He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.
* * * * *
A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a land that once reached over all the seas.
For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes. Huge, powerful men whose foreheads sloped back and whose jaws sloped forward and whose stiff hands reached an inch nearer their knees than today.
This giant in the tattered mackinaw is an exile from this land and there is no dream of it left in his blood. The body of his fathers has returned to him. Their long, loose arms, their thick muscles and heavy pounding veins are his, but their voices are buried too deep to rise again in him. The mutterings of warrior councils, the shouts of terrible hunts are lost somewhere in him and he shuffles along, his sloping forehead in a pucker of thought as if he were trying to remember. But no memories come. Instead a bewilderment. The swarming streets bewilder him. The towering buildings, the noises of traffic and people dull his eyes and bring his shoulders together like the shoulders of some helpless captive.
* * * * *
He returns to the employment office and raises his eyes to the bulletin boards. He reads slowly, his large lips moving as they form words. In another day or another week he will be riding somewhere, his dull eyes gazing out of the train window. They will call him Ole or Pat or Jim in some camp in the Dakotas or along some roadbed in Montana. He will stand with a puny pick handle in his huge hands and his arms will rise and fall mechanically as he hews away along a deserted track. And his forehead will still be puckered in a frown of bewilderment. The thing held in his fists will seem like a strange toy.
"Farm laborers in Kansas," says the bulletin board as the clerk with his piece of chalk re-enters the office. The Mexican slowly removes himself from the window and the contemplation of memories. Kansas lies to the south and to the south is the way home. He goes in and talks to the man behind the long desk.
An hour later the clerk and his piece of chalk emerge. The exiles are still mooching around on the pavement and the shuffling one stands on the curb staring dully at the street under him.
"Section hands, Alberta, Canada, transportation," says the new bulletin. There is no stir among the exiles. This is to the north. It is still cold in the north. But the shuffling one has turned. His eyes again trace the crudely chalked letters of the bulletin board. His lips move as he tells himself what is written.