CHAPTER VII—ONLY A BARNARDO BOY“They’ll abuse him as a youngster, they will mock him as a man,They’ll make his life a thorny path in every way they can,Till he curses his existence and the day that it began,And he wishes he was rotting in the sod.”The Empire Builders.Hiram Riles and his wife lived on a farm about two miles from the Grant homestead. They had come out from the East in the early days, when Riles was a strong, sinewy fellow to whom money-getting had not yet become a mania, and his wife still retained some of the roses and some of the sentiment of youth. But it’s a hardy rose that survives twenty years of pioneer life, and it’s a deep-rooted sentiment that can weather prosperity unelevated by culture and unsweetened by self-sacrifice. And in the Riles’ home culture had come to be a thing misunderstood, and self-sacrifice a thing unknown. There was only one end in life—to make money; and there was only one way this could be done—by labour which amounted to slavery, and stinginess which amounted to theft. Nothing which could not be expressed in dollars and cents had any value to Riles; no doctrine but mammon-worship had any part in his creed.The years had dragged on and he had prospered after the standard of the world, gaining money and losing everything that money cannot buy. Quarter section had been added to quarter section, bought when land was cheap and paid for by dint of untiring labour and at the sacrifice of physical comforts and mental advantages which Riles considered of no moment. But as, labouring from dawn to dusk, he added quarter to quarter, the time came when even his dauntless energy could not keep up with the growth of the farm. True, his wife helped him to the limit of her strength, driving the plough and the binder, stooking in the fields, or, drenched to the waist, working in the garden on days when the rain prevented harvesting, and milking her dozen cows after the neighbours were in bed. She was a model wife, as Riles admitted, but even in the admission he took rather more credit to himself for selecting and “breaking her in” than he allowed to her for her strength and industry. But when their combined efforts could no longer furnish the labour needed on the farm, Riles found it necessary to get a hired man. It took him months to make up his mind that the expenditure was unavoidable, but at length he drove to town and announced to a group of idle men that he was looking for a good strong man, not afraid of work, and would pay twenty dollars a month, board and keep.Riles honestly believed that as soon as he made this offer all the idle men in the town would crowd around him competing for the position, and he was not prepared for the indifference with which they regarded it.“Well, who wants it?” he demanded. “Speak up quick, I got no time to lose. I’ve a field of oats there waitin’ stookin’, and if you fellows don’t want the job there’s lots that does. Who’s comin’?”Nobody moved, and at last one of the men said, “I guess you better try somewhere else, Mr. Riles. Everybody here seems to know you.”“They do, hey? And what of it? Ain’t I good? Don’t I pay my bills? Just yuh walk down to the bank and ask ’em if Hiram Riles ever turned down a bill he owed, and I guess you’ll find——”“I wasn’t thinking about the bills,” the man replied. “You pay them because you have to. You’re worth it, and you can’t get out of it. But you’re as much a slave-driver as ever cracked a whip over a nigger in a cotton field. Nobody ’at knows you’ll work for you. You better get a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim for a blood-sucker of your class.”With an oath Riles jumped from his buckboard and struck a savage blow at the frank labourer, but years of hardship in the fields had taken greater toll than he guessed. The fist he aimed at the face of his critic cut a circle in thin air as a sledge-hammer blow caught Riles under the jaw and he fell with tremendous force against a hub of the buckboard. When he staggered to his feet the flesh of his forehead was cut in two and the eyes lobed forward as though they would fall out.Riles had the wound dressed by a doctor and met the evening train, where he engaged a harvester just out from Ontario. They drove home through the darkness, the hired man so tired with three days and nights of bumping in a slat-seated colonist car that he would have fallen out of the buckboard had Riles not held him in. When the horses were stabled the new comer was shown to his bedroom, which was reached by climbing up steps nailed to the studs of the shanty where Riles and his wife lived. In the loft was a little window looking out of a gable, a straw mattress covered with two discarded horse-blankets lay in a corner, and a kitchen chair, from which the back had been broken, completed the furniture of the little room. It was, however, also used as a store-house for old clothes and for drying vegetables, and the mice scampered in great excitement at the approach of the lantern.Long before daylight Riles wakened the hired man by thumping the wall with a stick of firewood. “Come, yuh barnyard savage,” he said, in his playful humour, “roll out. Do yuh think I’m goin’ to pay yuh twenty dollars a month tosleep? Get down here an’ get at those oats, an’ be quick about it, or I’ll fire yuh before noon.”The sleepy harvester crawled out of the musty blankets, drew on his clothes, and opened his suit-case. From a jumble of socks and underwear he drew a revolver and a murderous-looking knife. Slinging the suit-case by a strap over his shoulder, with the knife between his teeth, the revolver in one hand and the lantern in the other, he made the precipitous descent into the kitchen.“What in thunder does this mean?” demanded the astonished Riles, as he caught sight of the animated arsenal.“I’m going after those oats,” the man replied, in a hoarse whisper. “They’re wild oats, ain’t they?”“No, they’re not wild oats, my smart young fellow. They’re tame oats, if yuh know the difference.”“Then if they’re tame oats,” said the other, in a wheedling tone, “if they’re tame oats, don’t you think, Mr. Riles, if we were careful, we might manage to sneak up on them in daylight?” And before the astonished Riles could find an answer the hired man continued, “Ta, ta, Mr. Riles. Much obliged for the night’s lodging. Hope you catch the oats,” and had swung out into the darkness to find his way back to town.His first experience with hired men was rather disconcerting, but out of it dawned an important light. The illumination came upon Riles as he stooked the oats himself that forenoon. After dinner he drove back to town and called casually upon Bill Perkins, the lawyer. It was no part of Riles’ policy to encourage any such useless class as lawyers or doctors by paying a fee, but he usually succeeded in getting the desired information in process of conversation, and without appearing to have sought it. He had already benefited several times by advice given by Perkins in this way, and the lawyer had determined to be even with him.Perkins was busy with a transfer of land when Riles dropped in, and for a few minutes the conversation was of crops and harvest and the weather. Skilfully enough the farmer introduced the subject of hired help, lamenting how difficult it was to get good men and how the hired men now-a-days took all the profit from the farm and left the owner with the expense, in all of which Perkins concurred. As he was about to leave the office Riles remarked—“Oh, by the way, I guess there’ll be a job fer one o’ yuh fellows one o’ these days. I heard this mornin’ of a hired man quittin’ work before the month was up, and the farmer wouldn’t pay him, an he’s goin’ to have the law on him. How’ll a case o’ that kind come out, do yuh think?”“If the servant left without due provocation before the period of his employment had expired, he will have difficulty in collecting his wages.”“I was thinkin’ so, Mr. Perkins. Well, it’s a fine afternoon, an’ I must be gettin’ back.”“Just a minute, Mr. Riles,” the lawyer called, as his client was stepping out of the office. “There is a small fee for the information just given you. Five dollars, please.”“Five devils!” shouted Mr. Riles. “You go to ——. I beg yer pardon, Mr. Perkins. I didn’t mean to be so out-spoken, but yer little joke kinda took me by surprise. Ha! ha! a very good one, too. There’s no bein’ even with a lawyer.”“It’s no joke, Mr. Riles. You’ve been sponging your legal advice around this office long enough. To-day you will pay for it or I will collect it at court.”“I’ll pay it, will I? I’ll see yuh in hell first,” said the farmer, now thoroughly beside himself.“Very well,” said Perkins. “There’ll be no trouble here. But if it isn’t paid by Saturday night you know what will happen.”Riles started down town in a rage, and Perkins reached for his telephone.