“Hello, Thorkelson,” said he; “you’re quite a stranger.  Haven’t seen you for a week.”

Magnus stole a look at me and blushed so that his face was as red as his hair.  I was taken aback by this for he had never said a word to me about the frequent visits to the Gowdy ranch which Buck’s talk seemed to show had taken place.  What had he been coming over for?  I wondered, as I heard Gowdy greeting me.

“Glad to see you, Mr. Vandemark,” said he.  “What can I do for you-all?”

“We heard you wanted a couple of hands,” said I, “and we thought—­”

“I need a couple of hundred,” said he.  “Put ’em to work, Mobley,” turning to the overseer; and then he went off into a lot of questions and orders about the work, after which he jumped into the buckboard buggy, in which Pinck Johnson sat with the whip in his hands, and they went off at a keen run, with Pinck urging the team to a faster pace, and Gowdy holding to the seat as they went careering along like the wind.

We lived in a great barracks with his other men, and ate our meals in a long room like a company of soldiers.  It was a most interesting business experiment which he was trying; and he was going behind every day.  Where land is free nobody will work for any one else for less than he can make working for himself; and land was pretty nearly free in Monterey County then.  All a man needed was a team, and he could get tools on credit; and I know plenty of cases of people breaking speculator’s land and working it for years without paying rent or being molested.  The rent wasn’t worth quarreling about.  But Gowdy couldn’t get, on the average, as much out of his hired men in the way of work as they would do for themselves.

Most of the aristocrats who came early to Iowa to build up estates, lost everything they had, and became poor; for they did not work with their own hands, and the work of others’ hands was inefficient and cost, anyhow, as much as it produced or more.  Gowdy would have gone broke long before the cheap land was gone, if it had not been for the money he got from Kentucky.  The poor men like me, the peasants from Europe like Magnus—­we were the ones who made good, while the gentility went bankrupt.

After a few years the land began to take on what the economists call “unearned increment,” or community value, and the Gowdy lands began the work which finally made him a millionaire; but it was not his work.  It was mine, and Magnus Thorkelson’s, and the work of the neighbors generally, on the farms and in the towns.  It was the railroads and school and churches.  He would have made property faster to let his land lie bare until in the ’seventies.  I could see that his labor was bringing him a loss, every day’s work of it; and at breakfast I was studying out ways to organize it better,—­when a small hand pushed a cup of coffee past my cheek, and gave my nose a little pinch as it was drawn back.  I looked up, and there was Rowena, waiting on our table!