Some incidents gave me a good deal to think about, for I had taken a great liking to the young owner. I saw his side, of course. It was in the interests of the country, and even of mankind at large, that crops like his should bepage 415
safely garnered. Lack of labour might prevent this from being accomplished. The men were unreasonable, there was no doubt about that. But I had learned, by that time, that at least nine-tenths of all our behaviour is unreasonable. And I could not help pitying them; I felt sympathy even with their impotent rage, for I knew how the feeling of impotence hurts. What I saw and heard made my heart sore for the underlying conditions that have created hobodom. There is, in most cases, first the inability to secure steady work at any one place; partial or seasonal employment is to blame for that; thus arises, in the individual, an inability to stay with the work; the men have to move sooner or later; they want to choose their own time; and this desire becomes at last a mania for which they can no longer be held responsible. Where hobodom has not been created in this manner, it is a case of congenital disposition. At any rate, as things were, it was one of the conditions of human life; to ignore it and not to make allowance for it, seemed cruelly callous to me.
Slowly my liking for Mr. Mackenzie faded; I found myself slipping into an attitude of animosity.
Then a case came up which relieved me, at least partly, of this gnawing discontent with the order of things. I saw that Mr. Mackenzie tempered a cruel policy with discriminating humanity.
A man had left his camp, asked for his cheque, and was refused. He demanded to see Mr. Mackenzie, saying he had to catch a morning train to the east. Unfortunately Mr. Mackenzie was out in the Fields, in his car, and could not be reached. The man, a quiet, unassuming fellow, walked restlessly up and down while waiting.
As soon as Mr. Mackenzie returned, he came over. Two or three others were waiting for him by this time.
"Well, what is it?" he asked.
"I am a married man," the first of those waiting said in substance. "I have a family, and I received a letter last night telling me that my wife and two children arepage 416
down with typhoid. I've got to get home. I have missed to-day's train; but I can walk it to Walloh and catch a night-train. I must have my wages."
"How much have you coming?"
The bookkeeper answered for the man.
"Well," said Mr. Mackenzie, "I can't pay you your wages. I have made a rule; I have to live up to it. But I shall fix you up somehow. Where do you live?"
"Near Fergus Falls, Minnesota," the man replied.
Mr. Mackenzie studied a time-table. "You can make the night-train from Barnesville," he said at last; "that is thirty miles from here. Have your dinner first; after that I shall take you over in my car. As for money, I shall loan you a hundred dollars in cash. You leave your address with the bookkeeper, and we shall send you the balance by mail when the season is over. Will that fix you up?"
"Yes," said the man, "thanks."
The other two found the young owner inexorable.
I could not excuse the cruel condition; but I could at least view Mr. Mackenzie less harshly than I had done before. Much of our suffering is inflicted by thoughtlessness. Lack of humanity is lack of thought, insight, imagination.
It was at this time that the old feeling of wonder took hold of me again; I marvelled at the plan of my life.
Had I gone through those things which I had endured and suffered myself -- on that tramp from New York to Indiana -- in preparation for what I was witnessing now? Doubtlessly my own, direct suffering, little as it amounted to, had prepared me for the vicarious suffering of the present. Doubtlessly I should -- as others did -- have shrugged my shoulders at the agony of the German boy; I should have turned in disgust from the "garbage-eater". Doubtlessly I should have looked with the Jewish bookkeeper's distant and hostile disdain upon this flood of questionable humanity, had not my own experience taught me a deeper sympathy. I had at that time no thought forpage 417
myself; I had nothing to worry about for the future; I felt that my great idea, my revelation of only a few weeks ago, secured me, insured me against all threats of an economic nature which the invaded continent might hold. As far as I personally was concerned, I could step out of this condition of hobodom whenever I chose to. But what difference did that make? It did not change one single fact in the cruel conditions which surrounded me.
And then, somehow, I received a hint of what was going on at the bunk-house at night and on rainy days.
I knew, of course, that the big hall on the ground-floor was the scene of the recreations of the hobos. For me there lay a certain, glamour over that hall -- that kind of fascination, I suppose, which in former years, in the Quartier Latin of Paris, had lured me on occasional adventurous trips into the "dives" of the criminal underworld.
