THURSDAY, JULY 11, 1912. Great Bend, Kansas.
Yesterday I could lift three moderate-sized sheaves on the run. This
morning I could hardly lift one, walking. This noon the foreman of the
ranch, the man who, with his brother, disciplined the broncho, was
furiously angry with me, because, as I plainly explained, I was
getting too much sun and wanted a bit of a rest. He inquired, "Why
didn't you tell me two days ago you were going to be overcome by the
heat, so I could have had a man ready to take your place?" Also, "It's
no wonder dirty homeless men are walking around the country looking
for jobs." Also, a little later: "I have my opinion of any man on
earth who is a quitter."
But I kept my serenity and told him that under certain circumstances I
was apt to be a quitter, though, of course, I did not like to overdo
the quitting business. I remained unruffled, as I say, and handed him
and his brother copies of _The Gospel of Beauty_ and _Rhymes to Be
Traded for Bread_ and bade them good-bye. Then I went to town and told
the local editor on them for their horse-killing, which, I suppose,
was two-faced of me.
The tenant's attitude was perfectly absurd. Hands are terribly scarce.
A half day's delay in shocking that wheat would not have hurt it, or
stopped the reaper, or altered any of the rest of the farm routine. He
fired me without real hope of a substitute. I was working for
rock-bottom wages and willing to have them docked all he pleased if
he would only give me six hours to catch up in my tiredness.
Anyway, here I am in the Saddlerock Hotel, to which I have paid in
advance a bit of my wages, in exchange for one night's rest. I enclose
the rest to you. I will start out on the road to-morrow, bathed,
clean, dead broke and fancy free. I have made an effort to graduate
from beggary into the respectable laboring class, which you have so
often exhorted me to do.
I shall try for employment again, as soon as I rest up a bit. I
enjoyed the wheat and the second-hand reaper, and the quaintness of my
employers and all till the death of Richard the Lion-Hearted.
I am wondering whether I ought to be as bitter as I am against the
horse-killers. We cannot have green fields just for bronchos to gambol
in, or roads where they can trot unharnessed and nibble by the way. We
must have Law and Order and Discipline.
But, thanks to the Good St. Francis who marks out my path for me, I
start to-morrow morning to trot unharnessed once again.
SUNDAY, JULY 14, 1912. In front of the general store at Wright,
Kansas, which same is as small as a town can get.
I have been wondering why Destiny sent me to that farm where the
horse-killers flourished. I suppose it was that Dick might have at
least one mourner. All the world's heroes are heroes because they had
the qualities of constancy and dancing gameness that brought him to
his death.
Some day I shall hunt up the right kind of a Hindu and pay him filthy
gold and have him send the ghost of Dick to those wretched men. They
will be unable to move, lying with eyes a-staring all night long.
Dreadful things will happen in that room, dreadful things the Hindu
shall devise after I have told him what the broncho endured. They
shall wake in the morning, thinking it all a dream till they behold
the horse-shoe prints all over the counterpane. Then they will try to
sit up and find that their ribs are broken--well, I will leave it to
the Hindu.
I have been waiting many hours at this town of Wright. To-day and
yesterday I made seventy-six miles. Thirty-five of these miles I made
yesterday in the automobile of the genial and scholarly Father A. P.
Heimann of Kinsley, who took me as far as that point. I have been
loafing here at Wright since about four in the afternoon. It is nearly
dark now. Dozens of harvesters, already engaged for the week, have
been hanging about and the two stores have kept open to accommodate
them. There is a man to meet me here at eight o'clock. I may harvest
for him four days. I told him I would not promise for longer. He has
taken the train to a station further east to try to get some men for
all week. If he does not return with a full quota he will take me on.
While I am perfectly willing to work for two dollars and a half, many
hold out for three.
The man I am waiting for overtook me two miles east of this place. He
was hurrying to catch his train. He took me into his rig and made the
bargain. He turned his horse over to me and raced for the last car as
we neared the station. So here I am a few yards from the depot, in
front of the general store, watching the horse of an utter stranger.
Of course the horse isn't worth stealing, and his harness is half
twine and wire. But the whole episode is so careless and free and
Kansas-like.
Most of the crowd have gone, and I am awfully hungry. I might steal
off the harness in the dark, and eat it. Somehow I have not quite the
nerve to beg where I expect to harvest. I am afraid to try again in
this fight with the sun, yet when a man overtakes me in the road and
trusts me with his best steed and urges me to work for him, I hardly
know how to refuse.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 21, 1912. Loafing and dozing on my bed in the
granary on the farm near Wright, Kansas, where I have been harvesting
a full week.
The man I waited for last Sunday afternoon returned with his full
quota of hands on the "Plug" train about nine o'clock. Where was I to
sleep? I began to think about a lumber pile I had seen, when I
discovered that five other farmers had climbed off that train. They
were poking around in all the dark corners for men just like me. I
engaged with a German named Louis Lix for the whole week, all the time
shaking with misgivings from the memory of my last break-down. Here it
is, Sunday, before I know it. Lix wants me back again next year, and
is sorry I will not work longer. I have totalled about sixteen days of
harvesting in Kansas, and though I sagged in the middle I think I have
ended in fair style. Enclosed find all my wages except enough for one
day's stay at Dodge City and three real hotel meals there--sherbet
and cheese and crackers, and finger bowls at the end, and all such
folly. Harvest eating is grand in its way but somehow lacks frills.
Ah, if eating were as much in my letters as in my thoughts, this would
be nothing but a series of menus!
