My own task began down at the row of inhabited box-
cars, and so on through shacks and tenements with many Spanish
laborers' wives. Then toward noon the labor-train screamed in,
with two "gold" coaches and many open cattle-cars with long
benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six hundred men in the
six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood through a
suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and shrieked
away again.
Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds
of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-
mell around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough
and tumble food--yet so different from the old French catch as
catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all
through the noon-hour to cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We
jotted them down at express speed, with changes of tongue so
abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and in the place where
our minds should have been sounded only a confused chaotic uproar
like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot dictionary. Then
suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. I like to
speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to
talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" of
Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I
will NOT run the risk of talking Russian.
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