All these men were harmless enough, taken singly. They were men like you and myself, men with personal worries and sorrows, likings and idiosyncrasies; above all weak and suffering men who appealed to my human sympathies. So far I had steered clear of them in the mass. I knew that Mr. Nelson, the superintendent, a quiet, coolly courageous man, did not like to interfere with them, there. Sometimes it was whispered that drinking was going on in the hall; and though it was strictly against the rules to bring liquor in any form into the camp, so that, if it was done, in violation of the rules, it became Nelson's duty to do something about it, I could see a look of annoyance cross his face when he was informed of the fact. He would have preferred not to know about it, to let them get drunk and sleep it off the next day. It was a dangerous task to investigate and to seize the whisky. Once, when the report came that the men were far gone in drink and that an ugly mood was prevailing, he held a brief conference with Mr. Mackenzie, and the two went together. Unflinching courage I found to be the most redeeming feature of the young millionaire-owner.
There was no need for me to go near the place. Nopage 418
duty of mine led me there. But I felt that my knowledge of this particular brand of humanity was incomplete till I had seen it in its orgies.
At last, one evening, after a sudden thunderstorm which had brought the work in the Fields to a stop in the early afternoon, I went.
It was after supper; the hour was late; I could not quit work at the usual time. This was especially true on rainy days because then we always had a rush on both office and store; everybody drew a cheque on account; everybody bought what he thought he needed. So night had set in when I reached the hall of the bunk-house.
To this very day I see the scene when I close my eyes.
Innumerable more or less smoky lanterns stood on a long table placed in the centre of the huge barn-hall. The rest of its spaces were in darkness; for the table was surrounded by a dense crowd of excited onlookers whose dim but gigantic shadows checkered and moved over the slanting beams, the walls, and the ceiling of the structure. The atmosphere reeked with the smells of coal-oil, soot, and whisky-exhalations.
When I penetrated the surrounding wall of humanity, edging in at the upper end, near the top of the table, so as to get a look at the game, I was struck by the feeling of tension which prevailed.
To me a game had always been a game -- a give-and-take, in which a loss had to be borne with the same equanimity -- at least in appearance -- as that with which you rake in a gain. But these twenty-odd men who were seated on the wooden benches around the table played for what to them were fortunes. Their stakes were the earnings of weeks and months of unremitting labour; to some a gain might mean comparative ease and leisure during the coming winter; a loss, slavery in a sweat-shop of the middle west. Winnings were taken with a grim sort of satisfaction; losses, with an obscene curse; sometimes with a vicious word against the winner.
The game was poker, of course; with the bets runningpage 419
high -- "the sky was the limit". That is the most deplorable form of the game because it allows the skilful "bluffer" to "squeeze out" an unfortunate antagonist whose holdings have run below his own. It was on that score that the brawls arose; for, as soon as you passed, unable to follow up the expert "pyramiding" of the bets, you lost the right to demand a "show-down".
I saw at once that the game was dominated by a young engineer from St. Paul, sent out by the Tractor Company to supervise the working of the new engines used for steam-plowing and threshing. Engineers and separator men could command as much as ten dollars a day during the high-pressure of the work. But this young fellow was engaged for three months at a flat rate of six dollars a day, all found, rain or shine. His earnings during the season may not have exceeded those of any other engineer -- there were eight on the farm; but his bragging certainly did. The fact that he went on drawing his money when rainy weather threw everybody else out of employment, except the low-paid Swedes who never appeared here anyway, put him in his own estimation on a sort of pedestal where he glorified himself.
Once, when he came to the store for a new suit of overalls, he spoke in the most patronizing way to me; and though I coolly discouraged his confidential talk, he rambled on for a quarter of an hour or so, sitting on an up-tilted box and keeping me from attending to my work.
"Money piles up pretty fast," he said, "when it keeps coming in at the rate of six dollars a day whether you work or not. Besides, I have a whole crowd here working for me. They can't keep their money; it burns in their pockets. They come and beg for a game. They know, or if they don't, they should know that, when I sit down in a game, I take the money and nobody else. Oh boy, when I get back to the Twin Cities, won't I have a sweet old time with the girls? I'll say I will."
This man who had nothing to recommend him except his never-failing nerve, sat in the centre on one side of the
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table. On either hand he had a lantern, in front of him a half-empty bottle. At his right a long folding-knife which locked in the handle, at left a pile of bills, cheques, and IOU's. His voice, eliminated the bedlam of shouts and laughter.
There were others who had made large winnings; they, too, were noisy.
But most of the gamblers sat tense and silent, except for an occasional muttered curse or a whispered accusation. What I could not understand was that they did not unite to down the bully in their midst. But the prevailing spirit seemed rather to narrow the circle by "squeezing" more and more of the less able or less fortunate players out, and then, when only two or three players were left, to spar for position and opportunity, and finally to stake everything on one bold throw.
