, and
said, ‘Good boy, kid.’ With that he lay quietly down on his back again.
I didn’t sleep for a week but it didn’t seem to bother him any, or
anybody else. There was never anything said about it.”
“Didn’t the courts investigate it?” Scott asked in surprise.
“No, a greaser does not count there.
“When we finished the line we were away down in Southern Mexico; it was
time for college to begin and no way to get back. I made my way across
country to the nearest seaport and found a steamer just about to sail. A
greaser there said she was bound for New Orleans, and I stowed myself
away in the hold.
“It was stuffy in that old pit and I thought we would never get to New
Orleans. My grub began to give out and I lived on half rations for four
days and on nothing for two. I had just finished the last of my water,
and had decided to try to get out when we docked and the hold was opened
up. I managed to sneak out in the night and hid in the warehouse. I did
not know much about what New Orleans looked like, but I did not think so
many of the people there were Spaniards. Then I found out that it was
Buenos Ayres instead of New Orleans. That pesky ship had been sailing
the wrong way.”
“That was certainly a good one on you,” Scott laughed.
“Yes,” Johnson bragged. “Fortune has had many a good one on me, but
nobody else has.
“Well, I was too late for college then, so I stayed to work in the
warehouse awhile, and took a trip back into the country. The place
looked pretty good to me and I came near staying there, but I had been
working too long to get to the University to let it go. So I took a job
on a sailing vessel and reached New York about February 1. I beat my way
West with the idea of entering the University at the beginning of the
second semester, but they would not let me.
“You know how I worked around College all last spring, carried a rod in
a survey party in Wisconsin all last summer and have been trotting up
and down this blooming hill to lectures all fall. Now I reckon I have
talked you to sleep, so I’ll go myself.”
Scott did not speak for a minute, but it was not because he was asleep.
The very carelessness with which Johnson related his wonderful
achievements, and the utter lack of conceit in his almost superhuman
efforts to rise in the world, added to the fascination of it. Scott was
thinking what a bed of roses his life had been compared with Johnson’s,
what a tremendous handicap he had been working under, and yet how little
he had the advantage of Johnson. Even that little advantage was
temporary, for a man with that experience of life would soon distance
him when he finally started his real work.
“By George, Johnson,” he said, starting up suddenly, “you’re a hero.”
But the hero made no answer, for true to his word he was already asleep.
Scott lay awake for a while thinking it over. He wondered what his
father would think of Johnson as a chosen companion. Judged on the basis
of family as was the custom at home Johnson would be rejected but he
felt in his heart that Johnson had certainly earned a place in the world
and finally went to sleep convinced that if he could not get his ten
thousand acres without discarding Johnson he would go without it.