Across the Fruited Plain

"I clean forgot to look over the beans and put them to soak," she said wearily, from her bed.

Rose-Ellen scooped herself farther into her layer of straw. She ought to offer to get up and look over those beans, but she simply couldn't make herself.

"It seems like I can't stay up another ten minutes," Grandma excused herself, "after the field work and redding up and such. But we're getting like all the rest of them, buying the groceries that we can fix easiest, even though they cost twice as much and ain't half as nourishing. And when you can't trade at but one place it's always dearer. . . ."

Mr. Lukes had guaranteed their account at the store, because of the pay due them at the end of the season. So they went on buying there, even though its prices were high and its goods of poor quality, because they did not have money to spend anywhere else.

When the thinning was done, they must begin all over again, working with the short-handled hoes, cutting out any extra plants, loosening the ground. By that time they were more used to the work; and in July came a rest time, when all they needed to do was to turn the waters of the big ditch into the little ditches that crinkled between the rows. It was lucky there was irrigation water, or the growing plants would have died in the heat, since there had been little rain.

Rose-Ellen loved to watch the water moving through the fields as if it were alive, catching the rosy gold of sunset in its zigzag mirrors. She missed the Eastern fireflies at night; otherwise the evenings were a delight. Colorado sunsets covered the west with glory, and then came quick coolness. Dry as it was, the cottonwood leaves made a sound like refreshing rain, and the cicadas hummed comfortably. All the Beechams stayed outside till far into the night, for the chicken-house was miserably hot at the end of every day.

"The Garcias' and Martinezes' houses are better if they are mud and haven't any shade," Rose-Ellen told Grandma. "The walls are so thick that inside they're like cool caves."

She and Dick had made friends in the Mexican village with Vicente Garcia and her brother Joe, and with Nico Martinez, next door to the Garcias', and her brothers. Even when they all picked beans in the morning, during the vacation from sugar beets, there were these long, cool evenings for play.

Grandma complained. "I don't know what else to blame for Dick's untidy ways. Hair sticking up five ways for Christmas, and fingernails in mourning and the manners of a heathen. I'm afraid that sore on his hand may be something catching. Those Garcias and Martinezes of yours . . . !"

"The Garcias maybe, but not the Martinezes," Rose-Ellen objected. "Gramma, you go to their houses sometime and see."

One evening Grandma did. Jimmie had come excitedly leading home the quaintest of all the babies of the Mexican village, Vicente Garcia's little sister. He had found her balancing on her stomach on the bank of the ditch. Three years old, she was, and slim and straight, with enormous eyes and a great tangle of sunburned brown curls. Her dress made her quainter still, for it was low-necked and sleeveless, and came to her tiny ankles so that she looked like a child from an old-fashioned picture.

Grandma and Rose-Ellen and Jimmie walked home with her, and Grandma's eyes widened at sight of the two-roomed Garcia house. Ten people lived and slept, ate and cooked there, and it looked as if it had never met a broom or soapsuds.

The Martinez home was different, perfectly neat, even to the scrubbed oilcloth on the table. Afterwards Grandma said the bottoms of the pans weren't scoured, but she couldn't feel to blame Mrs. Martinez, with five young ones besides the new baby to look after. When the Beechams went home, Mrs. Martinez gave them a covered dish of enchiladas.

Even Grandma ate those enchiladas without hesitation, though they were so peppery that she had to cool her mouth with frequent swallows of water. They were made of tidily rolled tortillas (Mexican corn-cakes, paper-thin), stuffed with meat and onion and invitingly decorated with minced cheese and onion tops. They looked, smelled and tasted delicious.

In turn, Grandma sent biscuits, baked in the Dutch oven Grandpa had bought her. Grandma had always been proud of her biscuits.

In July the Mexican children took Dick and Rose-Ellen to the vacation school held every summer in one of the town churches. The Beechams were not surprised at Nico's dressed-up daintiness when she called for them. Grandma said she was perfect, from the ribbon bows on her shining hair to the socks that matched her smart print dress. But it was surprising to see Vicente come from the cluttered, dirty Garcia rooms, almost as clean and sweet as Nico, though with nails more violently red.

The Beechams found it a problem to dress at all in their chicken-apartment. Dick tried to get ready in one room and Rose-Ellen in the other, and everything she wanted was in his room and everything he wanted in hers. Their small belongings had to be packed in boxes, and all the boxes emptied out to find them. Clean clothes--still unironed, of course--had to be hung up, and they could not be covered well enough so flies and moth-millers did not speck them.

"I do admire your Mexican friends," Grandma admitted grudgingly, "keeping so nice in such a hullabaloo."