To me the game became a symbol of much that is horrible in modern life.
Here was a handful of the drifting population of God's earth; here were men who owned nothing in the world beyond what they carried about and what might be waiting for them as a balance on the books of the farm. They threw down what they had and mortgaged their future into the bargain by giving IOU's and orders on wages not yet earned. They were virtually selling themselves into slavery. For what? For the thrilling and gripping excitement of a moment; and then maybe in the vain hope of recouping themselves by hanging on; and in a game in which nothing counted in the long-run except nerve.
I watched the engineer. He took his cards up as they fell, hiding the first in the hollow palm of his hand and laying those which followed on top of the first, slowly and deliberately; he never looked at his cards again, never spread his hand out; he hardly ever discarded to draw a new supplement. It hardly mattered to him what his hand might hold. He waited for the first bet; he hardly ever "passed", never accepted a bet as offered. Swiftly
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he pyramided, in his shrill, tense, ironic voice which stung his opponent like an insult and which seemed to have the power of depriving his victims of their cooler reason. He sat like a hawk, apparently nonchalant, in reality with every muscle taut; his whole attitude one of studied contempt.
I was to have an illustration of the fact that even chance counted for little or nothing in the game as it was played.
Where I stood, a commotion arose among the onlookers. A broad-shouldered giant of a man sat right in front of me. When my eye followed the excited looks of my neighbours in the group, I saw that he held "four of a kind".
I stood tightly wedged in at my post; but somehow I managed to edge up a little closer behind him.
He had a small pile of bills at his right, amounting to maybe twenty dollars or a little more.
Betting started somewhere around the table.
The giant seemed to bide his time.
The engineer's voice was pyramiding the bets, quickly, sharply, skilfully.
More and more betters dropped out of the game; at last there was a momentary pause. I saw that the pot held the stakes left over from a draw.
The deep bass of the giant in front sang out, "Wait a minute, you pup."
And then he made a fatal mistake. The betting stood at fifteen dollars; he should have accepted the bet as it stood. But, instead of merely "staying in," he raised it to twenty dollars.
That gave the engineer the chance for which he was waiting. With a swift side-look of his eye he appraised the giant's pile. I doubt whether many saw that look; but I knew that very moment that the giant was not going to win even though chance had dealt him a "hand among hands". The engineer calmly raised the bet back on him, to an amount way beyond the giant's holdings.
The game stood between the two.
I think, the giant realized at once that he had made an
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irretrievable mistake. But his fist came down on the table with a tremendous thump which sent the lanterns jumping up into the air.
"I'll call you," he roared, "you son-of-a-gun!"
The engineer sat coolly unmoved. "Put up," he said, throwing his money into the already large "pot".
The giant looked about, as if reading the faces. None of those he saw held the slightest encouragement.
"Loan me thirty buck," he called to no one in particular.
Not a man made a move.
There was a cruel perversity in this indifference. If I had had the money in my pocket, I should have slipped it to him. He was sure of his game. His "hand" could hardly be beaten. But, of course, it was not the possible or certain chance of recovery which would have prompted me. Iniquity was being perpetrated, even though in a game; I heard the unspoken call for redress.
A pleading look crept into the giant's face. He bent over and showed his neighbour what he held.
The only answer that man made was to close his hand over his pile of bills.
The giant muttered. He turned back to the engineer; but his voice sounded hopeless when he said, "I have sixty dollars coming to me at the office. I'll give you my IOU."
"I won't accept it; I am not a fool," replied the engineer with a steely sneer.
The giant clenched his fist as if ready to spring; his eyes bulged; he bent forward.
The engineer, piercing him with his steady look, reached with a blind hand for the handle of his knife.
There was a moment's tension which came close to sending a sob into my throat.
Then the giant relaxed, threw, with a coarse word, his cards on the table, got to his feet, and shouted, "Count me out. You can't beat the devil."
The engineer smiled his smile of bravado and for a
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second spread his cards into a fan, for the onlookers to see his hand.
Then he raked in the pot.
I squeezed myself out of the crowd. When, on my way to the door, I passed those who stood behind the engineer, I touched one of the men on the shoulder.
"What did he have?" I asked in a whisper.
"Nothing," was the reply.
Next morning, when I went out into the fresh, rainwashed air, one of the men who, the night before, had seen me in the hall said in passing, "Three of them are still at it, over there."