“Mr. Bradshaw? Hello, Bradshaw, this is Perkins speaking. Just had a visit from Riles—sponging advice as usual. Socked him a fiver and threatened if he didn’t come through by Saturday night I’d have him up. He’s mad enough to eat the town, but he’ll likely be round to you. Fix him plenty.... That’s right, George, go to it.” Mr. Perkins set down his telephone, sat back in his chair, and indulged in one of the few hearty smiles to which he found occasion to treat himself.Meanwhile Riles, stampeding down town, reached the door of Bradshaw’s office. Bradshaw stood on the step drinking in the afternoon autumn sunshine. The warm rays rested graciously on his slightly bald cranium.“Good-day, Mr. Riles. How is it you’re not cutting to-day?”Riles collected himself, and forced a smile. “A little business in town, Mr. Bradshaw. I’ve just been in talkin’ with that measly opposition o’ yours, and what d’ye s’pose the cur did?”“Who, Perkins? Oh, you can never tell what he’ll do. I gave it up long ago.”“Well, sir, we was just talkin’ about things in general an’ I told him likely there’d be a case one of these days about a man quittin’ before his time was up, an’ I asked him how’d it likely come out. He said the quitter would lose, an’ yuh can eat me, Bradshaw, if he didn’t try to charge me five dollars fer it, and threatened soot if I didn’t pay by Saturday night.”Bradshaw laughed. “You can never be up to Perkins,” he said. “But I must say it serves you right for going to him at all. Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”“That’s what I will do next time, you may be sure. But he can’t collect that five, can he, George?”“I’m afraid he can, Hiram. Yes, I rather think you’d better settle with him.”“Well, it’s a strange law. Lawyers get everything their own way.”“Once in awhile it happens that way,” Mr. Bradshaw agreed. “And when you’re settling anyway there will be a ten-spot coming to me.”“To you? For what?”“Legal advice,” answered Mr. Bradshaw, placing his thumbs in the upper pockets of his vest with an air of great complacency. “Haven’t I just told you you’d have to pay it?”Riles was so dumbfounded that he pulled out ten dollars, threw it at the smiling lawyer, and proceeded down street without a word.But having paid fifteen dollars for legal advice Riles was too shrewd a business man not to profit by it. That night he engaged another “barnyard savage,” being careful to hire him for a month. The man worked for four days and quit. Riles refused to pay him any wages, and hired another stranger on the same terms. In this way he was able to get through the fall without any direct outlay for help.But the system was not very satisfactory. Too much time was lost hunting for new men, and the labourers always quit before they got into Riles’ way of managing the farm. The suggestion of the man who knocked him into the wheel of the buckboard stayed with him almost as tenaciously as the scar he then received. “Hire a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim of a blood-sucker of your class.” Of course the words were rather strong—even Riles objected to them—but the sentiment was all right. Besides, it was doing the Englishman a good turn. It brought him away from a congested country and gave him an insight into life in a new land. With industry and application even an Englishman might become—might become—as prosperous and successful a farmer as he himself! There was something for a young man to look forward to!A good scheme had been worked by one or two of Riles’s neighbours. These men—transplanted Englishmen themselves—who, to tell the truth, had made a very indifferent success of agriculture, had hit upon the idea of giving instruction to young Englishmen of good family in the art of farming as it is practised in the Canadian West. They had no difficulty in finding fond fathers who, for reasons that need not be entered into here, were anxious that their sons should have a “colonial” experience, and were willing to pay from fifty to two hundred pounds a head per year (according to the state of the paternal exchequer and the desirability of the exodus) for the board, lodging and instruction of their sons in the “colony.” Of course it never occurred to these worthy parents that there are state-controlled institutions for giving just the instruction needed, where their sons would be brought in contact with the best influences in the land. Even had they known of these institutions they would probably have preferred to place their young hopefuls with some old acquaintance whose Munchausian reports of his success in Canada were accepted as gospel, but whose real accomplishments consisted mainly in supporting the brewery and dodging the bailiff—two occupations which usually go hand in hand.But Riles was not of the blood. He knew no one in England, and one or two advances which he made to the English neighbours mentioned with a view to “getting in on a good thing” were met with a coldness which amounted to a rebuff. There remained only one thing to be done—adopt a Barnardo boy. Riles would have much preferred a grown-up man, but on consultation with some of the neighbours who had adopted these boys he was assured that they could be depended upon to do as much work as a man, and were more easily controlled. Twenty years ago the latter consideration would not have appealed to Riles, but he recalled the incident where he received his scar, and he knew enough about Englishmen to know that if they excelled in anything it was in their ability to protect themselves from physical damage, and incidentally to administer a thrashing to their assailants. On the whole, perhaps a boy would suit his purpose better.Before being entrusted with the foster-parentage of an English orphan, Riles found that he must have his application supported by the recommendation of two reputable citizens and a resident clergyman. He at once appealed to his neighbour, David Grant, than whom there was no more respected farmer in the community. He hardly was prepared for Mr. Grant’s frankness.“No, Hiram, I can’t sign that paper. If one of my boys, ten or twelve years old, were to be left an orphan, I wouldn’t want him to come under your influence for the next five years of his life. You’re a good farmer, Riles, but being a good farmer is one thing, and being a good father’s another. A great many people in this country seem to think it more important that a man should be able to break in a colt than bring up a boy.”“Oh, well,” Riles answered, good naturedly enough, “if it was yer son of course it ’ud be different. They’ve always had a good home, better’n most boys, I’m thinkin’. But these English brats, herded out of the streets an’ turned loose in this country to live or die—it’s a charity for anyone to take them in. They don’t know nothin’, an’ never will, but eat an’ sleep an’ lie an’ steal when they get a chance. They’ve got to be broke in severe, an’ I reckon Hiram Riles can do it ’s well as the next one. ’Course, if yuh’ve got conscientious objections,” continued Riles, the habitual sneer creeping back into his disfigured face, “I won’t press you to sign the paper.”“After a speech like that I think you had better not,” said Grant, quietly, but there was a significance in his voice that did not appear on the surface.Nothing daunted, Riles called on his two English neighbours who were giving instruction in agriculture at so much per head. They signed his recommendation without question. A clergyman who had never been in Riles’ home, who had never met Mrs. Riles, who knew nothing of their style of living, put his name to the paper, as he did so speaking some cheap platitudes about the privilege of giving a Christian home to “one of these little ones.”And so it came about that Wilfred Vickery, already introduced to the reader as “London,” became the bond-servant of Hiram Riles and his wife, Eliza Riles.For a week or so the little orphan boy found everything so strange and unreal that he went around as one in a trance. Pure English was difficult enough for him, but the slangy colloquialism of the Riles’ home was almost unintelligible. Half the time he did not know what they said to him, but stared in a vacant, meaningless way which they ascribed to downright stupidity. When he spoke they mocked his language, although using an equally corrupted tongue themselves. For a few weeks, while under the direct care of responsible officers of the Home, the little fellow had experienced a kindness and a personal interest which had begun to unfold before him a life of which he had never dreamed. He had been taught to sing a few hymns, he had been taught to utter a simple prayer, he had been taught that there is a great Father to whom every child is dearer than to even the kindest earthly father. He had never known what an