s, baseball games and county fairs were events
of almost daily occurrence. It awed while it delighted us for we felt
vaguely our father's perturbation.

For the first time since leaving Boston, some thirty years before, Dick
Garland began to dream of making a living at something less backbreaking
than tilling the soil. It was to him a most abrupt and startling
departure from the fixed plan of his life, and I dimly understood even
then that he came to this decision only after long and troubled
reflection. Mother as usual sat in silence. If she showed exultation, I
do not recall the fashion of it.

Father assumed his new duties in June and during all that summer and
autumn, drove away immediately after breakfast each morning, to the
elevator some six miles away, leaving me in full charge of the farm and
its tools. All his orders to the hired men were executed through me. On
me fell the supervision of their action, always with an eye to his
general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an
eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could
detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's
activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the
yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side
to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at
once, and his reproof was never a cause of laughter to me or my brother.

As harvest came on he took command in the field, for most of the harvest
help that year were rough, hardy wanderers from the south, nomads who
had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward, and
were not the most profitable companions for boys of fifteen. They
reached our neighborhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien
unclean birds, and vanished into the north in September as mysteriously
as they had appeared. A few of them had been soldiers, others were the
errant sons of the poor farmers and rough mechanics of older States,
migrating for the adventure of it. One of them gave his name as "Harry
Lee," others were known by such names as "Big Ed" or "Shorty." Some
carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean
shirt and a few socks.

They all had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women.
A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked
for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid
who y