A tall awkward man walking up State Street
threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him
through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for this," he
said.
"You fool that's what I want. I want to make property that won't
employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the
cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a
Lincoln suffering for mankind.
Into this maelstrom of misery and grim desperate want walked Beaut
McGregor of Coal Creek--huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind,
untrained, uneducated, hating the world. Within two days he had
snatched before the very eyes of that hungry marching army three
prizes, three places where a man might by working all day get clothes
to wear upon his back and food to put into his stomach.
In a way McGregor had already sensed something the realisation of
which will go far toward making any man a strong figure in the world.
He was not to be bullied with words. Orators might have preached to
him all day about the progress of mankind in America, flags might have
been flapped and newspapers might have dinned the wonders of his
country into his brain. He would only have shaken his big head. He did
not yet know the whole story of how men, coming out of Europe and
given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and
forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have
produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder
of man.
Pages:
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64