OIL KING'S HAPPYEST DAY

one cherub every five minutes market for all classes of
real estate continues to be healthy with good demand for fac-
tory sites residence and business properties court bills break
labor

BLOODY SUNDAY IN MOSCOW

lady angels are smashed troops guard oilfields America
tends to become empire like in the days of the Caesars $5 poem
gets rich husband eat less says Edison rich poker player falls
dead when he draws royal flush charges graft in Cicero

STRIKE MAY MEAN REVOLT IN RUSSIA

lake romance of two yachts murder ends labor feud Michi-
gan runs all over Albion red flags in St. Petersburg

CZAR YIELDS TO PEOPLE

holds dead baby forty hours families evicted by bursting
watermain

CZAR GRANTS CONSTITUTION

From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay
Through the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming

THE CAMERA EYE (6)

Go it go it said Mr. Linwood the headmaster when
one was running up the field kicking the round ball footer
they called it in Hampstead and afterwards it was time
to walk home and one felt good because Mr. Linwood
had said Go it

Taylor said There's another American come and he
had teeth like Teddy in the newspapers and a turnedup

-57-

nose and a Rough Rider suit and he said Who are you
going to vote for? and one said I dunno and he stuck his
chest out and said I mean who your folks for Roosevelt
or Parker? and one said Judge Parker

the other American's hair was very black and he
stuck his fists up and his nose turned up and he said I'm for
Roosevelt wanto fight? all trembly one said I'm for Judge
Parker but Taylor said Who's got tuppence for ginger
beer? and there wasn't any fight that time

NEWSREEL V

BUGS DRIVE OUT BIOLOGIST

elopers bind and gag; is released by dog

EMPEROR NICHOLAS II FACING REVOLT OF
EMPIRE GRANTS SUBJECTS LIBERTY

paralysis stops surgeon's knife by the stroke of a pen the
last absolute monarchy of Europe passes into history miner of
Death Valley and freak advertiser of Santa Fe Road may die
sent to bridewell for stealing plaster angel

On the banks of the Wabash far away.

MAC

Next morning soon after daylight Fainy limped out of
a heavy shower into the railroad station at Gaylord. There

-58-

was a big swagbellied stove burning in the station waiting
room. The ticket agent's window was closed. There was
nobody in sight. Fainy took off first one drenched shoe
and then the other and toasted his feet till his socks were
dry. A blister had formed and broken on each heel and
the socks stuck to them in a grimy scab. He put on his
shoes again and stretched out on the bench. Immediately
he was asleep.

Somebody tall in blue was speaking to him. He tried to
raise his head but he was too sleepy.

"Hey, bo, you better not let the station agent find
you," said a voice he'd been hearing before through his
sleep. Fainy opened his eyes and sat up. "Jeez, I thought
you were a cop."

A squareshouldered young man in blue denim shirt and
overalls was standing over him. "I thought I'd better
wake you up, station agent's so friggin' tough in this
dump."

"Thanks." Fainy stretched his legs. His feet were so
swollen he could hardly stand on them. "Golly, I'm stiff."

"Say, if we each had a quarter I know a dump where
we could get a bully breakfast."

"I gotta dollar an' a half," said Fainy slowly. He stood
with his hands in his pockets, his back to the warm stove
looking carefully at the other boy's square bulljawed face
and blue eyes.

"Where are you from?"

"I'm from Duluth . . . I'm on the bum more or less.
Where are you from?"

"Golly, I wish I knew. I had a job till last night."

"Resigned?"

"Say, suppose we go eat that breakfast."

"That's slick. I didn't eat yesterday. . . . My name's
George Hall . . . The fellers call me Ike. I ain't exactly
on the bum, you know. I want to see the world."

"I guess I'm going to have to see the world now," said

-59-

Fainy. "My name's McCreary. I'm from Chi. But I was
born back east in Middletown, Connecticut."

As they opened the screen door of the railroad men's
boarding house down the road they were met by a smell
of ham and coffee and roachpowder. A horsetoothed
blonde woman with a rusty voice set places for them.

"Where do you boys work? I don't remember seein'
you before."

"I worked down to the sawmill," said Ike.

"Sawmill shet down two weeks ago because the super-
intendent blew out his brains."

"Don't I know it?"

"Maybe you boys better pay in advance."

"I got the money," said Fainy, waving a dollar bill in
her face.

"Well, if you got the money I guess you'll pay all
right," said the waitress, showing her long yellow teeth
in a smile.

"Sure, peaches and cream, we'll pay like millionaires,"
said Ike.

They filled up on coffee and hominy and ham and eggs
and big heavy white bakingpowder biscuits, and by the
end of breakfast they had gotten to laughing so hard over
Fainy's stories of Doc Bingham's life and loves that the
waitress asked them if they'd been drinking. Ike kidded
her into bringing them each another cup of coffee with-
out extra charge. Then he fished up two mashed ciga-
rettes from the pocket of his overalls. "Have a coffin
nail, Mac?"

