about Halsted Street, or
State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and
taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats. Ben
used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the
day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's husband. Gus, the
firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt. If Ben thought,
sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he
clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.--if he thought of how
the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and
opinion--he said nothing.

Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of
the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shovelled coal. He
tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shovelling and
scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe. It gave
him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.

"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If you
want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the backyard and
grow something. You was crazy enough about it on the farm."

His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her
that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate
little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to
gardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.

On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away
one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the
place. Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful
tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding
forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He
talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy
man. He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the
street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat
did not interest these gentlemen. They did not know that the price of
wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.

"Well, now," he would say, "you take this year's wheat crop with about
917,000,000 bushels of wheat harvested, why, that's what's going to win
the war! Yes, sirree! No wheat, no winning, that's what I say."

"Ya-as, it is!" the city men would scoff. But the queer part of it is
that Farmer Ben was right.

Minnie got into