Windy McPherson's Son Part 31

At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, "Where are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give you a lift."

Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man's manner or in his dress suggesting the man of G.o.d, he a.s.sumed a bantering air.

"I am on my way to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I am one who seeks G.o.d."

The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the wheels of his buggy.

"Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,"

he said.

On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road, told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward which he might work.

"It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will bring me bread and b.u.t.ter, but because I need to be doing something that will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I want to find that way."

The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.

The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of G.o.d and of what the thought of G.o.d meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.

"There is no spirit of G.o.d here," he said, poking viciously at the coals in the stove. "The people here do not want me to talk to them of G.o.d.

They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank."

For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country with him and talking of G.o.d. In the evening they sat in the house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in his church.

The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and unnatural.

"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.

One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.

"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her arms and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him dissatisfied."

Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness.

There had been tears in the wife's eyes.

In June he went with a thres.h.i.+ng crew, working among labourers and eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the thres.h.i.+ng crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.

The thres.h.i.+ng outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe, who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers for other days of thres.h.i.+ng. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.

"One has to keep going," said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him on the matter.

When told to keep Sam's wage until the end of the season he looked relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried and said that he had no money.

"I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a little time," he said.

Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him from the shadows at the back of the barn.

"Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?" he asked.

Joe looked indignant.

"A man wants independence," he said.

When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a stream, and tearing up Joe's note watched the torn pieces of it float away upon the brown water.

CHAPTER III

Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days on which something happened or on which something outside himself interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange experiences.

At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.

"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he said to the men standing along the bar.

Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam said to himself, "I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this tramping on the road and thinking."

The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an obscure place had made its proprietor what is called "well fixed." It had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.

"Let them ask for it," said the proprietor gruffly. "Do you want to insult a man?"

On Sat.u.r.day the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks.

When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men and put the bottle before them, saying, "Drink all you want of the stuff."

When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets and looking at the floor.

"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.

The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in gla.s.s cases bottles of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender's art and stood all day handing out Al's poisonous stuff and the foaming gla.s.ses of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.

Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam apologetically.

"Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold," they would say, as though repeating a formula.

At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life's unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day's duty, and his curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam's question an impertinence.

"You fool, don't you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?"

Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.

CHAPTER IV

One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the sh.o.r.es of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.