"You can't smoke here," said the waitress. "The missus
won't'stand for smokin'."
"All right, bright eyes, we'll skidoo."

"How far are you goin'?"

"Well, I'm headed for Duluth myself. That's where
my folks are . . ." "So you're from Duluth, are you?"

-60-

"Well, what's the big joke about Duluth?" "It's no joke,
it's a misfortune."

"You don't think you can kid me, do you?" " 'Tain't
worth my while, sweetheart." The waitress tittered as she
cleared off the table. She had big red hands and thick
nails white from kitchenwork.

"Hey, got any noospapers? I want somethin' to read
waitin' for the train." "I'll get you some. The missus
takes the American from Chicago." "Gee, I ain't seen a
paper in three weeks." "I like to read the paper, too,"
said Mac. "I like to know what's goin' on in the world."

"A lot of lies most of it . . . all owned by the in-
terests."

"Hearst's on the side of the people."

"I don't trust him any more'n the rest of 'em."

"Ever read The Appeal to Reason?"

"Say, are you a Socialist?"

"Sure; I had a job in my uncle's printin' shop till the
big interests put him outa business because he took the
side of the strikers."

"Gee, that's swell . . . put it there . . . me, too. . . .
Say, Mac, this is a big day for me . . . I don't often
meet a guy thinks like I do."

They went out with a roll of newspapers and sat under
a big pine a little way out of town. The sun had come
out warm; big white marble clouds sailed through the
sky. They lay on their backs with their heads on a piece
of pinkish root with bark like an alligator. In spite of
last night's rain the pine needles were warm and dry
under them. In front of them stretched the singletrack
line through thickets and clearings of wrecked woodland
where fireweed was beginning to thrust up here and there
a palegreen spike of leaves. They read sheets of the week-
old paper turn and turn about and talked.

"Maybe in Russia it'll start; that's the most backward
country where the people are oppressed worst . . .

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There was a Russian feller workin' down to the sawmill,
an educated feller who's fled from Siberia . . . I used
to talk to him a lot . . . That's what he thought. He
said the social revolution would start in Russia an' spread
all over the world. He was a swell guy. I bet he was some-
body."

"Uncle Tim thought it would start in Germany."

"Oughter start right here in America . . . We got
free institutions here already . . . All we have to do is
get out from under the interests." "Uncle Tim says we)re
too well off in America . . . we don't know what op-
pression or poverty is. Him an' my other uncles was
Fenians back in Ireland before they came to this country.
That's what they named me Fenian . . . Pop didn't like
it, I guess . . . he didn't have much spunk, I guess."

"Ever read Marx?"

"No . . . golly, I'd like to though." "Me neither,
I read Bellamy Looking Backward, though; that's what
made me a Socialist." "Tell me about it; I'd just started
readin' it when I left home." "It's about a galoot that
goes to sleep an' wakes up in the year two thousand and
the social revolution's all happened and everything's so-
cialistic an' there's no jails or poverty and nobody works
for themselves an' there's no way anybody can get to be
a rich bondholder or capitalist and life's pretty slick for
the working class." "That's what I always thought . . .
It's the workers who create wealth and they ought to
have it instead of a lot of drones." "If you could do away
with the capitalist system and the big trusts and Wall
Street things 'ud be like that."

"Gee."

"All you'd need would be a general strike and have
the workers refuse to work for a boss any longer . . .
God damn it, if people only realized how friggin' easy
it would be. The interests own all the press and keep
knowledge and education from the workin'men."

-62-

"I know printin', pretty good, an' linotypin'. . . .
Golly, maybe some day I could do somethin'."

Mac got to his feet. He was tingling all over. A cloud
had covered the sun, but down the railroad track the
scrawny woods were full of the goldgreen blare of young
birch leaves in the sun. His blood was like fire. He stood
with his feet apart looking down the railroad track. Round
the bend in the far distance a handcar appeared with a
section gang on it, a tiny cluster of brown and dark blue.
He watched it come nearer. A speck of red flag fluttered
in the front of the handcar; it grew bigger, ducking into
patches of shadow, larger and more distinct each time it
came out into a patch of sun.

"Say, Mac, we better keep out of sight if we want to
hop that freight. There's some friaggin' mean yard detec-
tives on this road.""All right." They walked off a hun-
dred yards into the young growth of scrub pine and birch.
Beside a big greenlichened stump Mac stopped to make
water. His urine flowed bright yellow in the sun, disap-
pearing at once into the porous loam of rotten leaves and
wood. He was very happy. He gave the stump a kick.
It was rotten. His foot went through it and a little powder
like smoke went up from it as it crashed over into the
alderbushes behind.