earthly father was, but in the new, great land to which they were going he should soon know—he should find that for every little child in all God’s world some heart beats with the joy of a father’s love, some bosom swells with the wealth of a mother’s devotion. He had been taught these things, and some glimpse of that great real world which lies just beyond the realm of the intellect had come to his poor dwarfed soul and fired his spirit with the unutterable yearning that no man has ever answered in terms of time and sense. He had learned that life is not merely a battle to fill the belly, that the earth is not only for fighting and swearing in, that Love is arealthing, more powerful than hate. The slumbering germ of his spiritual life, deafened by a decade of London’s roar, had been wakened by a brief contact with kindness, and in the birth of imagination the world had taken on a new interest and a new possibility. All these hidden emotions, touched to sudden life, were clamouring for expression, for utterance, when he had come—to this.The boy’s disillusionment was terrible and complete. They thought him stupid, but he found the guise of stupidity serve his purpose well, and he was more cunning than they. He stole to fill his stomach; he lied to cover his theft. He shirked his labour whenever he could; he destroyed property whenever he dared. When they cuffed him he cursed them; when they swore at him he swore back, and he had the advantage of vocabulary. When they made him milk cows he would pour the milk on the ground and say the cow kicked it; when he was old enough to drive a team he would let it run away whenever opportunity offered. He was to have been sent to school, but he went only on those rare occasions when nothing could be found for him to do on the farm, but he was compelled to write periodical letters to the Home saying how happy he was and how kind Mr. and Mrs. Riles were to him. He was held up as an object of contempt before neighbours and strangers; he was the butt of their coarse humour and the victim of their bullying authority.The kind officers of the Home had taught him a little prayer, and told him never to forget the good people who were to be his foster-parents in the new land. And every night as he crawled to his musty mattress and blankets in the mouse-chamber already described he would kneel by the broken chair and repeat:“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,Bless Thy little lamb to-night,Through the darkness be Thou near me.Keep me safe till morning’s light.God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles and make me a good boy, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”He had repeated this prayer nightly for months. One night he had difficulty getting the calves into their pen; they would run every direction except the way he would have them go. He still had his cows to milk, his pigs to feed, his wood and water to carry in, but the calves refused to be housed. When he had them almost in they broke away, and raced into the darkness of the pasture field, jumping and frisking in appreciation of the joke. He ran after them as fast as his tired little legs would take him, sobbing and swearing as he ran, but without success. They could not be found in the darkness, and as he came back, defeated and utterly played out, he met Riles, who had just returned from town and was none the better for his potations. Without a word the ruffian knocked the boy down with a swinging blow on the face, and kicked him almost into insensibility. As he crawled to bed that night, stiff, bruised and battered, he knelt before his broken chair and repeated his nightly prayer. When he came to the words “God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles” he stopped. The significance of the words dawned upon him in a way he had never quite understood. He was only a little boy, against whom environment and ancestry seemed to have conspired, but he was no hypocrite. He was praying for a man he hated, and the words stuck in his teeth. For a long time he remained there on his knees, looking at the misty light in the half-blackened lantern, and thinking, thinking. He was fighting one of those great fights which come earlier in boyhood than we sometimes think, and which decide in large measure the whole course of after life.Finally his jaws closed with a snap. “Damn Mr. Riles,” he said, and climbed into bed.
CHAPTER VII—ONLY A BARNARDO BOY“They’ll abuse him as a youngster, they will mock him as a man,They’ll make his life a thorny path in every way they can,Till he curses his existence and the day that it began,And he wishes he was rotting in the sod.”The Empire Builders.Hiram Riles and his wife lived on a farm about two miles from the Grant homestead. They had come out from the East in the early days, when Riles was a strong, sinewy fellow to whom money-getting had not yet become a mania, and his wife still retained some of the roses and some of the sentiment of youth. But it’s a hardy rose that survives twenty years of pioneer life, and it’s a deep-rooted sentiment that can weather prosperity unelevated by culture and unsweetened by self-sacrifice. And in the Riles’ home culture had come to be a thing misunderstood, and self-sacrifice a thing unknown. There was only one end in life—to make money; and there was only one way this could be done—by labour which amounted to slavery, and stinginess which amounted to theft. Nothing which could not be expressed in dollars and cents had any value to Riles; no doctrine but mammon-worship had any part in his creed.The years had dragged on and he had prospered after the standard of the world, gaining money and losing everything that money cannot buy. Quarter section had been added to quarter section, bought when land was cheap and paid for by dint of untiring labour and at the sacrifice of physical comforts and mental advantages which Riles considered of no moment. But as, labouring from dawn to dusk, he added quarter to quarter, the time came when even his dauntless energy could not keep up with the growth of the farm. True, his wife helped him to the limit of her strength, driving the plough and the binder, stooking in the fields, or, drenched to the waist, working in the garden on days when the rain prevented harvesting, and milking her dozen cows after the neighbours were in bed. She was a model wife, as Riles admitted, but even in the admission he took rather more credit to himself for selecting and “breaking her in” than he allowed to her for her strength and industry. But when their combined efforts could no longer furnish the labour needed on the farm, Riles found it necessary to get a hired man. It took him months to make up his mind that the expenditure was unavoidable, but at length he drove to town and announced to a group of idle men that he was looking for a good strong man, not afraid of work, and would pay twenty dollars a month, board and keep.Riles honestly believed that as soon as he made this offer all the idle men in the town would crowd around him competing for the position, and he was not prepared for the indifference with which they regarded it.“Well, who wants it?” he demanded. “Speak up quick, I got no time to lose. I’ve a field of oats there waitin’ stookin’, and if you fellows don’t want the job there’s lots that does. Who’s comin’?”Nobody moved, and at last one of the men said, “I guess you better try somewhere else, Mr. Riles. Everybody here seems to know you.”“They do, hey? And what of it? Ain’t I good? Don’t I pay my bills? Just yuh walk down to the bank and ask ’em if Hiram Riles ever turned down a bill he owed, and I guess you’ll find——”“I wasn’t thinking about the bills,” the man replied. “You pay them because you have to. You’re worth it, and you can’t get out of it. But you’re as much a slave-driver as ever cracked a whip over a nigger in a cotton field. Nobody ’at knows you’ll work for you. You better get a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim for a blood-sucker of your class.”With an oath Riles jumped from his buckboard and struck a savage blow at the frank labourer, but years of hardship in the fields had taken greater toll than he guessed. The fist he aimed at the face of his critic cut a circle in thin air as a sledge-hammer blow caught Riles under the jaw and he fell with tremendous force against a hub of the buckboard. When he staggered to his feet the flesh of his forehead was cut in two and the eyes lobed forward as though they would fall out.Riles had the wound dressed by a doctor and met the evening train, where he engaged a harvester just out from Ontario. They drove home through the darkness, the hired man so tired with three days and nights of bumping in a slat-seated colonist car that he would have fallen out of the buckboard had Riles not held him in. When the horses were stabled the new comer was shown to his bedroom, which was reached by climbing up steps nailed to the studs of the shanty where Riles and his wife lived. In the loft was a little window looking out of a gable, a straw mattress covered with two discarded horse-blankets lay in a corner, and a kitchen chair, from which the back had been broken, completed the furniture of the little room. It was, however, also used as a store-house for old clothes and for drying vegetables, and the mice scampered in great excitement at the approach of the lantern.Long before daylight Riles wakened the hired man by thumping the wall with a stick of firewood. “Come, yuh barnyard savage,” he said, in his playful humour, “roll out. Do yuh think I’m goin’ to pay yuh twenty dollars a month tosleep? Get down here an’ get at those oats, an’ be quick about it, or I’ll fire yuh before noon.”The sleepy harvester crawled out of the musty blankets, drew on his clothes, and opened his suit-case. From a jumble of socks and underwear he drew a revolver and a murderous-looking knife. Slinging the suit-case by a strap over his shoulder, with the knife between his teeth, the revolver in one hand and the lantern in the other, he made the precipitous descent into the kitchen.