CHAPTER VII
FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER
The Barton Farm, Faribault County,
Minnesota, July 6, 1892.
For a week past I have been Mr. Barton’s hired man, but in the early morning I must take leave of the family and renew the long journey. More than once during the past year I have found it hard to say good-by to an employer, but that is altogether apart from the real sadness of the present farewell.
It might have been months ago, so strong has my attachment to Mr. Barton’s family grown and so well do I feel that I know them, that Mr. Barton stopped me on the wayside as I was leaving Blue Earth City and offered me work on his farm. I hesitated, but finally agreed to accept his offer for a week. I am staggered now at realizing how near I came to missing an experience which will always be a cherished memory of my life.
With utmost hospitality I, a mere chance workman, picked up on the public highway, was taken in by the Bartons and made one of themselves; and during the days since I have shared their life of summer industry with hard work for all of us from five in the morning until nightfall, but healthful, worth-while work, and with it a home most daintily neat, and having an atmosphere of true refinement and of simple, genuine religion.
My pain at leaving is precisely that which one feels in the farewells which end the rare, halfborn friendships of life. A voyage, perhaps, or a short sojourn in a foreign country proves the chance occasion of a meeting, and kindred hearts awaken to quick recognition of one another, and then their roads diverge and from the parting of the ways each bears a sorrow which is of the tragedy of existence. Who has not felt that sadness and seen its shadow fall over the face of nature and far over the coming days?
There is, in my mind, no smallest fear of fresh encounter with an untried world. I have long since lost all such feeling, and can set forth of a morning as light of heart, as free from anxious care as are the birds which share my early start, and with a sense of pure animal enjoyment which is, I sometimes dream, not far removed from their own.
And with small wonder can I be so careless, for ever since I left Chicago work has ceased to be a difficult thing to find and has grown to be an increasingly difficult matter to avoid. It has come to be a positive embarrassment, for every day I am stopped by the way and urged to go to work, and it is not easy to refuse men who are most evidently short-handed. I shall set out in the morning with six dollars—five earned from Mr. Barton and one remaining from my last employment—and I shall try to cover a wide strip of country before settling down to another job; but, upon the basis of my past experience, I am sure that on an average of at least once a day in the coming march some farmer will ask me to help him at his work. All through Illinois and from Minneapolis to this point, which is near the Iowa border, this has been my uniform experience.
It was late in the spring when I left Chicago. Almost continuous rains compelled me to defer my start from day to day until the month of May was far advanced, and then I stopped at Joliet and joined for a week a gang of laborers in the works of the Illinois Steel Company. So that it was the first of June before I found myself in the open country once more, after six months as a city workman. Even then the skies continued threatening, and frequent rains forced me from the soft loam of the country roads to a firmer footing on the line of the Rock Island Railway for most of the journey to the Mississippi. I was relatively flush with wages earned at Joliet, and so was under no necessity to stop. But the chance of work never failed me, for not only in the rich farming region about Morris but also in the brick-kilns in the neighborhood of Ottawa and Utica I found abundant offers of a job.