"They are admire-able in lots of ways," Rose-Ellen answered. "I never knew anyone I liked much better than Nico. And the Mexicans are the very best in all the art work at the vacation school. I think the Japanese learn quickest."

"Do folks treat 'em nice?" asked Grandma.

"In the school," Rose-Ellen told her. "But outside school they act like even Nico had smallpox. They make me sick!"

Rose-Ellen spoke both indignantly and sorrowfully. That very day the three girls had come out of the church together, and had paused to look over the neat picket fence of the yard next the church. It seemed a sweet little yard, smelling of newly cut grass and flowers. Trees rose high above the small house, and inside the fence were tall spires of delphinium, bluer than the sky.

"The flowers iss so pretty," said Nico.

"And on the porch behind of the vines is a chicken in a gold cage," cried Vicente.

Rose-Ellen folded her lips over a giggle, for the chicken was a canary.

Just then a head popped up behind a red rosebush. The lady of the house was gathering flowers, and she held out a bunch to Rose-Ellen.

"Don't prick yourself," she warned. "Are you the one they call Rose-Ellen?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Rose-Ellen, burying her nose in the flowers.

"I had a little sister named Rose-Ellen," the woman said gently. "You come play on the grass sometime, and we'll pick flowers for your mother."

"And can Nico and Vicente come, too?" Rose-Ellen asked. "They're my best friends."

The woman looked at Nico and Vicente with cold eyes. "I can't ask all the children," she answered.

"Thank you, ma'am," Rose-Ellen stammered. When they were out of sight down the road, she threw the roses into the dust. Nico snatched them up again.

"I wouldn't go there--I wouldn't go there for ten dollars," Rose-Ellen declared. Vicente looked at her with wise deep eyes. "I could 'a' told you," she said, shrugging. "American ladies, they mostly don't like Mexican kids. I don't know why."

October came. It was the time for the topping of the beets. The Martinez family went back to Denver for school. The Garcias stayed; their children would go into the special room when they returned, to have English lessons and to catch up in other studies--or rather, to try to catch up.

"But me, always I am two years in back of myself," Vicente regretted one day, "even with specials room. Early out of school and late into it, for me that makes too hard."

Now Farmer Lukes went through the Beechams' acres, lifting the beets loose by machine. Rose-Ellen could not believe they were beets-great dirt-colored clods, they looked. Not at all like the beets she knew.

Topping was a new job. With a long hooked knife the beet was lifted and laid across the arm, and then, with a slash or two, freed of its top. The children followed, gathering the beets into great piles for Mr. Lukes's wagon to collect.

Vicente and Joe did not make piles; they topped; and Joe boasted that he was faster than his father as he slashed away with the topping knife.

"It looks like you'd cut yourself, holding it on your knee like you do!" Grandma cried as she watched him one day.

"Not me!" bragged Joe. "Other kids does." The beet tops fell away under his flashing knife.

From the beet-dump the beets were taken to the sugar factory a few miles away, where they were made into shining white beet sugar. ("And that's another thing I never even guessed!" thought Rose-Ellen. "What hard work it takes to fill our sugar bowls!")

Sometimes at night now a skim of ice formed on the water bucket in the chicken-house. Goldenrod and asters were puffs of white; the harvest moon shone big and red at the skyline, across miles of rolling farmland; crickets fiddled sleepily and long-tailed magpies chattered. One clear, frosty night Grandpa said, "Hark! the ducks are flying south. Maybe we best follow."

THE BOY WHO DIDN'T KNOW GOD

Handbills blew around the adobe village, announcing that five hundred cotton-pickers were wanted at once in Arizona. The Reo, full of Beechams and trailing Carrie, headed south.

The surprisingly large grocery bill had been paid, a few clothes bought, Daddy's ulcerated tooth pulled, and the Reo's patched tires replaced with better used ones. The result was that the Beecham pocketbooks were as flat as pancakes.

"Yet we've worked like horses," Daddy said heavily. "And, worse than that, we've let Gramma and the kids work as I never thought Beechams would."

"But we can't blame Farmer Lukes," said Grandpa. "With all the planting and digging and hauling he's done, he says he hasn't a cent to show for it, once he's paid for his seed. It's too deep for me."

Down across Colorado, where the names were Spanish, Daddy said, because it used to be part of Mexico. Down across New Mexico, where the air smelled of cedar; where scattered adobe houses had bright blue doors and strings of scarlet chili peppers fringing their roofs; where Indians sat under brush shelters by the highway and held up pottery for sale. Down into Arizona, where Grandma had to admit that the colors she'd seen on the picture postcards of it were not too bright. Here were red rocks, pink, blue-gray, white, yellow, purple; and the morning and evening sun set their colors afire and made them flower gardens of flame. Here the Indian women wore flounced skirts and velvet tunics and silver jewelry. They herded flocks of sheep and goats and lived in houses like inverted brown bowls.

