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.
They called him the "Dude," and put into it gradually all the class
hatred of their wretched sullen lives. He had to fight them, more than
once, and had they united against him he might have been killed. But
they never united. Their own personal animosities and angers kept them
apart, as their misery held them together. And as time went on and his
muscles hardened he was able to give a better account of himself. The
time came when they let him alone, and when one day a big shocker fell
off a stack and broke his leg and Dick set it, he gained their respect.
They asked no questions, for their law was that the past was the past.
They did not like him, but in the queer twisted ethics of the camp they
judged the secret behind him by the height from which he had fallen, and
began slowly to accept him as of the brotherhood of derelicts.