Ike had sat down on a log and was picking his teeth
with a little birchtwig.

"Say, ever been to the coast, Mac?"

"No."

"Like to?"

"Sure."

"Well, let's you an' me beat our way out to Duluth
. . . I want to stop by and say hello to the old woman,
see. Haven't seen her in three months. Then we'll take
in the wheat harvest and make Frisco or Seattle by fall.
Tell me they have good free night-schools in Seattle. I

-63-

want to do some studyin', see? I dunno a friggin' thing
yet."

"That's slick."

"Ever hopped a freight or ridden blind baggage, Mac?"

"Well, not exactly."

"You just follow me and do what I do. You'll be all
right."

Down the track they heard the hoot of a locomotive
whistle.

"There is number three comin' round the bend now
. . . We'll hop her right after she starts outa the station.
She'll take us into Mackinaw City this afternoon."

Late that afternoon, stiff and cold, they went into a
little shed on the steamboat wharf at Mackinaw City to
get shelter. Everything was hidden in a driving rain-
streaked mist off the lake. They had bought a ten-cent
package of Sweet Caps, so that they only had ninety cents
left between them. They were arguing about how much
they ought to spend for supper when the steamboat agent,
a thin man wearing a green eyeshade and a slicker came
out of his office. "You boys lookin' for a job?" he asked.
"Cause there's a guy here from the Lakeview House
lookin' for a coupla pearldivers. Agency didn't send 'em
enough help I guess. They're openin' up tomorrer."
"How much do they pay ye?" asked Ike. "I don't reckon
it's much, but the grub's pretty good.""How about it,
Mac? We'll save up our fare an' then we'll go to Duluth
like a coupla dudes on the boat."

So they went over that night on the steamboat to
Mackinac Island. It was pretty dull on Mackinac Island.
There was a lot of small scenery with signs on it reading
"Devil's Cauldron,""Sugar Loaf,""Lover's Leap," and
wives and children of mediumpriced business men from
Detroit, Saginaw and Chicago. The grayfaced woman who
ran the hotel, known as The Management, kept them
working from six in the morning till way after sundown.

-64-

It wasn't only dishwashing, it was sawing wood, running
errands, cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, smashing bag-
gage and a lot of odd chores. The waitresses were all old
maids or else brokendown farmers' wives whose husbands
drank. The only other male in the place was the cook, a
hypochondriac French Canadian halfbreed who insisted
on being called Mr. Chef. Evenings he sat in his little
log shack back of the hotel drinking paregoric and mum-
bling about God.

When they got their first month's pay they packed up
their few belongings in a newspaper and sneaked on board
the Juniata for Duluth. The fare took all their capital,
but they were happy as they stood in the stern watching
the spruce and balsamcovered hill of Mackinac disappear
into the lake.

Duluth; girderwork along the waterfront, and the
shack-covered hills and the tall thin chimneys and the
huddle of hunch-shouldered grain elevators under the
smoke from the mills scrolled out dark against a huge
salmon-colored sunset. Ike hated to leave the boat on
account of a pretty dark-haired girl he'd meant all the
time to speak to. "Hell, she wouldn't pay attention to
you, Ike, she's too swank for you," Mac kept saying. "The
old woman'll be glad to see us anyway," said Ike as they
hurried off the gangplank. "I half expected to see her at
the dock, though I didn't write we was coming. Boy, I bet
she'll give us a swell feed."

"Where does she live?"

"Not far. I'll show you. Say, don't ask anythin' about
my ole man, will ye; he don't amount to much. He's in
jail, I guess. Ole woman's had pretty tough sleddin'
bringin' up us kids . . . I got two brothers in Buffalo
. . . I don't get along with 'em. She does fancy needle-
work and preservin' an' bakes cakes an' stuff like that.
She used to work in a bakery but she's got the lumbago

-65-

too bad now. She'd 'a' been a real bright woman if we
hadn't always been so friggin' poor."

They turned up a muddy street on a hill. At the top
of the hill was a little prim house like a schoolhouse.

"That's where we live . . . Gee, I wonder why there's
no light."

They went in by a gate in the picket fence. There was
sweetwilliam in bloom in the flowerbed in front of the
house. They could smell it though they could hardly see,
it was so dark. Ike knocked.

"Damn it, I wonder what's the matter." He knocked
again. Then he struck a match. On the door was nailed a
card "FOR SALE" and the name of a realestate agent.
"Jesus Christ, that's funny, she musta moved. Now I think
of it, I haven't had a letter in a couple of months. I hope
she ain't sick . . . I'll ask at Bud Walker's next door."

Mac sat down on the wooden step and waited. Over-
head in a gash in the clouds that still had the faintest
stain of red from the afterglow his eye dropped into
empty black full of stars. The smell of the sweetwilliams
tickled his nose. He felt hungry.