“What in thunder does this mean?” demanded the astonished Riles, as he caught sight of the animated arsenal.“I’m going after those oats,” the man replied, in a hoarse whisper. “They’re wild oats, ain’t they?”“No, they’re not wild oats, my smart young fellow. They’re tame oats, if yuh know the difference.”“Then if they’re tame oats,” said the other, in a wheedling tone, “if they’re tame oats, don’t you think, Mr. Riles, if we were careful, we might manage to sneak up on them in daylight?” And before the astonished Riles could find an answer the hired man continued, “Ta, ta, Mr. Riles. Much obliged for the night’s lodging. Hope you catch the oats,” and had swung out into the darkness to find his way back to town.His first experience with hired men was rather disconcerting, but out of it dawned an important light. The illumination came upon Riles as he stooked the oats himself that forenoon. After dinner he drove back to town and called casually upon Bill Perkins, the lawyer. It was no part of Riles’ policy to encourage any such useless class as lawyers or doctors by paying a fee, but he usually succeeded in getting the desired information in process of conversation, and without appearing to have sought it. He had already benefited several times by advice given by Perkins in this way, and the lawyer had determined to be even with him.Perkins was busy with a transfer of land when Riles dropped in, and for a few minutes the conversation was of crops and harvest and the weather. Skilfully enough the farmer introduced the subject of hired help, lamenting how difficult it was to get good men and how the hired men now-a-days took all the profit from the farm and left the owner with the expense, in all of which Perkins concurred. As he was about to leave the office Riles remarked—“Oh, by the way, I guess there’ll be a job fer one o’ yuh fellows one o’ these days. I heard this mornin’ of a hired man quittin’ work before the month was up, and the farmer wouldn’t pay him, an he’s goin’ to have the law on him. How’ll a case o’ that kind come out, do yuh think?”“If the servant left without due provocation before the period of his employment had expired, he will have difficulty in collecting his wages.”“I was thinkin’ so, Mr. Perkins. Well, it’s a fine afternoon, an’ I must be gettin’ back.”“Just a minute, Mr. Riles,” the lawyer called, as his client was stepping out of the office. “There is a small fee for the information just given you. Five dollars, please.”“Five devils!” shouted Mr. Riles. “You go to ——. I beg yer pardon, Mr. Perkins. I didn’t mean to be so out-spoken, but yer little joke kinda took me by surprise. Ha! ha! a very good one, too. There’s no bein’ even with a lawyer.”“It’s no joke, Mr. Riles. You’ve been sponging your legal advice around this office long enough. To-day you will pay for it or I will collect it at court.”“I’ll pay it, will I? I’ll see yuh in hell first,” said the farmer, now thoroughly beside himself.“Very well,” said Perkins. “There’ll be no trouble here. But if it isn’t paid by Saturday night you know what will happen.”Riles started down town in a rage, and Perkins reached for his telephone.“Mr. Bradshaw? Hello, Bradshaw, this is Perkins speaking. Just had a visit from Riles—sponging advice as usual. Socked him a fiver and threatened if he didn’t come through by Saturday night I’d have him up. He’s mad enough to eat the town, but he’ll likely be round to you. Fix him plenty.... That’s right, George, go to it.” Mr. Perkins set down his telephone, sat back in his chair, and indulged in one of the few hearty smiles to which he found occasion to treat himself.Meanwhile Riles, stampeding down town, reached the door of Bradshaw’s office. Bradshaw stood on the step drinking in the afternoon autumn sunshine. The warm rays rested graciously on his slightly bald cranium.“Good-day, Mr. Riles. How is it you’re not cutting to-day?”Riles collected himself, and forced a smile. “A little business in town, Mr. Bradshaw. I’ve just been in talkin’ with that measly opposition o’ yours, and what d’ye s’pose the cur did?”“Who, Perkins? Oh, you can never tell what he’ll do. I gave it up long ago.”“Well, sir, we was just talkin’ about things in general an’ I told him likely there’d be a case one of these days about a man quittin’ before his time was up, an’ I asked him how’d it likely come out. He said the quitter would lose, an’ yuh can eat me, Bradshaw, if he didn’t try to charge me five dollars fer it, and threatened soot if I didn’t pay by Saturday night.”Bradshaw laughed. “You can never be up to Perkins,” he said. “But I must say it serves you right for going to him at all. Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”“That’s what I will do next time, you may be sure. But he can’t collect that five, can he, George?”“I’m afraid he can, Hiram. Yes, I rather think you’d better settle with him.”“Well, it’s a strange law. Lawyers get everything their own way.”“Once in awhile it happens that way,” Mr. Bradshaw agreed. “And when you’re settling anyway there will be a ten-spot coming to me.”“To you? For what?”“Legal advice,” answered Mr. Bradshaw, placing his thumbs in the upper pockets of his vest with an air of great complacency. “Haven’t I just told you you’d have to pay it?”Riles was so dumbfounded that he pulled out ten dollars, threw it at the smiling lawyer, and proceeded down street without a word.But having paid fifteen dollars for legal advice Riles was too shrewd a business man not to profit by it. That night he engaged another “barnyard savage,” being careful to hire him for a month. The man worked for four days and quit. Riles refused to pay him any wages, and hired another stranger on the same terms. In this way he was able to get through the fall without any direct outlay for help.But the system was not very satisfactory. Too much time was lost hunting for new men, and the labourers always quit before they got into Riles’ way of managing the farm. The suggestion of the man who knocked him into the wheel of the buckboard stayed with him almost as tenaciously as the scar he then received. “Hire a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim of a blood-sucker of your class.” Of course the words were rather strong—even Riles objected to them—but the sentiment was all right. Besides, it was doing the Englishman a good turn. It brought him away from a congested country and gave him an insight into life in a new land. With industry and application even an Englishman might become—might become—as prosperous and successful a farmer as he himself! There was something for a young man to look forward to!A good scheme had been worked by one or two of Riles’s neighbours. These men—transplanted Englishmen themselves—who, to tell the truth, had made a very indifferent success of agriculture, had hit upon the idea of giving instruction to young Englishmen of good family in the art of farming as it is practised in the Canadian West. They had no difficulty in finding fond fathers who, for reasons that need not be entered into here, were anxious that their sons should have a “colonial” experience, and were willing to pay from fifty to two hundred pounds a head per year (according to the state of the paternal exchequer and the desirability of the exodus) for the board, lodging and instruction of their sons in the “colony.” Of course it never occurred to these worthy parents that there are state-controlled institutions for giving just the instruction needed, where their sons would be brought in contact with the best influences in