The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

“I will take you on,” he said, and then he added, almost without a pause,

“I will give you twenty dollars a month and arrange for your board at the hotel [indicating the “Fifth Avenue” one], or thirty dollars a month and you manage for your own keep. You will sleep in the loft over the harness-room.”

Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted the first offer, and wishing us good-night Mr. Holden left the stable in charge of Ed, one of the other hired men, and me.

It was too late to get anything to eat at the hotel, and so I sat up with Ed and helped unhitch the horses and put up the traps as they came in. The last horse was housed by eleven o’clock. I then found that with the aid of a hose a capital bath was possible in the carriage-washing section of the stable, and then I went to bed on a cot in the well-ventilated loft, very content in the knowledge that I had found a good place and should have a breakfast in the morning.

Ed called me at five o’clock as he was going below, and when I followed him he assigned me the two rows of stalls next to his own, which contained twelve horses and which were to be my first care. All these stalls had to be cleaned and the horses fed before I was at liberty to go to breakfast, and it was with a royal appetite that about seven o’clock I applied at the hotel. It was a very decent hostelry, largely made use of by farmers apparently. I was at once accepted as an employé of Mr. Holden, and served to an excellent meal by a trim little waitress, at one of the very tables which I had looked in upon on the previous afternoon with such genuine longing, and with the feeling of its belonging to a degree of luxury far beyond my reach.

The twelve horses which had fallen to my share had all to be curried after breakfast and got ready for the day’s orders. Calls for vehicles began to arrive in the middle of the morning, and they continued to come at intervals throughout the day, so that there was much hitching and unhitching to interfere with regular tasks.

Jake, the third hired man, was boss in the absence of the owner. He had long been in Mr. Holden’s employ, and had a wife and several children in a home of his own somewhere in the outskirts of the city. All the feeding, and cleaning, and currying, and carriage-washing, fell to Ed and me, while Jake, in addition to a general superintendence, had as his special trust the care of all the harnesses. He took great pride in them, and certainly kept them in admirable condition. Ed was chief carriage-washer and next in command under Jake, while to me, when my regular work was done, fell the odd jobs of keeping the carriages oiled, and watering the horses at the proper hours, and lending a hand at the unloading of the hay and feed as they came in—of holding myself in readiness, in short, to do anything that anyone in the stable asked of me. A very good position it was, as I very soon found. I had no great difficulty in learning the various tasks, and in a stable which, even in the fierce heat of August, was always comfortable, and at forms of work which were always interesting, and with every cost of living provided for, I was clearing five dollars a week.

By no means were the demands of our work continuous. Nearly every afternoon we had an hour or two or even three together, when there was little to be done. I found a book-shop across the way from the stable, where second-hand books could be rented at the rate of six cents a week and the books exchanged as often as you pleased.

Then in the evenings, when we all had supped in turn, and the stalls had been made ready for the night, and the traps sent out in answer to the evening trade, Jake and Ed and I used to sit out in front, within easy hearing of the telephone-bell, with our chairs tilted against the stable-wall and our feet caught by the heels on the chair-rounds, and there we talked by the hour together, until Jake went home and left Ed and me to care for the outstanding horses and traps, and lock up the stable for the night.

I was at a disadvantage in these conversations. Jake and Ed were Yankees, both of them shrewd, hard-headed, steady fellows. Jake was the father of a family, and Ed an unmarried man of three-and-thirty, who was working with all his might to pay off the mortgage on his father’s farm back in Illinois. Both of them had had some district-school training, but nothing beyond, and while they had a perfectly intelligent knowledge of affairs which concerned them as men and as citizens, their farther intellectual horizon was limited.