To Fred Finch it was a weary journey, but J.W. gave no thought to its discomforts.  He was seeing the country, as well as learning to sell hardware, and both occupations were highly absorbing.  Before long he found too that he was seeing a new people.  Storekeepers he knew, as being of his own guild; the small towns were much like Delafield, when you had become used to their newer crudeness of architecture and their sprawling planlessness; and the people who used hardware were very much like his customers at home.

He had no fear of failing to become a salesman, after the first few experiences under Finch’s watchful eye; his father had taught him a sort of salesmanship which experience could only make more effective.  He knew already never to sell what he could see his customer ought not to buy, and he knew always to contrive as much as possible that the customer should do the selling to himself.  The elder Farwell used to say, “Let your customer once see the advantage that buying is to him, and he won’t care what advantage selling is to you.”

Now, as has been said before, this is not a salesman’s story.  Let it suffice to say that before the two got back to Saint Louis J.W. knew he had found his trade.  He was a natural salesman, and so Fred Finch reported to Peter McDougall.  “If it’s hardware,” he said, “that boy can sell it, and I don’t care where you put him.  He can sell to people who can’t speak English, and I believe he could sell to deaf mutes or the blind.  He knows the line, and they know he knows it.  Why, this very first trip he’s sold more goods on his own say-so than on the house brand.  Said he knew what the stuff would do, and people took that who usually want to know about the guarantee.”  All of which Peter McDougall filed where he would not forget it.

But to go back to the trip itself.  Along the railway in Kansas J.W. began to see box-cars without trucks, roughly fitted up for dwellings.  Dark-skinned men and women and children were in occupation, and all the household functions and processes were going on, though somewhat primitively.

“Mexicans,” said Finch, as J.W. pointed out the cars.  “Section hands; when I first began to make this territory you never saw them except right down on the border, but they have moved a long way east and north.  I saw lots of them in the yards at Kansas City last time I was there.”

J.W. watched the box-car life with a good deal of curiosity.  Here and there were poor little attempts at color and adornment; flowers in window boxes and bits of lace at the windows.  Delafield had plenty of foreigners, but these were foreigners of another sort.  They seemed to be entirely at home.

“I suppose,” he said to Finch, “these Mexicans have come to the States to get away from the robbery and ruin that Mexico has had instead of government these last ten years and more.”