the land. Even had they known of these institutions they would probably have preferred to place their young hopefuls with some old acquaintance whose Munchausian reports of his success in Canada were accepted as gospel, but whose real accomplishments consisted mainly in supporting the brewery and dodging the bailiff—two occupations which usually go hand in hand.But Riles was not of the blood. He knew no one in England, and one or two advances which he made to the English neighbours mentioned with a view to “getting in on a good thing” were met with a coldness which amounted to a rebuff. There remained only one thing to be done—adopt a Barnardo boy. Riles would have much preferred a grown-up man, but on consultation with some of the neighbours who had adopted these boys he was assured that they could be depended upon to do as much work as a man, and were more easily controlled. Twenty years ago the latter consideration would not have appealed to Riles, but he recalled the incident where he received his scar, and he knew enough about Englishmen to know that if they excelled in anything it was in their ability to protect themselves from physical damage, and incidentally to administer a thrashing to their assailants. On the whole, perhaps a boy would suit his purpose better.Before being entrusted with the foster-parentage of an English orphan, Riles found that he must have his application supported by the recommendation of two reputable citizens and a resident clergyman. He at once appealed to his neighbour, David Grant, than whom there was no more respected farmer in the community. He hardly was prepared for Mr. Grant’s frankness.“No, Hiram, I can’t sign that paper. If one of my boys, ten or twelve years old, were to be left an orphan, I wouldn’t want him to come under your influence for the next five years of his life. You’re a good farmer, Riles, but being a good farmer is one thing, and being a good father’s another. A great many people in this country seem to think it more important that a man should be able to break in a colt than bring up a boy.”“Oh, well,” Riles answered, good naturedly enough, “if it was yer son of course it ’ud be different. They’ve always had a good home, better’n most boys, I’m thinkin’. But these English brats, herded out of the streets an’ turned loose in this country to live or die—it’s a charity for anyone to take them in. They don’t know nothin’, an’ never will, but eat an’ sleep an’ lie an’ steal when they get a chance. They’ve got to be broke in severe, an’ I reckon Hiram Riles can do it ’s well as the next one. ’Course, if yuh’ve got conscientious objections,” continued Riles, the habitual sneer creeping back into his disfigured face, “I won’t press you to sign the paper.”“After a speech like that I think you had better not,” said Grant, quietly, but there was a significance in his voice that did not appear on the surface.Nothing daunted, Riles called on his two English neighbours who were giving instruction in agriculture at so much per head. They signed his recommendation without question. A clergyman who had never been in Riles’ home, who had never met Mrs. Riles, who knew nothing of their style of living, put his name to the paper, as he did so speaking some cheap platitudes about the privilege of giving a Christian home to “one of these little ones.”And so it came about that Wilfred Vickery, already introduced to the reader as “London,” became the bond-servant of Hiram Riles and his wife, Eliza Riles.For a week or so the little orphan boy found everything so strange and unreal that he went around as one in a trance. Pure English was difficult enough for him, but the slangy colloquialism of the Riles’ home was almost unintelligible. Half the time he did not know what they said to him, but stared in a vacant, meaningless way which they ascribed to downright stupidity. When he spoke they mocked his language, although using an equally corrupted tongue themselves. For a few weeks, while under the direct care of responsible officers of the Home, the little fellow had experienced a kindness and a personal interest which had begun to unfold before him a life of which he had never dreamed. He had been taught to sing a few hymns, he had been taught to utter a simple prayer, he had been taught that there is a great Father to whom every child is dearer than to even the kindest earthly father. He had never known what an earthly father was, but in the new, great land to which they were going he should soon know—he should find that for every little child in all God’s world some heart beats with the joy of a father’s love, some bosom swells with the wealth of a mother’s devotion. He had been taught these things, and some glimpse of that great real world which lies just beyond the realm of the intellect had come to his poor dwarfed soul and fired his spirit with the unutterable yearning that no man has ever answered in terms of time and sense. He had learned that life is not merely a battle to fill the belly, that the earth is not only for fighting and swearing in, that Love is arealthing, more powerful than hate. The slumbering germ of his spiritual life, deafened by a decade of London’s roar, had been wakened by a brief contact with kindness, and in the birth of imagination the world had taken on a new interest and a new possibility. All these hidden emotions, touched to sudden life, were clamouring for expression, for utterance, when he had come—to this.The boy’s disillusionment was terrible and complete. They thought him stupid, but he found the guise of stupidity serve his purpose well, and he was more cunning than they. He stole to fill his stomach; he lied to cover his theft. He shirked his labour whenever he could; he destroyed property whenever he dared. When they cuffed him he cursed them; when they swore at him he swore back, and he had the advantage of vocabulary. When they made him milk cows he would pour the milk on the ground and say the cow kicked it; when he was old enough to drive a team he would let it run away whenever opportunity offered. He was to have been sent to school, but he went only on those rare occasions when nothing could be found for him to do on the farm, but he was compelled to write periodical letters to the Home saying how happy he was and how kind Mr. and Mrs. Riles were to him. He was held up as an object of contempt before neighbours and strangers; he was the butt of their coarse humour and the victim of their bullying authority.The kind officers of the Home had taught him a little prayer, and told him never to forget the good people who were to be his foster-parents in the new land. And every night as he crawled to his musty mattress and blankets in the mouse-chamber already described he would kneel by the broken chair and repeat:“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,Bless Thy little lamb to-night,Through the darkness be Thou near me.Keep me safe till morning’s light.God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles and make me a good boy, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”He had repeated this prayer nightly for months. One night he had difficulty getting the calves into their pen; they would run every direction except the way he would have them go. He still had his cows to milk, his pigs to feed, his wood and water to carry in, but the calves refused to be housed. When he had them almost in they broke away, and raced into the darkness of the pasture field, jumping and frisking in appreciation of the joke. He ran after them as fast as his tired little legs would take him, sobbing and swearing as he ran, but without success. They could not be found in the darkness, and as he came back, defeated and utterly played out, he met Riles, who had just returned from town and was none the better for his potations. Without a word the ruffian knocked the boy down with a swinging blow on the face, and kicked him almost into insensibility. As he crawled to bed that night, stiff, bruised and battered, he knelt before his broken chair and repeated his nightly prayer. When he came to the words “God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles” he stopped. The significance of the words dawned upon him in a way he had never quite understood. He was only a little boy, against whom environment and ancestry seemed to have conspired, but he was no hypocrite. He was praying for a man he hated, and the words stuck in his teeth. For a long time he remained there on his knees, looking at the misty light in the half-blackened lantern, and thinking, thinking. He was fighting one of those great fights which come earlier in boyhood than we sometimes think, and which decide in large measure the whole course of after life.Finally his jaws closed with a snap. “Damn Mr. Riles,” he said, and climbed into bed.
