"A pretty decent chap, that," remarked the Governor, "with a highly developed bump of discretion. A man I hope to see with his feet on honest earth when I leave the road. There must be no slip, Archie. The responsibilities of the next fortnight are enormous. The happiness of many people depends upon us. We'll stroll back to that big farm we passed awhile ago. It's starred in the official guide books of the dusty ramblers and the milk and bread and butter there will be excellent. And the barn is red, Archie! A red barn is the best of all for sleeping purposes. An unpainted barn advertises the unthrift of the owner, and the roof is always leaky. The scent of moldy hay is extremely offensive to me—suggests rheumatism and pneumonia. And a white barn stares at you insolently. Whenever I see a white barn I prepare for bad luck. But a red barn, Archie, warms the cockles of your heart. It enfolds you like a canopy of dreams! I wouldn't have the red too glaring;—a certain rustiness of tint is desirable—"
"Here endeth the lecture," Archie interrupted. "I am starving in a land of milk and honey. Do I understand," he asked as they crossed the bridge, "that tomorrow we're going to find jobs on Eliphalet's plantation and kidnap his granddaughter?"
"Much as I hate to anticipate, Archie, it's not only little Edith we're going to kidnap! We're going to steal the old man too!"
III
"I never saw a tramp yet that was worth his breakfast," snarled Grubbs, the foreman of Eliphalet Congdon's farm. "But don't you bums think y' can loaf round here. It's goin' t' be work from now right through till the wheat's cut. Jail birds, both on y', I bet. Well, there ain't nothin' round here to steal. Y' can both sleep in the hands' house back yonder and hop to meals when the bell rings. There's some old hats in the barn; shed them pies y' got on yer heads and try t' look like honest men anyhow."
They partook of the generous midday meal provided in a big screened porch adjoining the kitchen. Half a dozen other laborers, regularly attached to Eliphalet's section of rich land, eyed the newcomers with the disdain born of their long tenure. Perky was a capital actor; no one would have imagined that he had ever seen either of the new hands before. In the near-by fields the wheat shimmered goldenly in the sun, quivering into the perfection that would bring it under the knife a few days later. Help was scarce and the scorn of the foreman was assumed. He had every intention of clinging to the latest comers, inexperienced vagabonds though they might prove, until the pressing need was passed.
The Governor was set to work with two other men ripping out an old rail fence and replacing it with wire. Archie's task was the rather more disagreeable one of trundling gravel in a wheelbarrow and distributing it in holes staked for his guidance in the road that ran from the highway gate to the barn. The holes were small; it seemed to Archie absurd to spend time filling such small cavities; and a wheelbarrow filled with gravel is heavy. The foreman explained the job and departed, reappearing from time to time for the pleasure of criticizing Archie's work. When Archie suggested that there would be an economy of time in loading the gravel into a wagon and effecting the distribution by that means the foreman stared at him open-mouthed for a moment, then burst into ironical laughter.
"Give you a team to handle—you!"
The thought of trusting Archie with a team when teams were needed for much more important matters struck the cynical foreman as a gross impiety. The humor of the thing was too tremendous to be enjoyed alone; he yelled to a man who was driving by in a motor truck filled with milk cans to stop and hear the joke. Archie's soul burned within him. That a man of education who belonged to the best clubs on the continent should be proclaimed a fool by a hatchet-faced farmer in overalls, before a fat person on a milk truck was the most crushing of all humiliations. The foreman jumped on the truck and rode away, and Archie bent his back to the barrow, resolving that never again would he complain of bumps in a road now that he knew the heart-breaking and back-breaking labor of road-mending.
On the whole he did a good job; it was remarkable how interested one could become in so contemptible a task. He tamped the gravel into the holes with the loving care of a dentist filling a tooth, and struck work with reluctance when the bell sounded for supper.