A low whistle from Ike roused him. "Come along," he
said gruffly and started walking fast down the hill with
his head sunk between his shoulders.

"Hey, what's the matter?"

"Nothin'. The old woman's gone to Buffalo to live with
my brothers. The lousy bums got her to sell out so's they
could spend the dough, I reckon."

"Jesus, that's hell, Ike."

Ike didn't answer. They walked till they came to the
corner of a street with lighted stores and trolleycars. A
tune from a mechanical piano was tumbling out from a
saloon. Ike turned and slapped Mac on the back. "Let's
go have a drink, kid . . . What the hell."

There was only one other man at the long bar. He
was a very drunken tall elderly man in lumbermen's boots

-66-

with a sou'wester on his head who kept yelling in an in-
audible voice, 'Whoop her up, boys,' and making a pass
at the air with a long grimy hand. Mac and Ike drank
down two whiskies each, so strong and raw that it pretty
near knocked the wind out of them. Ike put the change
from a dollar in his pocket and said:

"What the hell, let's get out of here." In the cool air
of the street they began to feel lit. "Jesus, Mac, let's get
outa here tonight . . . It's terrible to come back to a
town where you was a kid . . . I'll be meetin' all the
crazy galoots I ever knew and girls I had crushes on . . .
I guess I always get the dirty end of the stick, all right."

In a lunchroom down by the freight depot they got
hamburger and potatoes and bread and butter and coffee
for fifteen cents each. When they'd bought some ciga-
rettes they still had eight seventyfive between them.
"Golly, we're rich," said Mac. "Well, where do we go?"

"Wait a minute. I'll go scout round the freight depot.
Used to be a guy I knowed worked there."

Mac loafed round under a lamp post at the street-
corner and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was warmer
since the wind had gone down. From a puddle somewhere
in the freight yards came the peep peep peep of toads.
Up on the hill an accordion was playing. From the yards
came the heavy chugging of a freight locomotive and the
clank of shunted freightcars and the singing rattle of the
wheels.

After a while he heard Ike's whistle from the dark
side of the street. He ran over. "Say, Mac, we gotta hurry.
I found the guy. He's goin' to open up a boxcar for us
on the westbound freight. He says it'll carry us clear out
to the coast if we stick to it."

"How the hell will we eat if we're locked up in a
freightcar?"

"We'll eat fine. You leave the eatin' to me."

"But, Ike . . ."

-67-

"Keep your trap shut, can't you . . . Do you want
everybody in the friggin' town to know what we're tryin'
to do?"

They walked along tiptoe in the dark between two
tracks of boxcars. Then Ike found a door half open and
darted in. Mac followed and they shut the sliding door
very gently after them.

"Now all we got to do is go to sleep," whispered Ike,
his lips touching Mac's ear. "This here galoot, see, said
there wasn't any yard dicks on duty tonight."

In the end of the car they found hay from a broken
bale. The whole car smelt of hay. "Ain't this hunky
dory?" whispered Ike.

"It's the cat's nuts, Ike."

Pretty soon the train started, and they lay down to
sleep side by side in the sparse hay. The cold night wind
streamed in through the cracks in the floor. They slept
fitfully. The train started and stopped and started and
shunted back and forth on sidings and the wheels rattled
and rumbled in their ears and slambanged over crossings.
Towards morning they fell into a warm sleep and the thin
layer of hay on the boards was suddenly soft and warm.
Neither of them had a watch and the day was overcast
so they didn't know what time it was when they woke
up. Ike slid open the door a little so that they could peek
out; the train was running through a broad valley brim-
full-like with floodwater, with the green ripple of full-
grown wheat. Now and then in the distance a clump of
woodland stood up like an island. At each station was
the hunched blind bulk of an elevator. "Gee, this must be
the Red River, but I wonder which way we're goin',"
said Ike. "Golly, I could drink a cup of coffee," said Mac.
"We'll have swell coffee in Seattle, damned if we won't,
Mac."

They went to sleep again, and when they woke up they
were thirsty and stiff. The train had stopped. There was

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no sound at all. They lay on their backs stretching and
listening. "Gee, I wonder where in hell we are." After a
long while they heard the cinders crunching down the
track and someone trying the fastenings of the boxcar
doors down the train. They lay so still they could hear
both their hearts beating. The steps on the cinders
crunched nearer and nearer. The sliding door slammed
open, and their car was suddenly full of sunlight. They
lay still. Mac felt the rap of a stick on his chest and sat
up blinking. A Scotch voice was burring in his ears:

"I thought I'd find some Pullman passengerrs . . .
All right, byes, stand and deliver, or else you'll go to the
constabulary."

"Aw hell," said Ike, crawling forward.

"Currsin' and swearin' won't help ye . . . If you got
a couple o' quid you can ride on to Winnipeg an' take your
chances there . . . If not you'll be doin' a tidy bit on
the roads before you can say Jack Robinson."

