"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."
"We'd best wait a little longer, then."
Though it seemed that half the day had wheeled by already, by seven o'clock we rode a-field, and the less experienced of us were hard at it, tossing up bundles to the loaders, who placed them swiftly here and there till the waggons were packed tight and piled high.
I pitched up bundles from below, to an old man of sixty, who wore a fringe of grey beard, like a Mennonite.
"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically, peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again....