"We've had worse homes, this year," Grandma said. "I'd never hold up my head if they knew back home." Along the road with the Reo ran an endless parade of old cars and trailers. There were snub-nosed Model T's, packed till they bulged; monstrous Packards with doors tied shut; yellow roadsters that had been smart ten years ago, jolting along with mattresses on their tops and young families jammed into their luggage compartments. Once in a while they met another goat, like Carrie, who wasn't giving as much milk as before.

"All this great country," Grandma marveled some more, "and no room for these folks. Half a million of us, some say, without a place to go."

Dick said, "The kid in that Oklahoma car said the drought dried up their farm and the wind blew it away. Nothing will grow in the ground that's left."

"He's from the Dust Bowl," Grandpa assented. "Thousands of these folks are from the Dust Bowl."

The parade of old cars limped along for two weeks, growing thicker as it drew near the part of Arizona where the pickers had been called for. The Beechams saw more and more signs on fences and poles: FIVE HUNDRED PICKERS WANTED!

"They don't say how much they pay," Grandma noticed.

"Ninety cents a hundred pounds is usual this year, and a fellow can make a bare living at that," said Daddy.

Soon the procession turned off the road, the Beechams with it. The place was swarming with pickers.

"How much are you paying?" Daddy asked.

"Fifty cents a hundred."

"Why, man alive, we'd starve on that pay," Daddy growled, the corners of his jaws white with anger.

"You don't need to work if you don't want to," the manager barked at him. "Here's two thousand folks glad to work at fifty cents."

Leaving Jimmie to mind Sally in the car, the Beechams went to picking at once. Grandma had saved their old cotton sacks, fortunately, since they cost a dollar apiece.

Rose-Ellen's heart thumped as if she were running a race. Everyone was picking at top speed, for there were far too many pickers and they all tried to get more than their share. The Beechams started at noon. At night, when they weighed in, Grandpa and Daddy each got forty cents, Grandma twenty-five, Dick twenty, and Rose-Ellen fifteen.

When he paid them, the foreman said, "No more work here. All cleaned up."

"Good land," Grandma protested, her voice shaking, "bring us from Coloraydo for a half day's work?"

"Sorry," said the foreman. "First come, first served."

In a blank quietness, the Beechams went on to hunt a camp. And here they were fortunate, for they came upon a neat tent city with a sign declaring it a Government Camp. Tents set on firm platforms faced inward toward central buildings, and everything was clean and orderly. They drove in. Yes, they could pitch their tent there, the man in the office said; there was one vacant floor. The rent was a dollar a week, but they could work it out, if they would rather, cleaning up the camp. Grandpa said they'd better work it out, since it might be hard to find jobs near by.

Even Rose-Ellen, even Dick and Jimmie, were excited over the laundry tubs in the central building, and more interested in the shower baths. Twice a day they washed themselves, and their clothes were kept fresher than they had been for a long time. Neighbors came calling, besides; and there were entertainments every week, with the whole camp taking part.

"Seems like home," said Grandpa. "If only we could find work."

The nurse on duty found that the sore on Dick's hand was scabies--the itch--picked up in some other camp, and she treated and bandaged it carefully.

Every day the men went out hunting jobs, taking others with them to share the cost of gasoline; and every day they came back discouraged. Even in the fine camp, money leaked out steadily for food. At last the Beechams gave up hope of finding work. They set out for California, the fairyland of plenty, as they thought.

At first California looked like any other state, but soon the children began naming their discoveries aloud. "Lookit! Oranges on trees!" "Roses! And those red Christmas flowers growing high as the garage!" "Palm trees--like feather dusters stuck on telegraph poles!"

"Little white houses and gardens!" crooned Grandma.

Soon, too, they saw the familiar posters: PICKERS WANTED; and the Reo followed the signs to the fields.

They were pea-fields, this time, but Grandma, peering at the pea-pickers' camp, cried, "My land, if this ain't Floridy all over again!"

"Maybe the owner ain't got the cash to put up decent chicken-coops for folks to live in," Grandpa sputtered, "but if I was him I'd dig ditches for a living before I'd put humans into pigpens like these."

"Let's go a piece farther," Grandma urged.

Grandpa fingered his old wallet. "Five dollars is the least we can keep against the car breaking down. We've got six-fifty now."