“They’ll abuse him as a youngster, they will mock him as a man,They’ll make his life a thorny path in every way they can,Till he curses his existence and the day that it began,And he wishes he was rotting in the sod.”
“They’ll abuse him as a youngster, they will mock him as a man,
They’ll make his life a thorny path in every way they can,
Till he curses his existence and the day that it began,
And he wishes he was rotting in the sod.”
The Empire Builders.
Hiram Riles and his wife lived on a farm about two miles from the Grant homestead. They had come out from the East in the early days, when Riles was a strong, sinewy fellow to whom money-getting had not yet become a mania, and his wife still retained some of the roses and some of the sentiment of youth. But it’s a hardy rose that survives twenty years of pioneer life, and it’s a deep-rooted sentiment that can weather prosperity unelevated by culture and unsweetened by self-sacrifice. And in the Riles’ home culture had come to be a thing misunderstood, and self-sacrifice a thing unknown. There was only one end in life—to make money; and there was only one way this could be done—by labour which amounted to slavery, and stinginess which amounted to theft. Nothing which could not be expressed in dollars and cents had any value to Riles; no doctrine but mammon-worship had any part in his creed.
The years had dragged on and he had prospered after the standard of the world, gaining money and losing everything that money cannot buy. Quarter section had been added to quarter section, bought when land was cheap and paid for by dint of untiring labour and at the sacrifice of physical comforts and mental advantages which Riles considered of no moment. But as, labouring from dawn to dusk, he added quarter to quarter, the time came when even his dauntless energy could not keep up with the growth of the farm. True, his wife helped him to the limit of her strength, driving the plough and the binder, stooking in the fields, or, drenched to the waist, working in the garden on days when the rain prevented harvesting, and milking her dozen cows after the neighbours were in bed. She was a model wife, as Riles admitted, but even in the admission he took rather more credit to himself for selecting and “breaking her in” than he allowed to her for her strength and industry. But when their combined efforts could no longer furnish the labour needed on the farm, Riles found it necessary to get a hired man. It took him months to make up his mind that the expenditure was unavoidable, but at length he drove to town and announced to a group of idle men that he was looking for a good strong man, not afraid of work, and would pay twenty dollars a month, board and keep.
Riles honestly believed that as soon as he made this offer all the idle men in the town would crowd around him competing for the position, and he was not prepared for the indifference with which they regarded it.
“Well, who wants it?” he demanded. “Speak up quick, I got no time to lose. I’ve a field of oats there waitin’ stookin’, and if you fellows don’t want the job there’s lots that does. Who’s comin’?”
Nobody moved, and at last one of the men said, “I guess you better try somewhere else, Mr. Riles. Everybody here seems to know you.”
“They do, hey? And what of it? Ain’t I good? Don’t I pay my bills? Just yuh walk down to the bank and ask ’em if Hiram Riles ever turned down a bill he owed, and I guess you’ll find——”
“I wasn’t thinking about the bills,” the man replied. “You pay them because you have to. You’re worth it, and you can’t get out of it. But you’re as much a slave-driver as ever cracked a whip over a nigger in a cotton field. Nobody ’at knows you’ll work for you. You better get a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim for a blood-sucker of your class.”
With an oath Riles jumped from his buckboard and struck a savage blow at the frank labourer, but years of hardship in the fields had taken greater toll than he guessed. The fist he aimed at the face of his critic cut a circle in thin air as a sledge-hammer blow caught Riles under the jaw and he fell with tremendous force against a hub of the buckboard. When he staggered to his feet the flesh of his forehead was cut in two and the eyes lobed forward as though they would fall out.
Riles had the wound dressed by a doctor and met the evening train, where he engaged a harvester just out from Ontario. They drove home through the darkness, the hired man so tired with three days and nights of bumping in a slat-seated colonist car that he would have fallen out of the buckboard had Riles not held him in. When the horses were stabled the new comer was shown to his bedroom, which was reached by climbing up steps nailed to the studs of the shanty where Riles and his wife lived. In the loft was a little window looking out of a gable, a straw mattress covered with two discarded horse-blankets lay in a corner, and a kitchen chair, from which the back had been broken, completed the furniture of the little room. It was, however, also used as a store-house for old clothes and for drying vegetables, and the mice scampered in great excitement at the approach of the lantern.
Long before daylight Riles wakened the hired man by thumping the wall with a stick of firewood. “Come, yuh barnyard savage,” he said, in his playful humour, “roll out. Do yuh think I’m goin’ to pay yuh twenty dollars a month tosleep? Get down here an’ get at those oats, an’ be quick about it, or I’ll fire yuh before noon.”
The sleepy harvester crawled out of the musty blankets, drew on his clothes, and opened his suit-case. From a jumble of socks and underwear he drew a revolver and a murderous-looking knife. Slinging the suit-case by a strap over his shoulder, with the knife between his teeth, the revolver in one hand and the lantern in the other, he made the precipitous descent into the kitchen.
“What in thunder does this mean?” demanded the astonished Riles, as he caught sight of the animated arsenal.
“I’m going after those oats,” the man replied, in a hoarse whisper. “They’re wild oats, ain’t they?”
