That night on his way to supper he passed Riles, who came reeling out of a bar-room, and the leer on the farmer’s face was not a good thing to see. “And so, young meddler,” he hissed, “you are buying revolvers now, but I guess you’ll soon be where you won’t meddle in decent folks’ affairs again for awhile, eh?”
[CHAPTER VII—ONLY A BARNARDO BOY]
| “They’ll abuse him as a youngster, they will mock him as a man, They’ll make his life a thorny path in every way they can, Till he curses his existence and the day that it began, And he wishes he was rotting in the sod.” The Empire Builders. |
Hiram Riles and his wife lived on a farm about two miles from the Grant homestead. They had come out from the East in the early days, when Riles was a strong, sinewy fellow to whom money-getting had not yet become a mania, and his wife still retained some of the roses and some of the sentiment of youth. But it’s a hardy rose that survives twenty years of pioneer life, and it’s a deep-rooted sentiment that can weather prosperity unelevated by culture and unsweetened by self-sacrifice. And in the Riles’ home culture had come to be a thing misunderstood, and self-sacrifice a thing unknown. There was only one end in life—to make money; and there was only one way this could be done—by labour which amounted to slavery, and stinginess which amounted to theft. Nothing which could not be expressed in dollars and cents had any value to Riles; no doctrine but mammon-worship had any part in his creed.
The years had dragged on and he had prospered after the standard of the world, gaining money and losing everything that money cannot buy. Quarter section had been added to quarter section, bought when land was cheap and paid for by dint of untiring labour and at the sacrifice of physical comforts and mental advantages which Riles considered of no moment. But as, labouring from dawn to dusk, he added quarter to quarter, the time came when even his dauntless energy could not keep up with the growth of the farm. True, his wife helped him to the limit of her strength, driving the plough and the binder, stooking in the fields, or, drenched to the waist, working in the garden on days when the rain prevented harvesting, and milking her dozen cows after the neighbours were in bed. She was a model wife, as Riles admitted, but even in the admission he took rather more credit to himself for selecting and “breaking her in” than he allowed to her for her strength and industry. But when their combined efforts could no longer furnish the labour needed on the farm, Riles found it necessary to get a hired man. It took him months to make up his mind that the expenditure was unavoidable, but at length he drove to town and announced to a group of idle men that he was looking for a good strong man, not afraid of work, and would pay twenty dollars a month, board and keep.
Riles honestly believed that as soon as he made this offer all the idle men in the town would crowd around him competing for the position, and he was not prepared for the indifference with which they regarded it.
“Well, who wants it?” he demanded. “Speak up quick, I got no time to lose. I’ve a field of oats there waitin’ stookin’, and if you fellows don’t want the job there’s lots that does. Who’s comin’?”
Nobody moved, and at last one of the men said, “I guess you better try somewhere else, Mr. Riles. Everybody here seems to know you.”
“They do, hey? And what of it? Ain’t I good? Don’t I pay my bills? Just yuh walk down to the bank and ask ’em if Hiram Riles ever turned down a bill he owed, and I guess you’ll find——”
“I wasn’t thinking about the bills,” the man replied. “You pay them because you have to. You’re worth it, and you can’t get out of it. But you’re as much a slave-driver as ever cracked a whip over a nigger in a cotton field. Nobody ’at knows you’ll work for you. You better get a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim for a blood-sucker of your class.”