The brakeman was a small blackhaired man with a
mean quiet manner.

"Where are we, guv'ner?" asked Ike, trying to talk
like an Englishman.

"Gretna . . . You're in the Dominion of Canada. You
can be had up, too, for illegally crossin' Her Majesty's
frontier as well as for bein' vags."

"Well, I guess we'd better shell out . . . You see
we're a couple of noblemen's sons out for a bit of a-bloody
lark, guv'ner."

"No use currsin' and prevarricatin'. How much have
you?"

" Coupla dollars."

"Let's see it quick."

Ike pulled first one dollar, then another, out of his
pocket; folded in the second dollar was a five. The Scotch-
man swept the three bills up with one gesture and
slammed the sliding door to. They heard him slip down

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the catch on the outside. For a long time they sat there
quiet in the dark. Finally Ike said, "Hey, Mac, gimme a
sock in the jaw. That was a damn fool thing to do . . .
Never oughta had that in my jeans anyway . . . oughta
had it inside my belt. That leaves us with about seventy-
five cents. We're up shit creek now for fair . . . He'll
probably wire ahead to take us outa here at the next big
town.""Do they have mounted police on the railroad,
too?" asked Mac in a hollow whisper. "Jez, I don't know
any more about it than you do."

The train started again and Ike rolled over on his face
and went glumly to sleep. Mac lay on his back behind him
looking at the slit of sunlight that made its way in through
the crack in the door and wondered what the inside of a
Canadian jail would be like.

That night, after the train had lain still for some time
in the middle of the hissing and clatter of a big freight-
yard, they heard the catch slipped off the door. After a
while Ike got up his nerve to slide the door open and they
dropped, stiff and terribly hungry, down to the cinders.
There was another freight on the next track, so all they
could see was a bright path of stars overhead. They got
out of the freightyards without any trouble and found
themselves walking through the deserted streets of a large
widescattered city.

" Winnipeg's a pretty friggin' lonelylookin' place, take
it from me," said Ike.

"It must be after midnight."

They tramped and tramped and at last found a little
lunchroom kept by a Chink who was just closing up.
They spent forty cents on some stew and potatoes and
coffee. They asked the Chink if he'd let them sleep on
the floor behind the counter, but he threw them out and
they found themselves dogtired tramping through the
broad deserted streets of Winnipeg again. It was too cold
to sit down anywhere, and they couldn't find anyplace

-70-

that looked as if it would give them a flop for thirtyfive
cents, so they walked and walked, and anyway the sky
was beginning to pale into a slow northern summer dawn.
When it was fully day they went back to the Chink's and
spent the thirtyfive cents on oatmeal and coffee. Then they
went to the Canadian Pacific employment office and signed
up for work in a construction camp at Banff. The hours
they had to wait till traintime they spent in the public
library. Mac read part of Bellamy Looking Backward
and Ike, not being able to find a volume of Karl Marx,
read an instalment of "When the Sleeper Wakes" in
the Strand Magazine. So when they got on the train they
were full of the coming Socialist revolution and started
talking it up to two lanky redfaced lumberjacks who sat
opposite them. One of them chewed tobacco silently all
the while, but the other spat his quid out of the window
and said, "You blokes 'll keep quiet with that kinder talk
if you knows what's 'ealthy for ye.""Hell, this is a free
country, ain't it? A guy's free to talk, ain't he?" said Ike.
"A bloke kin talk so long as his betters don't tell him to
keep his mouth shut.""Hell, I'm not tryin' to pick a
fight," said Ike. "Better not," said the other man, and
didn't speak again.

They worked for the C. P. R. all summer and by the
first of October they were in Vancouver. They had new
suitcases and new suits. Ike had forty-nine dollars and
fifty cents and Mac had eighty-three fifteen in a brand
new pigskin wallet. Mac had more because he didn't play
poker. They took a dollar and a half room between them
and lay in bed like princes their first free morning. They
were tanned and toughened and their hands were horny.
After the smell of rank pipes and unwashed feet and the
bedbugs in the railroad bunkhouses the small cleanboarded
hotel room with its clean beds seemed like a palace.

When he was fully awake Mac sat up and reached for
his Ingersoll. Eleven o'clock. The sunlight on the win-

-71-

dowledge was ruddy from the smoke of forestfires up the
coast. He got up and washed in cold water at the wash-
basin. He walked up and down the room wiping his face
and arms in the towel. It made him feel good to follow
the contours of his neck and the hollow between his
shoulderblades and the muscles of his arms as he dried
himself with the fresh coarse towel.

"Say, Ike, what do you think we oughta do? I think we
oughta go down on the boat to Seattle, Wash., like a
coupla dude passengers. I wanta settle down an' get a
printin' job; there's good money in that. I'm goin' to
study to beat hell this winter. What do you think, Ike?
I want to get out of this limejuicy hole an' get back to
God's country. What do you think, Ike?"