“No, they’re not wild oats, my smart young fellow. They’re tame oats, if yuh know the difference.”
“Then if they’re tame oats,” said the other, in a wheedling tone, “if they’re tame oats, don’t you think, Mr. Riles, if we were careful, we might manage to sneak up on them in daylight?” And before the astonished Riles could find an answer the hired man continued, “Ta, ta, Mr. Riles. Much obliged for the night’s lodging. Hope you catch the oats,” and had swung out into the darkness to find his way back to town.
His first experience with hired men was rather disconcerting, but out of it dawned an important light. The illumination came upon Riles as he stooked the oats himself that forenoon. After dinner he drove back to town and called casually upon Bill Perkins, the lawyer. It was no part of Riles’ policy to encourage any such useless class as lawyers or doctors by paying a fee, but he usually succeeded in getting the desired information in process of conversation, and without appearing to have sought it. He had already benefited several times by advice given by Perkins in this way, and the lawyer had determined to be even with him.
Perkins was busy with a transfer of land when Riles dropped in, and for a few minutes the conversation was of crops and harvest and the weather. Skilfully enough the farmer introduced the subject of hired help, lamenting how difficult it was to get good men and how the hired men now-a-days took all the profit from the farm and left the owner with the expense, in all of which Perkins concurred. As he was about to leave the office Riles remarked—
“Oh, by the way, I guess there’ll be a job fer one o’ yuh fellows one o’ these days. I heard this mornin’ of a hired man quittin’ work before the month was up, and the farmer wouldn’t pay him, an he’s goin’ to have the law on him. How’ll a case o’ that kind come out, do yuh think?”
“If the servant left without due provocation before the period of his employment had expired, he will have difficulty in collecting his wages.”
“I was thinkin’ so, Mr. Perkins. Well, it’s a fine afternoon, an’ I must be gettin’ back.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Riles,” the lawyer called, as his client was stepping out of the office. “There is a small fee for the information just given you. Five dollars, please.”
“Five devils!” shouted Mr. Riles. “You go to ——. I beg yer pardon, Mr. Perkins. I didn’t mean to be so out-spoken, but yer little joke kinda took me by surprise. Ha! ha! a very good one, too. There’s no bein’ even with a lawyer.”
“It’s no joke, Mr. Riles. You’ve been sponging your legal advice around this office long enough. To-day you will pay for it or I will collect it at court.”
“I’ll pay it, will I? I’ll see yuh in hell first,” said the farmer, now thoroughly beside himself.
“Very well,” said Perkins. “There’ll be no trouble here. But if it isn’t paid by Saturday night you know what will happen.”
Riles started down town in a rage, and Perkins reached for his telephone.
“Mr. Bradshaw? Hello, Bradshaw, this is Perkins speaking. Just had a visit from Riles—sponging advice as usual. Socked him a fiver and threatened if he didn’t come through by Saturday night I’d have him up. He’s mad enough to eat the town, but he’ll likely be round to you. Fix him plenty.... That’s right, George, go to it.” Mr. Perkins set down his telephone, sat back in his chair, and indulged in one of the few hearty smiles to which he found occasion to treat himself.
Meanwhile Riles, stampeding down town, reached the door of Bradshaw’s office. Bradshaw stood on the step drinking in the afternoon autumn sunshine. The warm rays rested graciously on his slightly bald cranium.
“Good-day, Mr. Riles. How is it you’re not cutting to-day?”
Riles collected himself, and forced a smile. “A little business in town, Mr. Bradshaw. I’ve just been in talkin’ with that measly opposition o’ yours, and what d’ye s’pose the cur did?”
“Who, Perkins? Oh, you can never tell what he’ll do. I gave it up long ago.”
“Well, sir, we was just talkin’ about things in general an’ I told him likely there’d be a case one of these days about a man quittin’ before his time was up, an’ I asked him how’d it likely come out. He said the quitter would lose, an’ yuh can eat me, Bradshaw, if he didn’t try to charge me five dollars fer it, and threatened soot if I didn’t pay by Saturday night.”
Bradshaw laughed. “You can never be up to Perkins,” he said. “But I must say it serves you right for going to him at all. Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”
“That’s what I will do next time, you may be sure. But he can’t collect that five, can he, George?”
“I’m afraid he can, Hiram. Yes, I rather think you’d better settle with him.”
“Well, it’s a strange law. Lawyers get everything their own way.”
“Once in awhile it happens that way,” Mr. Bradshaw agreed. “And when you’re settling anyway there will be a ten-spot coming to me.”
“To you? For what?”
“Legal advice,” answered Mr. Bradshaw, placing his thumbs in the upper pockets of his vest with an air of great complacency. “Haven’t I just told you you’d have to pay it?”
Riles was so dumbfounded that he pulled out ten dollars, threw it at the smiling lawyer, and proceeded down street without a word.
But having paid fifteen dollars for legal advice Riles was too shrewd a business man not to profit by it. That night he engaged another “barnyard savage,” being careful to hire him for a month. The man worked for four days and quit. Riles refused to pay him any wages, and hired another stranger on the same terms. In this way he was able to get through the fall without any direct outlay for help.
But the system was not very satisfactory. Too much time was lost hunting for new men, and the labourers always quit before they got into Riles’ way of managing the farm. The suggestion of the man who knocked him into the wheel of the buckboard stayed with him almost as tenaciously as the scar he then received. “Hire a green Englishman—some poor fool that doesn’t know any more than be a victim of a blood-sucker of your class.” Of course the words were rather strong—even Riles objected to them—but the sentiment was all right. Besides, it was doing the Englishman a good turn. It brought him away from a congested country and gave him an insight into life in a new land. With industry and application even an Englishman might become—might become—as prosperous and successful a farmer as he himself! There was something for a young man to look forward to!
A good scheme had been worked by one or two of Riles’s neighbours. These men—transplanted Englishmen themselves—who, to tell the truth, had made a very indifferent success of agriculture, had hit upon the idea of giving instruction to young Englishmen of good family in the art of farming as it is practised in the Canadian West. They had no difficulty in finding fond fathers who, for reasons that need not be entered into here, were anxious that their sons should have a “colonial” experience, and were willing to pay from fifty to two hundred pounds a head per year (according to the state of the paternal exchequer and the desirability of the exodus) for the board, lodging and instruction of their sons in the “colony.” Of course it never occurred to these worthy parents that there are state-controlled institutions for giving just the instruction needed, where their sons would be brought in contact with the best influences in the land. Even had they known of these institutions they would probably have preferred to place their young hopefuls with some old acquaintance whose Munchausian reports of his success in Canada were accepted as gospel, but whose real accomplishments consisted mainly in supporting the brewery and dodging the bailiff—two occupations which usually go hand in hand.