So for long months they worked in the peas and lived in the "jungle" camp, pitching their tent at the very edge of its dirt and smell.

Shacks of scrap tin, shingled with rusty pail covers, stood next to shacks made of burlap and pasteboard cartons. Ragged tents huddled behind the shacks, using the same back wall. Mattresses that looked as if they came from the dump lay on the ground with tarpaulins stretched above them as roofs, and these were the only homes of whole families who lived and slept and ate in swarms of stinging flies.

One of the few pleasant things was the Christian Center not very far away. Every morning its car chugged up to the jungle and carried off a load of children. Jimmie and Sally were always in the load. The back seat was crowded, and a helper sat in front with the driver and held Sally, while Jimmie sat between. He liked to sit there, for the driver looked like Her! Only short instead of tall, and plump instead of thin, and with curly dark hair, but with the same kind smile.

Here in California the other children were supposed to pick only outside school hours; but the school was too far from the camp and there was no bus. So Dick and Rose-Ellen picked peas all day with their elders.

"The more we earn," Dick said soberly, "the sooner we can get away from this place."

"The only trouble is," Rose-Ellen answered, "we get such an appetite that we eat more than we earn, except when we're sick."

The sun blistered Dick's fair skin until he was ill from the burn; and Rose-Ellen sometimes grew so sick and dizzy with the heat that she had to crawl into her pea hamper for shade instead of picking. There was much sickness in this camp, anyway. There was only one well, and it was not protected from filth. The flies were everywhere. Grandma boiled all the water, but she could not keep out the germ-laden flies. The family took turns lying miserably sick on an automobile-seat bed and wishing for the end of the pea-picking.

But after the early peas, they must wait for the February peas; and before they were picked, Jimmie complained that his throat felt sore. Next day he and Sally both broke out with measles.

Grandma had her hands full, keeping the toddler from running out into sunshine and rain; but it was Jimmie who really worried her, he was so sick. And when he had stopped muttering and tossing with fever, he woke one night with an earache.

"Mercy to us!" Grandma cried distractedly. "We ain't even got salt enough for a hot salt bag, or carbolic and oil to drop in his poor blessed ear!"

Indeed that night seemed to all of them like a dark cage, shutting them away from any help for Jimmie.

Next morning, Miss Pinkerton, the nurse at the Center, came to see Jimmie. She looked grave as she examined him. "If you belonged in the county, I could get him into a county hospital," she said. "But we'll do our best for him here."

Nursing in a tent was a bad dream for patient and nurses. Grandma kept boiling water to irrigate his ear and sterilize the utensils, Rose-Ellen told stories, shouting so he could hear. At night Daddy held him in strong, tired arms and sang funny songs he had learned in his one year of college. Grandma tempted Jimmie's appetite with eggs and sugar and vanilla beaten up with Carrie's milk, and with little broiled hamburgers and fresh vegetables--food such as the Beechams hadn't had for months.

The rest of them had no such food even now. Carrie was giving less milk every day, so that there was hardly enough for Sally and Jimmie. Grandma said she'd lost her appetite, staying in the tent so close, and she was glad to reduce, anyway. Grandpa said there was nothing like soup; so the kettle was kept boiling all the time, with soupbones so bare they looked as if they'd been polished, and onions and potatoes and beans. That soup didn't make any of them fat.

But Jimmie grew better, and one shining morning Miss Pinkerton stopped and said, "Jimmie's well enough to go with me on my daily round. He needs a change."

After she had carted two or three loads of children to the Center, she went to visit the sick ones in the camps for miles around. First they went to another "jungle," one where trachoma was bad. Here she left Jimmie in the car; but he could watch, for the children came outdoors to have the blue-stone or argyrol in their swollen red eyes. The treatment was painful, but without it the small sufferers might become blind.

The next camp had an epidemic of measles, and in the next, ten miles away, Miss Pinkerton vaccinated ten children.

By this time, the sun was high, and Jimmie began to think anxiously of lunch. Miss Pinkerton steered into the orchard country, where there was no sign of a store. He was relieved when she nosed the car in under the shade of a magnolia tree and said, "My clock says half-past eating time. What does yours say?"

First Miss Pinkerton scrubbed her hands with water and carbolic-smelling soap, and then she unwrapped a waxed-paper package and spread napkins. For Jimmie she laid out a meat sandwich, a jam sandwich, a big orange-colored persimmon, and a cookie: not a dull store cookie, but a thick homemade one. The churches of the neighborhood took turns baking them for the Center. Jimmie ate every crumb.

