The American: A Middle Western Legend by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

gang—then walk it.”
    Pete set out along the line to walk it. It was a hundred degrees in the shade, but there was no shade. After a while, it seemed to Pete that the prairies were rising and falling like a sea of ochre sulphur. He crawled into a toolshed and lay there until dark, sleeping a little. At nightfall, he came out and began to walk again. At a chow house, he talked the sleepy cook into giving him half a loaf of bread and a piece of sausage, and by morning he staggered into his old camp. The Irishmen, just coming onto the job, rubbed their eyes and stared at him. “The strong man,” they nodded, but without hatred; if Pete could have seen himself, he would have known why. When he found the foreman and asked for his old job back, he was ready for the swift reaction.
    â€œNo good, Pete.”
    â€œWhat’s no good?”
    â€œYou. You’re no goddam good. Why don’t you get out of here and push up north? This is fever country.”
    â€œI got no money,” he said. “Please, please, mister, give me the job.”
    â€œGet some rest and then we’ll talk about it.”
    â€œI’m all right. I tell you I’m all right now. Put me on the job. Put me on the job and see.”
    The foreman shrugged and nodded for him to join his gang. But now the Irishmen set the pace. For two hours, Pete kept up with them; then his legs buckled and he rolled over on the ground. They carried him into the shade, and that night the foreman gave him a pass to ride back along the line. The foreman gave him some good advice, too:
    â€œClear out, or you’ll be dead inside of a month.”

XVII
    During the war he had felt fear, but it was not the kind of fear that gripped him now. Turned twenty-two, in the prime of his. young manhood, his power to work was gone, and he was thrown out like a used-up tool. In the whole world, no one gave two damns about Pete Altgeld. Whether he lived or died simply did not matter. Society had laid down a demand, and when he couldn’t meet it, it turned its back. Now he was a bum, a tramp, a creature of the roads. He walked north, and his clothes became ragged, shabby; his beard grew. He had no strength, none at all, and when he tried to take a job at a farm, the fever returned. He begged for food; that he had never done before, nor had he ever considered that he would do it, but his body cried out to keep alive, and he answered its demands. He slept in barns or in the open field, and in the morning he rose, stiff, aching, and hopeless. Sometimes as he shuffled along the roads which led north, straight as arrows, binding the sections, his old dreams would return, and out of the impossibility of reality would come the confidence in his own power, but his dreams were drugs now, not plans. He had only one plan, to remain alive.
    Some of the people he met were kind, and others were cruel, and others were just indifferent. Some met him with a shotgun, for he was, by appearance and definition, one of a ravenous pack, cast out by society, and preying on those who had turned them into beasts. But others met him with kindness, and one Kansas family nursed him through an illness, giving him food and shelter for a while at least, remembering that not so long ago they were the dispossessed and the disinherited, searching westward with nothing but their own strength; yet even they recognized the law and bowed to it and sent him on his way.
    He took his path across Kansas, into Missouri; if it had been winter, he would have died; but in this gentle weather he was able to stay alive, to move on—to retain a small hope concerning what lay over the next hill. Yet as the days passed, even that hope waned. His young strength had ebbed away, all of it, and presently both past and future merged into a confused pattern, senseless and purposeless. He went on only because the will to live was a strong, demanding call, prodding him when all other prods were bent.

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