htful
labour, for sixteen hours of the day. But I thought of the old man who
had jeered at me, and I trudged a-field with the rest, my fork slung
over my shoulder ... sore ... I ached in every muscle ... muscles I
never knew existed before talked to me with their little voices of
complaint.

But after the first load I began to be better....

And by noon I was singing and whistling irrepressibly.

"You'll do ... but you'll have to put a hat on or you'll drop with
sun-stroke," Bonton remarked.

"I never wear a hat."

"All right. It's your funeral, not mine," and the boss walked away.

* * * * *

"Have a nip and fortify yourself against the sun ... that's the way to
do," suggested the old driver. He proffered his whiskey flask.

"Nope ... I've plenty of water to drink."

The water boy kept trailing about with his brown jug. I tipped it up to
my mouth and drank and drank ... I drank and drank and worked and worked
and sweated and sweated ... the top of my head perspired so that it felt
cool in the highest welter of heat.

In the hot early afternoon I saw the old man lying under a tree.

"What's the matter?"

--"too hot!"

"Where's your whiskey now?"

--"'tain't the whiskey. _That_ keeps a fellow up ... it's because I'm
old, not young, like you," he contested stubbornly.

* * * * *

These men that I worked with were unimaginably ignorant. One night we
held a heated argument as to whether the stars were other worlds and
suns, or merely lights set in the sky to light the world of men by ...
which latter, the old man maintained, was the truth, solemnly asserting
that the Bible said so, and that all other belief was infidelity and
blasphemy. So it was that, each evening, despite the herculean labour of
the day, we drew together and debated on every imaginable subject....

* * * * *

On the third day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of
the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles
down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it
... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and
the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the
separator the threshed grain poured in an unending stream....

* * * * *

It was difficult to keep the horses from the straw stacks that the daily
threshing