In the next camp--asparagus--was a Mexican boy with a badly hurt leg. He had gashed it when he was topping beets, and his people had come on into cotton and into peas, without knowing how to take care of the throbbing wound. When Miss Pinkerton first saw it, she doubted whether leg or boy could be saved. It was still bad, and the boy's mother stood and cried while Miss Pinkerton dressed it, there under the strip-of-canvas house.

Miss Pinkerton saw Jimmie staring at that shelter and at the helpless mother, and she whispered, "Aren't you lucky to have a Grandma like yours, Jimmie-boy?"

When the leg was all neatly rebandaged, the boy caught at Miss Pinkerton with a shy hand. "_Gracias_--thank you," he said, "but why you take so long trouble for us, Lady, when we don't pay you nothing?"

"I don't think there's anything so well worth taking trouble for as just boys and girls," Miss Pinkerton said.

The boy frowned thoughtfully. "Other peoples don't think like that way," he persisted. "For why should you?"

"Well, it's really because of Jesus," Miss Pinkerton answered slowly. "You've heard about Jesus, haven't you?"

"Not me," the boy said. "Who is he?"

"He was God's Son, and he taught men to love one another. He taught them about God, too."

"God? I've heard the name, but I ain't never seen that guy either."

"Like to hear about him?" Miss Pinkerton asked.

The boy dropped down on the running board with his bandaged leg stretched out before him. Other children came running. Sitting on the running board, too, Miss Pinkerton told them about Jesus, how he used his life to help other people be kinder to each other. The camp children listened with mouths open, and brushed the rough hair from their eyes to see the pictures she took from the car. The boy's mother stood with her arms wrapped in her dirty apron and listened, too.

But it was the boy who sat breathless till the story was done. Then he scrubbed a ragged sleeve across eyes and nose and spoke in a choked, angry voice. "I wish I'd been there. I bet them guys wouldn't-wouldn't got so fresh with--with him. But listen, Lady!" His dark eyes were fiercely questioning. "Why ain't nobody told us? It sure seems like we ought to been told before."

All the way home Jimmie sat silent. As the car stopped, he got his voice. "Miss Pink'ton, did he mean, honest, he didn't know about God and Jesus?"

Miss Pinkerton nodded. "He--he didn't know he had a Heavenly Father."

"And no Gramma either," Jimmie mumbled. "Gee."

THE HOPYARDS

Through February, March, and part of April, the Beecham family picked peas in the Imperial Valley.

"Peas!" Rose-Ellen exploded the word on their last night in the "jungle" camp. "I don't believe there are enough folks in the world to cat all the peas we've picked."

"And they aren't done with when they're picked, even," added Daddy. "Most of them will be canned; and other folks have to shell and sort them and put them into cans and then cook them and seal and label the cans."

"What an awful lot of work everything makes," Dick exclaimed.

"It was different in my Gramma's time." Grandma pursed her lips as she set a white patch in a blue overall knee. "Then each family grew and canned and made almost everything it used."

"Now everybody's linked up with everybody else," agreed Grandpa, cobbling a shoe with his little kit. "We use' to get along in winter with turnips and cabbage and such, and fruit the womenfolks canned. Of course it's pretty nice to have garden vegetables and fruit fresh the year round, but. . . ."

Grandma squinted suddenly over her spectacles. "For the land's sakes! I never thought of it, but it's turned the country upside down and made a million people into 'rubber tramps'--this having to have fresh green stuff in winter."

"The owners couldn't handle their crops without the million workers coming in just when they're ready to harvest," Daddy continued the tale. . . .

"But they haven't anything for us to do the rest of the time; and how they do hate the sight of us 'rubber tramps,' the minute we've finished doing their work for them," Dick ended.

Next morning they started up the coast to pick lettuce. The country was beautiful. Rounded hills, soft looking and of the brightest green, ran down toward the sea, with really white sheep pastured on them. Grandpa said it put him in mind of heaven. Grandma said it would be heaven-on-earth to live there, if only you had a decent little house and a garden. The desert places were as beautiful, abloom with many-colored wildflowers; and there were fields of artichokes and other vegetables, with Chinese and Japanese tending them. Those clean green rows stretched on endlessly.

"They make me feel funny," Rose-Ellen complained, "like seeing too many folks and too many stars."

"They've got so many vegetables they dump them into the sea, because if they put them all on the market, the price would go down. But there's not enough so that those that pick them get what they need to eat," said Grandpa. "Sometimes too much is not enough."

The lettuce camp housed part of its workers in a huge old barn. The Beechams had three stalls and used their tent for curtains. They cooked out in the barnyard, so it was fortunate that it was the dry season. From May to August the men and Dick picked, trimmed, packed lettuce; but during most of that time the barn-apartment was in quarantine. All the children who had not had scarlet fever came down with it.

