Dividing the Spoils
You find him everywhere, this sage of the corner grocery; in the West he is the nomadic renter. In the fall, to begin with, there is the renter and his family, fresh from their latest failure. He bargains for a broken-down team and mortgages it back to the owner for the full price,—the owner is pleased to have his team fed through the winter. He borrows a cow for her "keep" and increase, then rents a farm "on shares"; the owner furnishes the seed, and rewards himself liberally in the lease for doing so. The winter passes somehow, with odd jobs; by spring he had delivered a course of lectures at the country store on How to Run the Government, and the store-keeper holds a mortgage on the crops "to be" for supplies advanced. Now he half plants his crops, and tends them—hurriedly; for he is needed at the store to explain grave defects in the national currency system. Harvest time comes, and he "buys" machinery; another chattel mortgage. But the lightning of misfortune never misses him; if too wet, his crops wash out; if too dry, they burn out; for they were never really in. And he lays it all to the currency.
After the harvest comes the accounting. The land owner helps himself first, then the store-keeper; the machinery goes back to the factory, and the owner of the team claims his own. Last of all, the source of his milk supply ambles out through the gate in the wake of her unfeeling master.
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