Ike groaned and rolled over in bed.

"Say, wake up, Ike, for crissake. We want to take a
look at this burg an' then twentythree."

Ike sat up in bed. "God damn it, I need a woman."

"I've heard tell there's swell broads in Seattle, honest,
Ike."

Ike jumped out of bed and began splattering himself
from head to foot with cold water. Then he dashed into
his clothes and stood looking out the window combing
the water out of his hair.

"When does the friggin' boat go? Jez, I had two wet
dreams last night, did you?"

Mac blushed. He nodded his head.

"Jez, we got to get us women. Wet dreams weakens a
guy."

"I wouldn't want to get sick."

"Aw, hell, a man's not a man until he's had his three
doses."

"Aw, come ahead, let's go see the town."

"Well, ain't I been waitin' for ye this halfhour?"

They ran down the stairs and out into the street. They
walked round Vancouver, sniffing the winey smell of

-72-

lumbermills along the waterfront, loafing under the big
trees in the park. Then they got their tickets at the steam-
boat office and went to a haberdashery store and bought
themselves striped neckties, colored socks and four-dollar
silk shirts. They felt like millionaires when they walked
up the gangplank of the boat for Victoria and Seattle,
with their new suits and their new suitcases and their silk
shirts. They strolled round the deck smoking cigarettes
and looking at the girls. "Gee, there's a couple looks
kinda easy . . . I bet they're hookers at that," Ike
whispered in Mac's ear and gave him a dig in the ribs with
his elbow as they passed two girls in Spring Maid hats
who were walking round the deck the other way. "Shit,
let's try pick 'em up."

They had a couple of beers at the bar, then they went
back on deck. The girls had gone. Mac and Ike walked
disconsolately round the deck for a while, then they found
the girls leaning over the rail in the stern. It was a cloudy
moonlight night. The sea and the dark islands covered
with spiring evergreens shone light and dark in a mottling
silvery sheen. Both girls had frizzy hair and dark circles
under their eyes. Mac thought they looked too old, but
as Ike had gone sailing ahead it was too late to say any-
thing. The girl he talked to was named Gladys. He liked
the looks of the other one, whose name was Olive, better,
but Ike got next to her first. They stayed on deck kidding
and giggling until the girls said they were cold, then they
went in the saloon and sat on a sofa and Ike went and
bought a box of candy.

"We ate onions for dinner today," said Olive. "Hope
you fellers don't mind. Gladys, I told you we oughtn't
to of eaten them onions, not before comin' on the boat."

"Gimme a kiss an' I'll tell ye if I mind or not," said
Ike.

"Kiddo, you can't talk fresh like that to us, not on this

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boat," snapped Olive, two mean lines appearing on either
side of her mouth.

"We have to be awful careful what we do on the boat,"
explained Gladys. "They're terrible suspicious of two
girls travelin' alone nowadays. Ain't it a crime?"

"It sure is." Ike moved up a little closer on the seat.

"Quit that . . . Make a noise like a hoop an' roll away.
I mean it." Olive went and sat on the opposite bench.
Ike followed her.

"In the old days it was liberty hall on these boats, but
not so any more," Gladys said, talking to Mac in a low
intimate voice. "You fellers been workin' up in the
canneries?"

"No, we been workin' for the C.P.R. all summer."

"You must have made big money." As she talked to
him, Mac noticed that she kept looking out of the corner
of her eye at her friend.

"Yare . . . not so big . . . I saved up pretty near a
century."

"An' now you're going to Seattle."

"I want to get a job linotypist."

"That's where we live, Seattle. Olive an' I've got an
apartment . . . Let's go out on deck, it's too hot in
here."

As they passed Olive and Ike, Gladys leaned over and
whispered something in Olive's ear. Then she turned to
Mac with a melting smile. The deck was deserted. She
let him put his arm round her waist. His fingers felt the
bones of some sort of corset. He squeezed. "Oh, don't
be too rough, kiddo," she whined in a funny little voice.
He laughed. As he took his hand away he felt the con-
tour of her breast. Walking, his leg brushed against her
leg. It was the first time he'd been so close to a girl.

After a while she said she had to go to bed. "How
about me goin' down with ye?" She shook her head. "Not
on this boat. See you tomorrow; maybe you and your

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pal 'll come and see us at our apartment. We'll show you
the town.""Sure," said Mac. He walked on round the
deck, his heart beating hard. He could feel the pound of
the steamboat's engines and the arrowshaped surge of
broken water from the bow and he felt like that. He
met Ike.

"My girl said she had to go to bed.""So did mine."
"Get anywheres, Mac?""They got an apartment in
Seattle.""I got a kiss off mine. She's awful hot. Jez, I
thought she was going to feel me up.""We'll get it to-
morrow all right."

