THE EARTH'S BOUNTY 



soulful eyes, from some unseen retreat to act 

 as interpreter. Even then signs and many of 

 Reika's idioms had to be resorted to before 

 the barter of two five-dollar bills for two 

 scraggy goats was concluded. We subse- 

 quently learned that the colony had been 

 originally gathered together by an old Nor- 

 wegian who, after becoming prosperous and 

 acquiring large contracts for felling timber, 

 had collected waifs and strays at the emigrant 

 office in New York, regardless of nationality 

 so long as they were woodsmen. At first, he 

 boarded them in a large shanty, subsequently 

 selling to the best workers strips of land on 

 which to put up shanties of their own out of 

 any old material he happened to have bought 

 cheap. After which the pious old rogue ad- 

 vanced money to bring wife or sweetheart, as 

 the case might be, from the old country, and 

 by such benevolent usury bound the poor 

 wretches to lives of hard work, poor pay, and 

 slavish obedience, which savored more of a 

 Tolstoi novel than of real everyday life in a 



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