It was even hotter than midsummer Philadelphia, and the air was sticky, and black with flies besides, and sickening with odor. Grandma's cushiony pinkness entirely disappeared; she was more the color of a paper-bag, Rose-Ellen thought.

"But land knows," Grandma said, "what I'd have done if the Lord hadn't tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. What with no Center near here and only the public health nurse looking in once in a while, it was lucky the young-ones didn't have the fever bad."

In August they were all well and peeled. Grandma heated tub after tub of water and scrubbed them, hair and all, with yellow laundry soap, and washed their clothes and put the automobile-seat beds into the hot sun. Then they went on up the coast, steering for the hopyards northeast of San Francisco.

It seemed too bad to hurry through San Francisco without really seeing it--that beautiful city crowded steeply by the sea. But the Reo had had to have a new gas-line and a battery, and little money was left to show for the long, sizzling months of work. It was best to stay clear of cities.

The Sacramento Delta region was the strangest the Beechams had ever seen. The broad river, refreshing after months without real rivers, was higher than the fields. Beside the river ran the highway. The Beechams looked down at pear orchards, tule marshes and ranch houses. Everything was so lushly wet that moss grew green even on tree trunks and roofs. Like Holland, Daddy said, it had dikes to keep the water out.

One day they stopped at a fish cannery between highway and river and asked for work. The Reo was having to have her tires patched twice a day, and slow leaks were blown up every time the car stopped for gasoline. The family needed money.

Peering into the cannery, they saw men and women working in a strong-smelling steam, cleaning and cutting up the fish that passed them on an endless belt, making it ready for others to pack in cans. At the feet of some of the women stood boxes with babies in them; and other babies were slung in cloths on their mothers' backs.

There was no work for the Beechams, and they climbed into the Reo once more and stared down on the other side of the road, where the foreman had told them his packers lived. Even from that distance it was plain that this was a Chinese village, not American at all.

"The little babies were so sweet, with their shiny black eyes. But, my gracious, they don't get any sun or air at all!" Rose-Ellen squeezed Sally thankfully. Even though the baby was underweight and had violet shadows under her blue eyes, she looked healthier than most babies they saw.

The hops were queer and interesting, unlike any other crops Rose-Ellen had met with. The leaves were deep-lobed, shaped a little like woodbine, but rough to touch. The fruits resembled small spruce cones of pale yellow-green tissue paper. The vines were trained on wires strung along ten-foot poles; they formed aisles that were heavy with drowsy fragrance.

The picking baskets stood almost as high as Rose-Ellen's shoulder, and she and Dick were proud of filling one apiece, the first day they worked. These baskets held sixty pounds each--more when the weather was not so dry--and sixty pounds meant ninety cents. School had not started yet, so the children worked all day. Sometimes Rose-Ellen could not keep from crying, she was so tired. And when she cried, Grandma's mouth worked over her store teeth in the way that meant she felt bad.

"But we've got to get in under it, all of us," she scolded, to keep from crying herself. "We've got to earn what we can. I never see the beat of it. If we scrabble as hard as we can, we just only keep from sliding backwards."

Here in the hopyards the Beechams did not get their pay in money. They were given tickets marked with the amount due them. These they could use for money at the company store.

"And the prices there are sky-high!" Grandma wrathfully told Grandpa, waving a pound of coffee before his eyes. "Thirty-five cents, and not the best grade, mind you! Pink salmon higher than red ought to be. Bread fifteen cents a loaf! Milk sky-high and Carrie plumb dry!"

The living quarters were bad, too: shacks, with free straw on the floor for beds, and mud deep in the dooryards where the campers emptied water. Over it all hung a sick smell of garbage and a cloud of flies.

It was no wonder that scores of children and some older people were sick. The public health nurses, when they came to visit the sick ones, warned the women to cover food and garbage, but most of the women laughed at the advice.

"Those doctor always tell us things," the Beechams' Italian neighbor, Mrs. Serafini, said lightly. She was dandling a sad baby while the sad baby sucked a disk of salami, heavy with spices. "And those nurse also are crazy. Back in asparagus I send-it my kids to the Center, and what you think? They take off Pepe's clothes! They say it is not healthy that she wear the swaddlings. I tell Angelina to say to them that my madre before me was dressed so; but again they strip the poor angel."

"And what did you do then?" Rose-Ellen inquired.

"No more did I send-it my kids to the Center!" Mrs. Serafini cried dramatically.

"I'd think myself," Grandma observed dryly, "your baby might feel better in such hot weather if she was dressed more like Sally."