The next day was sunny; the Seattle waterfront was
sparkling, smelt of lumberyards, was noisy with rattle
of carts and yells of drivers when they got off the boat.
They went to the Y.M.C.A. for a room. They were
through with being laborers and hobos. They were going
to get clean jobs, live decently and go to school nights.
They walked round the city all day, and in the evening
met Olive and Gladys in front of the totempole on Pioneer
Square.

Things happened fast. They went to a restaurant and
had wine with a big feed and afterwards they went to a
beergarden where there was a band, and drank whiskey-
sours. When they went to the girls' apartment they took
a quart of whiskey with them and Mac almost dropped
it on the steps and the girls said, "For crissake don't make
so much noise or you'll have the cops on us," and the
apartment smelt of musk and facepowder and there was
women's underwear around on all the chairs and the girls
got fifteen bucks out of each of them first thing. Mac was
in the bathroom with his girl and she smeared liprouge
on his nose and they laughed and laughed until he got
rough and she slapped his face. Then they all sat together
round the table and drank some more and Ike danced a
Solomeydance in his bare feet. Mac laughed, it was so
very funny, but he was sitting on the floor and when he

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tried to get up he fell on his face and all of a sudden he
was being sick in the bathtub and Gladys was cursing hell
out of him. She got him dressed, only he couldn't find
his necktie, and everybody said he was too drunk and
pushed him out and he was walking down the street sing-
ing Make a Noise Like a Hoop and Just Roll Away,
Roll Away, and he asked a cop where the Y.M.C.A. was
and the cop pushed him into a cell at the stationhouse and
locked him up.

He woke up with his head like a big split millstone.
There was vomit on his shirt and a rip in his pants. He
went over all his pockets and couldn't find his pocketbook.
A cop opened the cell door and told him to make himself
scarce and he walked out into the dazzling sun that cut
into his eyes like a knife. The man at the desk at the Y
looked at him queerly when he went in, but he got up to
his room and fell into bed without anybody saying any-
thing to him. Ike wasn't back yet. He dozed off feeling
his headache all through his sleep. When he woke up
Ike was sitting on the bed. Ike's eyes were bright and his
cheeks were red. He was still a little drunk. "Say, Mac,
did they roll yer? I can't find my pocketbook an' I tried
to go back but I couldn't find the apartment. God, I'd
have beat up the goddam floosies . . . Shit, I'm drunk
as a pissant still. Say, the galoot at the desk said we'd
have to clear out. Can't have no drunks in the Y.M.C.A."
"But jez, we paid for a week.""He'll give us part of it
back . . . Aw, what the hell, Mac . . . We're flat, but
I feel swell . . . Say, I had a rough time with your Jane
after they'd thrown you out."

"Hell, I feel sick as a dog."

"I'm afraid to go to sleep for fear of getting a hang-
over. Come on out, it'll do you good."

It was three in the afternoon. They went into a little
Chinese restaurant on the waterfront and drank coffee.
They had two dollars they got from hocking their suit-

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cases. The pawnbroker wouldn't take the silk shirts be-
cause they were dirty. Outside it was raining pitchforks.

"Jesus, why the hell didn't we have the sense to keep
sober? God, we're a coupla big stiffs, Ike."

"We had a good party . . . Jez, you looked funny
with that liprouge all over your face."

"I feel like hell . . . I wanta study an' work for
things; you know what I mean, not to get to be a god-
dam slavedriver but for socialism and the revolution an'
like that, not work an' go on a bat an' work an' go on a
bat like those damn yaps on the railroad."

"Hell, another time we'll have more sense an' leave
our wads somewhere safe . . . Gee, I'm beginning to
sink by the bows myself."

"If the damn house caught fire I wouldn't have the
strength to walk out."

They sat in the Chink place as long as they could and
then they went out in the rain to find a thirtycent flop-
house where they spent the night, and the bedbugs ate
them up. In the morning they went round looking for
jobs, Mac in the printing trades and Ike at the shipping
agencies. They met in the evening without having had
any luck and slept in the park as it was a fine night.
Eventually they both signed up to go to a lumbercamp
up the Snake River. They were sent up by the agency on
a car full of Swedes and Finns. Mac and Ike were the
only ones who spoke English. When they got there they
found the foreman so hardboiled and the grub so rotten
and the bunkhouse so filthy that they lit out at the end
of a couple of days, on the bum again. It was already cold
in the Blue Mountains and they would have starved to
death if they hadn't been able to beg food in the cook-
houses of lumbercamps along the way. They hit the rail-
road at Baker City, managed to beat their way back to
Portland on freights. In Portland they couldn't find jobs
because their clothes were so dirty, so they hiked south-

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ward along a big endless Oregon valley full of fruit-
ranches, sleeping in barns and getting an occasional meal
by cutting wood or doing chores around a ranch house.

