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When going out, they fold a blue blanket over all, and put on a regular, unpicturesque, stove-pipe hat, with a band of tin-foil around it, which makes them look like one of those mulatto coachmen one sees now and then on the box of a bonton barouche, with his silver-mounted hat and double-caped blue box-coat.
" thought you'd sag under," but, putting his hand on my back, "you've got powerful back muscles, though your arms and legs are like beanpoles ... a fellow never can tell about a man, till he's tried out." After nearly a month of the work, Bonton began acting glum toward me.... "Gregory, I'm going to pay you off to-day!" " pay me off to-day?" "Yes."
I nailed my few books up in a drygoods box and left them in care of Professor Langworth's housekeeper, the former having gone away to Colorado for the summer. As for clothes, tramp-life had taught me the superfluity of more than a change of shirts and b.v.d's. Bonton looked me over. "You don't look strong enough ... the work is mighty hard." "I'm pretty wiry. Try me out, that is all I ask.
"I don't see why Bonton ever hired you," he remarked unsympathetically, peering over the top at me from his high-piled load. Several times I had missed the top and the bundle of wheat had tumbled back to me again.... "I can't be reaching out all the time to catch your forkfuls." "Just give me time till I learn the hang of it." I was better with the next load.
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.
Well, what Cinderella said when the prince fitted that 3½ A on her foot was a hard-luck story compared to the things I told myself. "Then Aunt Maggie says she is going to give me a coming-out banquet in the Bonton that'll make moving Vans of all the old Dutch families on Fifth Avenue. "'I've been out before, Aunt Maggie, says I. 'But I'll come out again.
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.
"Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no one cared ... but now you've started something." "I'm sorry, Mr. Bonton." "It can't be helped now ... don't fail to let me know in what magazines your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear."
I was continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a moral. For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering frenzy of belief in what I was doing. The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest. There was a man named Carl Bonton who owned a threshing machine. I heard he was in need of hands for the season.
Also Bonton speeded so terrifically that much of the grain was shot out into the straw.... One night three of the horses made their way to the straw and ate and gorged ... in the morning one of them was dead and the other two were foundered.... The cramps bothered me no more. The boss came up to me and slapped me on the back.