The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

“Hey, John!”

“Hello,” I said.

“Was you going to shave off them whiskers for Easter?”

I told him that I had not thought of it.

“Well,” he went on, “I hear the boys as have whiskers say as how they must go on Easter morning, and I thought maybe it was the same wid you.”

“What are you after doing, getting yourself into a sweat?” he continued, for he had drawn off from the German and was making my way. “You be a fool to kill yourself; you don’t earn the more by it, and they don’t think any the better of you. Take it easy, man, take it easy; there’s time enough.”

He was an authority on the time, for every few minutes he would walk slowly over to where his coat and waistcoat lay on a heap of stones, and drawing out a great silver watch, would critically examine it, and then announce the hour in a loud call to the German and me. At a quarter to five the two picked up their coats and went off, dodging behind shrubs and piles of building materials, until they made their exit at the gate, leaving a good third of the job unfinished.

That was on a Saturday. On Monday morning Mr. O’Shea singled out us three for as stiff a cursing as a boat’s crew often gets, but to little purpose, apparently, in its effect upon the other men. On that very day I was again a member of a gang, a gang of four this time, which was left without an overseer. We were ordered to unload a car of timber and pile the boards near the mammoth framework on the east side of the Manufactures Building. Besides native inertia there was unusual cause for idling in the fact that one of our number, a young Englishman, Rosedale by name, proved to be uncommonly interesting. He was rather a trim fellow, of the adventurous, jack-of-all-trades kind, that roam the world widely, and that always appear in numbers at great celebrations and in new regions. How they live and secure the means of extensive travel is a secret which no member of the fraternity ever tells. There was no mystery about Rosedale just then, for he was a fellow-lodger in Hotel No. 1, and was No. —— in the gang of laborers in which I, for example, was No. 472, and he fell into as natural association with the men as though he had lived with us always.

He was just up from South Africa, where he had been in the diamond fields, he said. Seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds was the loot he was bringing with him to Canada, when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Labrador and escaped with only his life. Not one of us, I suppose, was anything but sceptical of much of Rosedale’s story, but the man told his tale of free, reckless, vicious living on the diamond fields, with a vividness of narrative and a rough wealth of local color that charmed us into most attentive listeners, and that sped the morning hours with little regard to our job. Questions began to crowd in upon Rosedale as to the location of South Africa and the means of getting there, and great disappointment was evident in the discovery that it was not contiguous to any familiar point.

Noon found us with a pitiful showing for the morning’s work. In the afternoon I secured the post inside the car, and passed the boards out to the three other men, who piled them near the building. By hastening the work at that end, I hoped to quicken the pace at which the job was being done. To be caught a second time in a delinquent gang I feared would endanger my position, and I was anxious to remain on the grounds, and even more anxious to secure a promotion if I could. It was easy to keep ahead of the men, but it was impossible, apparently, to urge them beyond the languid deliberation with which they shouldered the timber and carried it to the piles.