A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

There was a mystery in it all that baffled him. Low prices were the ostensible cause of his ill-success; he could scarcely get more for his crops than they cost him; but back of low prices was something else, an incalculable power which took vague form in his mind as a conspiracy of the rich, who seemed to him not to work and yet to have unmeasured wealth, while he and his kind could hardly live at the cost of almost unceasing toil.

By five o’clock in the morning we were at the chores, and were hungry enough when the summons came to breakfast at a little after six. There is, in certain forms of it, a cheerlessness in farm-life the gloom of which would be difficult to heighten. The call to breakfast came from the kitchen, which was a shed-like annex to the small, decaying, wooden farm-house. The farmer, the hired man, and I washed ourselves at the kitchen-door, then passed from the clear sunlight into a room whose smoke-blackened walls were hung round with kitchen utensils. The air was hot and dense with the fumes and smoke of cooking. A slovenly woman stood over the stove, turning potatoes that were frying in a pan, while, at the same time, she scolded two ragged children, who sat at the table devouring the food with their eyes.

Scarcely a word was spoken during the meal, until, near its close, the farmer’s wife quite abruptly—as though resuming an interrupted conversation—broke into further account of a horse-thief, whose latest escapade had been not far away, but those whereabouts remained unknown. The very obvious point of which was that, however her husband had been imposed upon, my efforts to pass as an honest man had not met with unqualified success with her. In such manner the breakfast was saved from dulness, and I was sure that the parting guest was heartily speeded when my stint was done.

There is a high exhilaration in a day’s walk, even in the heat of July. The feeling of abounding life that comes with the opening day after sound sleep and abundant food, when one is free from care, and there are twelve hours of daylight ahead for leagues of delightful country, is like the pulse of a kingly sport. From higher points of rolling land I could see far over the squares marked by the regularly recurring roads that intersect one another at right angles at intervals of a mile. The farm-houses stood hidden each in a small grove, with the wheel of a windmill invariably whirling above the tree-tops, and with here and there a long winding line of willows and stunted oaks marking the course of a stream.

It was but twelve miles to Humboldt, and I stopped there only long enough to ask the way to Fort Dodge. The roads were as deserted as on the day before, and I was some distance past Humboldt before I fell in with a single farmer.

He came rumbling down the road, sitting astride the frame of a farm wagon from which the box had been removed. The fine dust was puffing like white smoke about his dangling legs, while the massive harness rattled over the big-jointed frames of the horses.

“You may as well ride,” he called, as he overtook me, and I lost no time in getting on behind.

More fruitful as a field of conversation even than the weather were the crops at that season. I had picked up a smattering of the lingo, and we were soon commenting on the abundant yield of hay, and the fair promise of rye and wheat, and the favorable turn that the unbroken heat had given to the prospects of the corn, in the hope that it held, in spite of the late planting, of its ripening before the coming of the frost. But, for all the good outlook, the farmer was far from cheerful. I suspected the cause of his depression and avoided it from fear of embarrassment to myself, while yet I wished to hear his views about the situation. When they came, they were what I anticipated:

A good hay crop? Yes, there could hardly be a better, but of what use was hay that rotted in the fields before you could house it, for want of hands? And this was but the beginning of the difficulty.

The whole harvest lay ahead, and the advancing summer brought no solution of the problem of “help.” He was very graphic in his account of the year-around need of men that grows acutest in midsummer, and I did not escape the embarrassment that I feared; for, when he pressed me to go to work for him, I could only urge weakly that I felt obliged to hurry on. He was glad to be rid of me at the parting of our ways, a little farther down the road, where he turned to the unequal struggle on his farm, while I walked on at leisure in the direction of Fort Dodge.