With the return of spring I went into the country again, drifting on with no more definite plan than that of going westward until I should reach the Pacific; and here at once was the contrast. Opportunities of work everywhere; with farmers, when one was on the country roads; in brick-kilns, when bad walking drove one to the railway lines.
Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the Rock Island Railway in Illinois, had, for seven weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to Lima and back again, he told me, and yet he got a job near Ottawa in response to his first inquiry; while a few miles farther down the line I, too, was offered work in a brick-kiln at Utica. I did not accept it, only because I had savings enough from my last job to see me through to Davenport.
It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1892, that I reached Davenport. I had followed the line of the Rock Island Railway from Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one night, at Bureau Junction, in a shed by the village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had developed a plan to go to Minneapolis. I hoped to work the passage as a hand on a river boat.
At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped to ask the way to the office of the steamboat line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a man who sat just inside. With a kindly face of German type, he was of middle age, a little stout, dressed in what is known as a “business suit,” and when he spoke, it was with a trace of German accent.
Mr. Ross is a sufficiently near approach to his name. He was not an Iowa farmer, but he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he had things to say about the unemployed. A director in a bank and the owner of a livery-stable, he was owner of I know not what besides, but I know that he was delightfully cordial, and that his hospitality was of a kind to do credit to the best traditions of the West.
He answered my question obligingly, then asked me whether I was looking for a job.
“For if you are,” he added, “there’s one right here,” and he waved his hand expressively in the direction of the stalls at the rear.
This was more than I had bargained for; it was wholly new to my experience to find work in a town before I even asked for it.
I told him frankly that I was out of employment and that I must find some soon, but that there were reasons, at the moment, why I wished to reach Minneapolis as early as possible.
Being without the smallest gift of mimicry I could not disguise my tongue, and it had been a satisfaction from the first to find that this lack in no way hampered me. I was accepted readily enough as a working-man by my fellows, and my greenness and manner of speech, I had every reason to think, were credited to my being an immigrant of a new and hitherto unknown sort.