IV
It was harvest-time, and Jimmie went West to the wheat country. It
was hard work, but the pay made your eyes bulge. Jimmie realized
that war was not such a bad thing--for the ones that stayed at
home! If you didn't like one farmer's way of speaking to you, or the
kind of biscuits his wife offered you, you could move on to the
next, and he would take you in at four bits more per day. It was the
nearest approach to a working-man's paradise that Jimmie had ever
encountered. There was really only one drawback--the pestiferous
draft-boards that never stopped snooping round. They were for ever
hauling you up and threatening and questioning you--putting you
through the same scene over and over. Why couldn't the fools give
you a card, showing that you had been through the mill, and let that
settle it? But no, they wouldn't give you a card--they preferred to
go on jacking you up because you had no card. It was all a trick,
thought Jimmie, to wear him out and force him into their army by
hook or by crook. But here was one time when they would not get away
with it!
However, Jimmie Higgins was not nearly so dangerous a character, now
that "Wild Bill" was gone out of his life. It was really not his
nature to cherish hate, or to set out deliberately to revenge
himself. Jimmie was a Socialist in the true sense of the word--he
felt himself a part of society, and that peace and plenty and
kindness which he desired for himself he desired for all mankind. He
was not dreaming of a time when he could turn the capitalists out of
power and treat them as they were now treating him; he meant the
world to be just as good a place for the capitalists as for the
workers--all would share alike, and Jimmie was ready to wipe out the
old scores and start fair any day. His propaganda regained its
former idealistic hue, and it was only when somebody tried to drag
him into the slaughter-pen that he developed teeth and claws.
So he became fairly happy again--happier than he had thought he
could ever be. It was in vain he told himself that he had nothing to
live for; he had the greatest thing in the world to live for, the
vision of a just and sane and happy world. So long as anybody could
be found to listen while he talked about it and explained how it
might be achieved, life was worth while, life was real. It was only
now and then that his bitter heartache returned to plague him--when
he awakened in the night with his arms clasped about the memory of
the soft, warm, kindly body of Eleesa Betooser; or when he came to a
farmhouse where there were children, whose prattle reminded him of
the little fellow who had been his prime reason for wanting a just
and sane and happy world. Jimmie found that he could not bear to
work in one farmhouse where there were children; and when he told
the farmer's wife the reason, he and the woman declared a temporary
truce to the class-war, and celebrated it with half a large apple-
pie.