I have helped Lix harvest barley, oats and wheat, mainly wheat. This
is the world of wheat. In this genial region one can stand on a
soap-box and see nothing else to the horizon. Walking the Santa Fé
Trail beside the railroad means walking till the enormous
wheat-elevator behind one disappears because of the curvature of the
earth, like the ships in the geography picture, and walking on and on
till finally in the west the top of another elevator appears, being
gradually revealed because this earth is not flat like a table, but,
as the geography says, curved like an apple or an orange.
In these fields, instead of working a reaper with a sickle eight feet
long, they work a header with a twelve-foot sickle. Instead of four
horses to this machine, there are six. Instead of one man or two
following behind to the left of the driver to pile sheaves into
shocks, a barge, a most copious slatted receptacle, drives right
beside the header, catching the unbound wheat which is thrown up
loosely by the machine. One pitchfork man in the barge spreads this
cataract of headed wheat so a full load can be taken in. His partner
guides the team, keeping precisely with the header.
But these two bargemen do not complete the outfit. Two others with
their barge or "header-box" come up behind as soon as the first box
starts over to the stack to be unloaded. Here the sixth man, the
stacker, receives it, and piles it into a small mountain nicely
calculated to resist cyclones. The green men are broken in as
bargemen. The stacker is generally an old hand.
Unloading the wheat is the hardest part of the bargeman's work. His
fork must be full and he must be fast. Otherwise his partner, who
takes turns driving and filling, and who helps to pitch the wheat out,
will have more than half the pitching to do. And all the time will be
used up. Neither man will have a rest-period while waiting for the
other barge to come up. This rest-period is the thing toward which we
all wrestle. If we save it out we drink from the water-jugs in the
corner of the wagon. We examine where the grasshoppers have actually
bitten little nicks out of our pitchfork handles, nicks that are apt
to make blisters. We tell our adventures and, when the header breaks
down, and must be tinkered endlessly, and we have a grand rest, the
stacker sings a list of the most amazing cowboy songs. He is a young
man, yet rode the range here for seven years before it became
wheat-country. One day when the songs had become hopelessly,
prosaically pornographic I yearned for a change. I quoted the first
stanza of Atalanta's chorus:
"When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces,
The mother of months, in meadow or plain,
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain----"
The stacker asked for more. I finished the chorus. Then I repeated it
several times, while the header was being mended. We had to get to
work. The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to ride
to the field he began:
"'When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces,
The mother of months, in meadow or plain,
Fills the shadows----'
"Dammit, what's the rest of it? I've been trying to recite that piece
all night."
Now he has the first four stanzas. And last evening he left for Dodge
City to stay overnight and Sunday. He was resolved to purchase
_Atalanta in Calydon_ and find in the Public Library _The Lady of
Shallot_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, besides paying the usual visit to
his wife and children.
Working in a header-barge is fun, more fun than shocking wheat, even
when one is working for a Mennonite boss. The crew is larger. There is
occasional leisure to be social. There is more cool wind, for one is
higher in the air. There is variety in the work. One drives about a
third of the time, guides the wheat into the header a third of the
time and empties the barge a third of the time. The emptying was the
back-breaking work.
And I was all the while fearful, lest, from plain awkwardness, or
shaking from weariness, I should stick some man in the eye with my
pitchfork. But I did not. I came nearer to being a real harvester
every day. The last two days my hands were so hard I could work
without gloves, this despite the way the grasshoppers had chewed the
fork-handle.
Believe everything you have ever heard of the Kansas grasshoppers.
The heights of the header-barge are dramatically commanding. Kansas
appears much larger than when we are merely standing in the field. We
are just as high as upon a mountain-peak, for here, as there, we can
see to the very edges of the eternities.
Now let me tell you of a new kind of weather.
Clouds thicken overhead. The wind turns suddenly cold. We shiver while
we work. We are liable in five minutes to a hailstorm, a terrific
cloudburst or a cyclone. The horses are unhitched. The barges are tied
end to end. And _still_ the barges may be blown away. They must be
anchored even more safely. The long poles to lock the wheels are
thrust under the bed through the spokes. It has actually been my duty
to put this pole in the wheels every evening to keep the barges from
being blown out of the barn-lot at night. Such is the accustomed
weather excitement in Kansas. Just now we have excitement that is
unusual. But as the storm is upon us it splits and passes to the north
and south. There is not a drop of rain.
We are at work again in ten minutes. In two hours the sky is clear and
the air is hot and alkaline. And ten thousand grasshoppers are glad to
see that good old hot wind again, you may believe. They are preening
themselves, each man in his place on the slats of the barge. They are
enjoying their chewing tobacco the same as ever.
Wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat! States and continents and oceans and
solar-systems of wheat! We poor ne'er-do-weels take our little part up
there in the header half way between the sky and the earth, and in the
evening going home, carrying Mister Stacker-Man in our barge, we sing
_Sweet Rosy O'Grady_ and the _Battle Hymn of the Republic_. And the
most emphatic and unadulterated tramp among us harvesters, a giant
Swiss fifty years old, gives the yodel he learned when a boy.
This is a German Catholic family for which I have been working. We
have had grace before and after every meal, and we crossed ourselves
before and after every meal, except the Swiss, who left the table
early to escape being blest too much.
My employers are good folk, good as the Mennonites. My boss was
absolutely on the square all the week, as kind as a hard-working man
has time to be. It gave me great satisfaction to go to Mass with him
this morning. Though some folks talk against religion, though it
sometimes appears to be a nuisance, after weighing all the evidence of
late presented, I prefer a religious farmer.