Mrs. Serafini eyed Sally's short crepe dress, worn over a single flour-sack undergarment. "We have-it our ways, you have-it yours," was all she would say.

While the elders talked, Jimmie had been staring at Pepe's next brother, Pedro. Seven years old, Pedro might have been, but he could move about only by sitting on the ground and hitching himself along. He was crippled much worse than Jimmie.

"I wonder, couldn't I show Pedro my scrapbook?" he whispered, nudging Grandma.

"To be sure; and I always said if you'd think more about others, you wouldn't be so sorry for yourself," Grandma replied.

Jimmie scowled at the sermon, but he went in and got his books, and the two boys sat up against the shack wall till dark, Jimmie telling stories to match the pictures. It was a week before they could repeat that pleasant hour. Next day both were ill with the fever that was sweeping the hop camp.

Next time the nurses came they had medicines and suggestions for Grandma. They liked her, and looked smilingly at the clock and approvingly at Carrie and at the covered garbage can and at the food draped with mosquito netting.

"We're going to have to enforce those rules," they told Grandma. "There wouldn't be half the sickness if everyone minded as you do."

That evening people from all parts of the camp gathered to discuss the renewed orders: Italians, Mexicans, Americans, Indians.

"They says to my mother," a little Indian girl confided to Rose-Ellen, "'You no cover up your grub, we throw him out!'" She laughed into her hands as if it were a great joke.

"They do nothing but talk," said Angelina.

Next day the camp had a surprise. Along came the nurses and men with badges to help them. Into shack after shack they went, inspecting the food supplies. Rose-Ellen, staying home with sick Jimmie, watched a nurse trot out of the Serafini shack, carrying long loaves of bread and loops of sausage, alive with flies, while Mrs. Serafini shouted wrathfully after her. Into the garbage pail popped the bread and sausage and back to the shack trotted the nurse for more.

That night the camp buzzed like a swarm of angry bees, with threats of what the pickers would do to "them fresh nurses."

Grandpa, resting on his doorsill, said, "You just keep cool. They got the law on their side; we couldn't do a thing. Besides, if you'll hold your horses long enough to see this out, you may find they're doing you a big kindness."

The people went on grumbling, but they covered their food, since they must do so or lose it. And they had to admit that there was much less sickness from that time on.

"Foolishness!" Mrs. Serafini persisted, unwilling to give in.

Yet Rose-Ellen, playing with Baby Pepe, discovered that her hot old swaddlings had been taken off at last. Perhaps Mrs. Serafini was learning something from the nurses after all.

"If you could show me the rest of my aflabet, Rose-Ellen," Jimmie begged, "I could teach Pedro."

"But, goodness!" Rose-Ellen exclaimed. "You never would let us teach you anything, Jimmie. What's happened to you?"

"Well, it's different. I got to keep ahead of Pedro," he explained, and every night he learned a new lesson.

Of all the family, though, Jimmie was the only contented one. Most of the trouble centered round Dick. He was fourteen now, and not only his voice, but his way, was changing. Through the day he picked hops, but when evening came, he was off and away.

"He's like the Irishman's flea," Grandma scolded, "and that gang he's running with are young scalawags."

"Dick hasn't a lick of sense," Daddy agreed worriedly. "I'll have to tan him, if he keeps on lighting out every night. That gang set fire to a hop rack last week. They'll be getting into real trouble."

"Dick thinks he's a man, now he's earning his share of the living," Grandpa reminded them. "When I was his age I had chores to keep me busy, and when you were his age you had gym, and the Y swimming pool. Here there's nothing for the kids in the evening except mischief."

"Well, then," Grandma suggested, "why don't we pull up stakes and leave?"

"They don't like you to leave till harvest's over," Daddy said. "But it would be great to get into apples in Washington, for instance. We'll have to get the boss to cash our pay tickets first."

There came the trouble. The tickets would be cashed when harvest was done, not before. Grandma sagged when she heard. "I ain't sick," she said, "but I'm played out. If we could get where it was cooler and cleaner. . . ."

"Well, we haven't such a lot of pay checks left." Grandpa looked at her anxiously. "Looks like, with prices at the company store so high, if we stayed another month we'd owe them instead of them owing us. We might cash our tickets in groceries and hop along."

"Hop along is right," agreed Daddy. "Those tires were a poor buy. We haven't money for tires and gas both."

"We'll go as fast as we can, and maybe we can get there before the tires bust," said Grandpa, trying to be gay.

Jimmie didn't try. "I liked it here," he mumbled. "I bet Pedro'll cry if we go away. He can print his first name now, but how's he ever going to learn 'Serafini'?"

