A tight squeeze

by William Staats

CHAPTER XIX.

THE GREAT HARVEST RANGE.

Turn we now to record more grateful scenes. Let us leave the black cross on the breast of the dead man. The dead man swinging in the morning breeze. Our backs are turned upon an unknown, moundless grave, down in a sandy, barren jack-oak field. A shallow grave over which no head stone tells the passer by that all flesh is grass. A grave on which the startled rabbit pauses, with ears erect, to heed the breaking of a twig. A grave on which the quail pipes forth his cheering notes in the glimmer of the dawn, and the prairie grouse crows good-night to the setting sun. A grave in which lies mouldering a monument to the reign of the lawless judge. A grave in which is secreted the prey of the human tiger. The occupant of the grave has found rest at last. His tramp is o'er. He sleeps the sleep that knows no waking, he dreams the dream that knows no breaking.

That there is only one occupant of the shallow grave down in the black-jack barren is due to the exertions of the man with whom Ben ate supper the previous evening. He it was who extended aid to our hero in his dire distress and saved his life. Through his intercessions Cleveland was lowered from the limb and spared. Like one walking in his sleep, his mind and energies paralyzed by the dreadful scene through which he had passed, Ben made a futile attempt to justify his dead friend's memory. He only met with repulses—nay, threats. No one would believe him, none give credence to his tale. He found none who had witnessed the hanging, none who would talk about it, but plenty who with frowning eyes and threatening looks turned their backs upon him when he attempted to speak of it. Had Ben appeared before that bulwark of the law—that greatest of all great American impositions—the Grand Jury, and told his tale of the crime, the Grand Jury could not have laid its indicting hand on a single man who had had any thing to do with the hanging. He did not know this, nor did he appreciate the people he was among. He called for justice, and came near getting a flogging. One not unfavorable result was accomplished by his pertinacious search after justification, however. Though he did not find the blind goddess, he found a railway ticket that conveyed him out of the State, and two hundred miles westward. His presence became disagreeable to the citizens of Lickskillet. The tiger had glutted himself and was drowsy. He did not like to be disturbed.

A delegation of two benevolent citizens waited upon him and informed him that from the plentitude of their hearts, and the charitable nature of their dispositions they were not only willing to condone his recent acts and view his crimes with a lenient eye, but they would aid him on his journey, and provide him with a railroad ticket to a distant point, with the stipulation that his foot should never press their sod again, and a gentle intimation that his own particular rope would be carefully preserved for his own particular use. The offer came in the shape of a command. With a stubbornness, peculiarly his own, Ben would have rejected it. He would have staid and fought to the death there and then for his dead friend's memory. But the poor, thin, lank parson came to him. The good man trembled lest the tiger should be roused from his slumber. He knew the beast for had he not dwelt beneath the velvet of its paw for many a day? He demonstrated to our hero the futility of one man, and he a penniless stranger, attempting the indictment of an entire community bound together by ties of blood, relationship, interest and—crime. A community that was a law unto itself. Ben gathered a clearer view of the case from the good man's explanations.

So Ben was placed on board of a train, and whirled away into Egypt.

Or, to speak more lucidly, into the very centre of Southern Illinois. And despite the sad incidents that had thronged the past forty-eight hours of his existence, as he stood on the platform of the station where the ticket expired and the train deposited him, he made the reflection:

"Nine days and nine hundred miles from New York! One hundred miles from St. Louis!" and the nine days seemed nine ages, and the nine hundred miles seemed so many worlds, separating him from the Benjamin Cleveland he had parted from and the life he had left, in the far east. And for the first time since the commencement of his tramp, he felt alone and lonely.

Tramps! Ben thought he had met many of the brotherhood before, but he now found himself on their great summer range. The solitary free-rider or small detachments of two and three, now swelled to squads numbering so high as a dozen.

In fact he had been dropped by the train on the Great Harvest Route, extending from the wheat fields of Minnesota, diagonally across the State of Iowa, crossing the Mississippi at Davenport, and thence extending clear down into the southern half of Illinois. A strip of country five hundred miles long, that may appropriately be termed the Harvest Range. The herd commences to move northward early in July. Starting in the neighborhood of Du Quoin or Bellville, it follows up the harvest, heading north-west, and ending the summer's incursion during the months of September and October in Minnesota. An eastern person has no conception of the vast army of impecuniosities forming this great herd of harvest tramps. Forth they come from the purlieus of cities, from hospitals, work-houses, poor-houses, soup-houses, and the various charitable asylums that have harbored them during the winter and spring. Up from the orange-scented south; from the pampas of Texas; the stave-timber of Arkansas, the cotton-fields of Mississippi; and from those bon-resorts of the fraternity in the river towns on the Father of Waters—"Pinch" in Memphis, "Under the Hill" in Natchez, "Elephant Johnnie's" and "Smoke Town" in New Orleans, and other celebrated haunts, where an existence (such as it is) has been dragged through for five months of the year. They crowd the river boats; they haunt the wood-pile landings, they line the tracks and capture the trains on their way to the joys and fattenings of the Harvest Range. Once on the Range and life smiles upon them. Back doors know them so well that during the favored period, the good housewife responds to each knock with a chunk of bread in one hand and a hunk of meat in the other, awaiting no solicitations. And how does the herd graze? They graze off of the charity of a community mellow with the ripeness of harvest-time. There help is needed—they are the monarchs of the hour.