In Salem, Ike found that he had a dose and Mac
couldn't sleep nights worrying for fear he might have it
too. They tried to go to a doctor in Salem. He was a big
roundfaced man with a hearty laugh. When they said
they didn't have any money he guessed it was all right
and that they could do some chores to pay for the con-
sultation, but when he heard it was a venereal disease he
threw them out with a hot lecture on the wages of sin.

They trudged along the road, hungry and footsore;
Ike had fever and it hurt him to walk. Neither of them
said anything. Finally they got to a small fruitshipping
station where there were watertanks, on the main line of
the Southern Pacific. There Ike said he couldn't walk
any further, that they'd have to wait for a freight. "Jesus
Christ, jail 'ud be better than this."

"When you're outa luck in this man's country, you
certainly are outa luck," said Mac and for some reason
they both laughed.

Among the bushes back of the station they found an
old tramp boiling coffee in a tin can. He gave them some
coffee and bread and baconrind and they told him their
troubles. He said he was headed south for the winter and
that the thing to cure it up was tea made out of cherry
pits and stems. "But where the hell am I going to get
cherry pits and stems?" Anyway he said not to worry,
it was no worse than a bad cold. He was a cheerful old
man with a face so grimed with dirt it looked like a brown
leather mask. He was going to take a chance on a freight
that stopped there to water a little after sundown. Mac
dozed off to sleep while Ike and the old man talked.
When he woke up Ike was yelling at him and they were
all running for the freight that had already started. In
the dark Mac missed his footing and fell flat on the ties.

-78-

He wrenched his knee and ground cinders into his nose
and by the time he had got to his feet all he could see
were the two lights on the end of the train fading into
the November haze.

That was the last he saw of Ike Hall.

He got himself back on the road and limped along until
he came to a ranch house. A dog barked at him and
worried his ankles but he was too down and out to care.
Finally a stout woman came to the door and gave him
some cold biscuits and applesauce and told him he could
sleep in the barn if he gave her all his matches. He limped
to the barn and snuggled into a pile of dry sweetgrass
and went to sleep.

In the morning the rancher, a tall ruddy man named
Thomas, with a resonant voice, went over to the barn and
offered him work for a few days at the price of his board
and lodging. They were kind to him, and had a pretty
daughter named Mona that he kinder fell in love with.
She was a plump rosycheeked girl, strong as a boy and
afraid of nothing. She punched him and wrestled with
him; and, particularly after he'd gotten fattened up a
little and rested, he could hardly sleep nights for think-
ing of her. He lay in his bed of sweetgrass telling over
the touch of her bare arm that rubbed along his when
she handed him back the nozzle of the sprayer for the
fruittrees, or was helping him pile up the pruned twigs to
burn, and the roundness of her breasts and her breath
sweet as a cow's on his neck when they romped and played
tricks on each other evenings after supper. But the
Thomases had other ideas for their daughter and told
Mac that they didn't need him any more. They sent him
off kindly with a lot of good advice, some old clothes and
a cold lunch done up in newspaper, but no money. Mona
ran after him as he walked off down the dustyrutted
wagonroad and kissed him right in front of her parents.
"I'm stuck on you," she said. "You make a lot of money

-79-

and come back and marry me.""By gum, I'll do that,"
said Mac, and he walked off with tears in his eyes and
feeling very good. He was particularly glad he hadn't
got the clap off that girl in Seattle.

NEWSREEL VI

Paris Shocked At Last

HARRIMAN SHOWN AS RAIL COLOSSUS

noted swindler run to earth

TEDDY WIELDS BIG STICK

straphangers demand relief.

We were sailing along
On moonlight bay
You can hear the voices ringing
They seem to say
You have stolen my heart, now don't go away
Just as we sang
love's
old
sweet
songs
On moonlight bay

MOB LYNCHES AFTER PRAYER

when the metal poured out of the furnace I saw the men
running to a place of safety. To the right of the furnace I
saw a party of ten men all of them running wildly and their
clothes a mass of flames. Apparently some of them had been
injured when the explosion occurred and several of them
tripped and fell. The hot metal ran over the poor men in a
moment.

PRAISE MONOPOLY AS BOON TO ALL

-80-

industrial foes work for peace at Mrs. Potter Palmer's

love's
old
sweet
song
We were sailing along song
on moonlight bay

THE CAMERA EYE (7)

skating on the pond next the silver company's mills
where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump
whaleoil soap somebody said it was that they used in
cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting
shine on them for sale there was shine on the ice early
black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by
the first skaters I couldn't learn to skate and kept fall-
ing down look out for the muckers everybody said
bohunk and polak kids put stones in their snowballs write
dirty words up on walls do dirty things up alleys their
folks work in the mills

we clean young American Rover Boys handy with
tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure
eights on the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn't
learn to skate and kept falling down

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