SETH THOMAS STRIKES TWELVE

At once Daddy and Grandpa set to work on the Reo. It was an "orphan" car, no longer made, and its parts were hard to replace; so the men were always watching the junkyards for other old Reos. They had learned a great deal about the car in these months, and they soon had it on the road again.

"Give you long enough," said Grandma, "and you'll cobble new soles on its tires and patch its innards. Looks like it's held together with hairpins now."

Daddy drove with one ear cocked for trouble, and when anyone spoke to him he said, "Shh! Sounds like her pistons--or maybe it's her vacuum. Anyway, as soon as there's a good stopping place, we'll. . . ."

But it was the tires that gave out first. Bang! Daddy's muscles bulged as he held the lurching car steady. One of the back tires was blown to bits. "Now can we eat?" Dick demanded. Daddy shook his head as he jumped out to jack up the car. "Got to keep moving. This is our last spare, and there isn't a single tire we can count on."

Sure enough, they hadn't gone far before the familiar bumping stopped them. That last spare was flat.

"Now," Daddy said grimly, "you may as well get lunch while I see whether I can patch this again."

Grandma had been sitting silent, her hand twisted in Sally's little skirt to keep her from climbing over the edge. "Well," she said, "you better eat before your hands get any blacker. Dick, you haul that shoe-box from under the seat. Rose-Ellen, fetch the crackers from the trailer. Sally, do sit still one minute."

"Crackers?" asked Rose-Ellen, when she had scrambled back. "I don't see a one, Gramma."

"Land's sakes, child, use your eyes for once!" Rose-Ellen rummaged in the part that was partitioned off from Carrie. "I don't see any groceries, Gramma."

Grandpa came back to help her, and stood staring. "Dick!" he called. "Did you tie that box on like I said?"

Dick dropped a startled lip. "Gee whiz, Grampa! It was wedged in so tight I never thought."

"No," said Grandpa, "I reckon you never did think." Silently they ate the scanty lunch in the shoe-box, and as silently the men cut "boots" from worn-out tires and cemented them under the holes in the almost worn-out ones. Silently they jogged on again, the engine stuttering and Daddy driving as if on egg-shells.

"Talk, won't you?" he asked suddenly. "My goodness, everyone is so still--it gets on my nerves."

Sally said, "Goin' by-by!" and leaned forward from Grandma's knees to give her father a strangling hug around the neck. Sally was two and a half now, and lively enough to keep one person busy. The pale curls all over her head were enchanting, and so was her talk. She had learned Buenos dias, good day, from a Mexican neighbor; bambina bella, pretty baby girl, from the Serafinis, and Sayonara, good-by, from a Japanese boss in the peas.

Rose-Ellen pulled the baby back and gave her a kiss in the hollow at the back of her neck. Then she tried to think of something to say herself. "Maybe they'll have school and church school at this next place for a change."

"Aw, you're sissy," Dick grumbled in his new, thick-thin voice. "If church was so much, why wouldn't it keep folks from being treated like us? Huh?"

Grandma roused herself from her limp stillness. "Maybe you didn't take notice," she said sharply, "that usually when folks was kind, and tried to make those dreadful camps a little decenter, why, it was Christian folks. There wouldn't hardly anything else make 'em treat that horrid itch and trachoma and all the catching diseases--hardly anything but being Christians."

"Aw," Dick jeered. "If the church folks got together and put their foot down they could clear up the whole business in a jiffy."

"We always been church folks ourselves," Grandma snapped. "It isn't so easy to get a hold."

"Hush up, Dick," Grandpa ordered with unusual sharpness. "Can't you see Gramma's clean done out?"

Grandma looked "done out," but Rose-Ellen, glancing soberly from one to the other, was sorry for Dick, too-his blue eyes frowned so unhappily.

Rose-Ellen tried to change the subject. "Apples!" she said. "I love oranges and ripe figs, and those big persimmons that you sort of drown in-but apples are homiest. I'd like to get my teeth into a hard red one and work right around."

That wasn't a good subject, either. "I'm hungry!" Jimmie bellowed.

And just then another tire blew out.

The old Reo had bumped along on its rim for an hour when Grandma said in a thin voice, "Next time we come to any likely shade, I guess we best stop. I'm . . . I'm just beat out."

With an anxious backward glance at her, Daddy stopped the car under a tree.

"I reckon some of you better go on to that town and get some bread and maybe weenies and potatoes," Grandma said faintly.

Grandpa and Daddy pulled out the tent and set it up under the tree, so that Grandma could lie down in its shelter. Then they bumped away, leaving the children to mind Sally and lead Carrie along the edge of the highway to graze, while Grandma slept.