Marching Men | Page 2

route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie
towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have
come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life.
Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander
through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening
with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent of
life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of them,
and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or Iowa
town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of the men
about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of our cities
life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of our American
lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing step with one
another, men lose also a sense of their own individuality so that a
thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly mass in at the door of a
Chicago factory morning after morning and year after year with never
an epigram from the lips of one of them.
In Coal Creek when men got drunk they staggered in silence through
the street. Did one of them, in a moment of stupid animal sportiveness,
execute a clumsy dance upon the barroom floor, his fellow--labourers
looked at him dumbly, or turning away left him to finish without
witnesses his clumsy hilarity.
Standing in the doorway and looking up and down the bleak village
street, some dim realisation of the disorganised ineffectiveness of life
as he knew it came into the mind of the McGregor boy. It seemed to
him right and natural that he should hate men. With a sneer on his lips,
he thought of Barney Butterlips, the town socialist, who was forever
talking of a day coming when men would march shoulder to shoulder
and life in Coal Creek, life everywhere, should cease being aimless and
become definite and full of meaning.
"They will never do that and who wants them to," mused the McGregor
boy. A blast of wind bearing snow beat upon him and he turned into the
shop and slammed the door behind him. Another thought stirred in his

head and brought a flush to his cheeks. He turned and stood in the
silence of the empty shop shaking with emotion. "If I could form the
men of this place into an army I would lead them to the mouth of the
old Shumway cut and push them in," he threatened, shaking his fist
toward the door. "I would stand aside and see the whole town struggle
and drown in the black water as untouched as though I watched the
drowning of a litter of dirty little kittens."
* * * * *
The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along
the street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he
went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of
the loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a
being, the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie
Wheeler had made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular
romance, galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people.
Men looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge
mouth and nose and the flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping the
snow from before the door of the saloon, shouted at him. "Hey,
Norman!" he called. "Sweet Norman! Norman is too pretty a name.
Beaut is the name for you! Oh you Beaut!"
The tall boy pushed the cart silently along the street. Again he hated
Coal Creek. He hated the bakery and the bakery cart. With a burning
satisfying hate he hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and the Reverend
Minot Weeks. "Fat old fools," he muttered as he shook the snow off his
hat and paused to breathe in the struggle up the hill. He had something
new to hate. He hated his own name. It did sound ridiculous. He had
thought before that there was something fancy and pretentious about it.
It did not fit a bakery cart boy. He wished it might have been plain John
or Jim or Fred. A quiver of irritation at his mother passed through him.
"She might have used more sense," he muttered.
And then the thought came to him that his father might have chosen the
name. That checked his flight toward universal hatred and he began
pushing the cart forward again, a more genial current of thought
running through his mind. The tall boy