“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.”