“Dined at the Wards’, and then took Elizabeth home.”

“How is she?”

“She’s all right.”

“And there’s no news?”

He knew her very well, and he saw then that she was laboring under suppressed excitement.

“What’s the matter, mother?  You’re worried about something, aren’t you?”

“I have something to tell you.  We’d better go inside.”  He followed her in, unexcited and half smiling.  Her world was a small one, of minor domestic difficulties, of not unfriendly gossip, of occasional money problems, investments and what not.  He had seen her hands tremble over a matter of a poorly served dinner.  So he went into the house, closed the terrace window and followed her to the library.  When she closed the door he recognized her old tactics when the servants were in question.

“Well?” he inquired.  “I suppose—­” Then he saw her face.  “Sorry, mother.  What’s the trouble?”

“Wallie, I saw Dick Livingstone in Chicago.”

XXXVI

During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central Washington, a harvest hand or “working stiff” among other migratory agricultural workers.  Among them, but not entirely of them.  Recruited from the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a slave market on the coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin, fully but badly fed, overflowing with blasphemy and filled with sullen hate for those above them in the social scale, the “stiffs” regarded him with distrust from the start.

In the beginning he accepted their sneers with a degree of philosophy.  His physical condition was poor.  At night he ached intolerably, collapsing into his wooden bunk to sleep the dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.  There were times when he felt that it would be better to return at once to Norada and surrender, for that he must do so eventually he never doubted.  It was as well perhaps that he had no time for brooding, but he gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion all day.

A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he felt like a ghost walking among sweating men, like a resurrection into life, but without life.  And more than once he tried to sink down to the level of the others, to unite himself again with the crowd, to feel again the touch of elbows, the sensation of fellowship.  The primal instinct of the herd asserted itself, the need of human companionship of any sort.

But he failed miserably, as Jud Clark could never have failed.  He could not drink with them.  He could not sink to their level of degradation.  Their oaths and obscenity sickened and disgusted him, and their talk of women drove him into the fresh air.

The fact that he could no longer drink himself into a stupor puzzled him.  Bad whiskey circulated freely among the hay stacks and bunk houses where the harvest hands were quartered, and at ruinous prices.  The men clubbed together to buy it, and he put in his share, only to find that it not only sickened him, but that he had a mental inhibition against it.