But Riles was not of the blood. He knew no one in England, and one or two advances which he made to the English neighbours mentioned with a view to “getting in on a good thing” were met with a coldness which amounted to a rebuff. There remained only one thing to be done—adopt a Barnardo boy. Riles would have much preferred a grown-up man, but on consultation with some of the neighbours who had adopted these boys he was assured that they could be depended upon to do as much work as a man, and were more easily controlled. Twenty years ago the latter consideration would not have appealed to Riles, but he recalled the incident where he received his scar, and he knew enough about Englishmen to know that if they excelled in anything it was in their ability to protect themselves from physical damage, and incidentally to administer a thrashing to their assailants. On the whole, perhaps a boy would suit his purpose better.
Before being entrusted with the foster-parentage of an English orphan, Riles found that he must have his application supported by the recommendation of two reputable citizens and a resident clergyman. He at once appealed to his neighbour, David Grant, than whom there was no more respected farmer in the community. He hardly was prepared for Mr. Grant’s frankness.
“No, Hiram, I can’t sign that paper. If one of my boys, ten or twelve years old, were to be left an orphan, I wouldn’t want him to come under your influence for the next five years of his life. You’re a good farmer, Riles, but being a good farmer is one thing, and being a good father’s another. A great many people in this country seem to think it more important that a man should be able to break in a colt than bring up a boy.”
“Oh, well,” Riles answered, good naturedly enough, “if it was yer son of course it ’ud be different. They’ve always had a good home, better’n most boys, I’m thinkin’. But these English brats, herded out of the streets an’ turned loose in this country to live or die—it’s a charity for anyone to take them in. They don’t know nothin’, an’ never will, but eat an’ sleep an’ lie an’ steal when they get a chance. They’ve got to be broke in severe, an’ I reckon Hiram Riles can do it ’s well as the next one. ’Course, if yuh’ve got conscientious objections,” continued Riles, the habitual sneer creeping back into his disfigured face, “I won’t press you to sign the paper.”
“After a speech like that I think you had better not,” said Grant, quietly, but there was a significance in his voice that did not appear on the surface.
Nothing daunted, Riles called on his two English neighbours who were giving instruction in agriculture at so much per head. They signed his recommendation without question. A clergyman who had never been in Riles’ home, who had never met Mrs. Riles, who knew nothing of their style of living, put his name to the paper, as he did so speaking some cheap platitudes about the privilege of giving a Christian home to “one of these little ones.”
And so it came about that Wilfred Vickery, already introduced to the reader as “London,” became the bond-servant of Hiram Riles and his wife, Eliza Riles.
For a week or so the little orphan boy found everything so strange and unreal that he went around as one in a trance. Pure English was difficult enough for him, but the slangy colloquialism of the Riles’ home was almost unintelligible. Half the time he did not know what they said to him, but stared in a vacant, meaningless way which they ascribed to downright stupidity. When he spoke they mocked his language, although using an equally corrupted tongue themselves. For a few weeks, while under the direct care of responsible officers of the Home, the little fellow had experienced a kindness and a personal interest which had begun to unfold before him a life of which he had never dreamed. He had been taught to sing a few hymns, he had been taught to utter a simple prayer, he had been taught that there is a great Father to whom every child is dearer than to even the kindest earthly father. He had never known what an earthly father was, but in the new, great land to which they were going he should soon know—he should find that for every little child in all God’s world some heart beats with the joy of a father’s love, some bosom swells with the wealth of a mother’s devotion. He had been taught these things, and some glimpse of that great real world which lies just beyond the realm of the intellect had come to his poor dwarfed soul and fired his spirit with the unutterable yearning that no man has ever answered in terms of time and sense. He had learned that life is not merely a battle to fill the belly, that the earth is not only for fighting and swearing in, that Love is arealthing, more powerful than hate. The slumbering germ of his spiritual life, deafened by a decade of London’s roar, had been wakened by a brief contact with kindness, and in the birth of imagination the world had taken on a new interest and a new possibility. All these hidden emotions, touched to sudden life, were clamouring for expression, for utterance, when he had come—to this.
The boy’s disillusionment was terrible and complete. They thought him stupid, but he found the guise of stupidity serve his purpose well, and he was more cunning than they. He stole to fill his stomach; he lied to cover his theft. He shirked his labour whenever he could; he destroyed property whenever he dared. When they cuffed him he cursed them; when they swore at him he swore back, and he had the advantage of vocabulary. When they made him milk cows he would pour the milk on the ground and say the cow kicked it; when he was old enough to drive a team he would let it run away whenever opportunity offered. He was to have been sent to school, but he went only on those rare occasions when nothing could be found for him to do on the farm, but he was compelled to write periodical letters to the Home saying how happy he was and how kind Mr. and Mrs. Riles were to him. He was held up as an object of contempt before neighbours and strangers; he was the butt of their coarse humour and the victim of their bullying authority.
The kind officers of the Home had taught him a little prayer, and told him never to forget the good people who were to be his foster-parents in the new land. And every night as he crawled to his musty mattress and blankets in the mouse-chamber already described he would kneel by the broken chair and repeat:
“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,Bless Thy little lamb to-night,Through the darkness be Thou near me.Keep me safe till morning’s light.God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles and make me a good boy, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”
“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,Bless Thy little lamb to-night,Through the darkness be Thou near me.Keep me safe till morning’s light.God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles and make me a good boy, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”
“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,Bless Thy little lamb to-night,Through the darkness be Thou near me.Keep me safe till morning’s light.
“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,
Bless Thy little lamb to-night,
Bless Thy little lamb to-night,
Through the darkness be Thou near me.
Keep me safe till morning’s light.
Keep me safe till morning’s light.
God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles and make me a good boy, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”
He had repeated this prayer nightly for months. One night he had difficulty getting the calves into their pen; they would run every direction except the way he would have them go. He still had his cows to milk, his pigs to feed, his wood and water to carry in, but the calves refused to be housed. When he had them almost in they broke away, and raced into the darkness of the pasture field, jumping and frisking in appreciation of the joke. He ran after them as fast as his tired little legs would take him, sobbing and swearing as he ran, but without success. They could not be found in the darkness, and as he came back, defeated and utterly played out, he met Riles, who had just returned from town and was none the better for his potations. Without a word the ruffian knocked the boy down with a swinging blow on the face, and kicked him almost into insensibility. As he crawled to bed that night, stiff, bruised and battered, he knelt before his broken chair and repeated his nightly prayer. When he came to the words “God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles” he stopped. The significance of the words dawned upon him in a way he had never quite understood. He was only a little boy, against whom environment and ancestry seemed to have conspired, but he was no hypocrite. He was praying for a man he hated, and the words stuck in his teeth. For a long time he remained there on his knees, looking at the misty light in the half-blackened lantern, and thinking, thinking. He was fighting one of those great fights which come earlier in boyhood than we sometimes think, and which decide in large measure the whole course of after life.
Finally his jaws closed with a snap. “Damn Mr. Riles,” he said, and climbed into bed.