The American: A Middle Western Legend by Howard Fast Page A

craftily, exalted by his fever, grinning as over a well-hidden joke, he bargained with the farmer. If he got well, he would work it off; he was a mighty worker in his health, and he boasted of what he had done on the railroad. “And if you die?” the farmer said. But the farmer wasn’t taken in, not even a little bit. There are men who are kind and who love other men; and though the Judge did not fully understand this broad, encompassing love of a species that is so basic in some, he recognized that it existed. Otherwise, why had the farmer made the poor bargain, sheltered him, fed him, and given him work? Hadn’t that been the beginning, there outside the little town of Savannah in Iowa? But his refuge lay in the fact that if it hadn’t been this farmer, mightn’t it have been another? The primer of success said that man was strong and mighty, and the clue to destiny lay in his head and his own two hands; and revolting against the broad, soft, species-loving man, the unreasonable humanitarian, the Judge sought for a train of events to bear out the primer. Memory paraded and collected and sorted, spurred on by the very fact that this was November 11, 1887. Had anyone been worse equipped, so ugly, so little gifted, so poorly raised, so miserably educated; all this was against him at the start, was it not? And he had gone down, deep down, before he came up. Was Cam Williams to receive the credit? Yet he, Pete Altgeld, John Peter Altgeld, Judge Altgeld, might have remained at the farm all his life, a laborer and then perhaps a farmer himself. Wasn’t that to be weighed in the balance? Ambition is dissatisfaction, and on that thread the world spins. From farm laborer, he had gone to a job in Savannah, teaching, but that was not the end; he read law, worked on farms to swell his small earnings. It was not just that he came to know people; rather, he developed in himself those qualities which made people admire him, and thereby, not by chance, came his appointment as city attorney.
    Sitting on his bed now, the Judge looked at his own two hands, strong, square, purposeful. “My doing,” he reflected. “And I could do it again—and again.”
    No one gave him anything. He practiced law from the bottom; the smallest cases were not too mean for him. He fought his own campaigns; he stood on his own two feet, hammering his way into the job of prosecuting attorney of Andrew County, Iowa. Did they say he climbed on the Granger bandwagon without ideal or principle?—if a man walked there were mice enough nibbling at his feet. What would they say if he told them that he had known this same dominating purpose in himself when he was twelve years old? Was he jealous of his ambition? Did he hoard it? He could have remained there as prosecuting attorney; no one forced him to walk out on the job and go to Chicago. It was his doing; step by step, he saw his way and he took it.
    And now he was Judge Altgeld of Chicago. Not Cam Williams! Not one of these damned species-lovers. Yet he could not hide from himself that this whole train of thought, this whole protest against the kindness of a simple farmer so long ago, came from the disturbing fact that today Albert Parsons and the others would die, that in not too many hours they would be hanging by their necks, with the life gone out of them.

IV
    He dressed methodically. Though his friend, Joe Martin the gambler, had once remarked to him, “Pete, you’re the damnedest Yankee, inside and outside, I’ve ever known,” he retained certain habits which might be called German. In some things, he was extraordinarily methodical; he had a sense of place for things and for people. Now, as he dressed, the routine of doing a simple thing he had done so often relaxed him, and when his wife put her head in the door and asked, “You’ll be ready soon, dear?” he answered, “In a few minutes. And I’m hungry, too.” “Do you