Free Satan's Bushel by Garet Garrett

crop with that of his neighbor. For like quality and grade of product they receive the same price. Their crop moves to market from their common bin in orderly fashion. There is no surplus bugaboo chasing relentlessly on their heels and breathing the scorching fire of ruinous prices. Neighbor joins with neighbor. They pool their product. They share and share alike in the new system of economic justice for agriculture. All this is precisely what the Great Teacher meant when he said: ‘Therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you do ye even so unto them.’ “
    The speaker cast that pamphlet down and opened another. He would deal now with facts. Already coöperative associations were marketing more than a billion dollars’ worth of farm produce annually. Take prunes, the perfect example of successful coöperation in marketing. Everybody knew what the prune growers had done. Here, of course, the problem was wheat, and there were those who said that what the prune growers had done wheat growers couldn’t because wheat was different—that prunes were prunes and wheat was wheat. He would show them how wrong they were. He would show them there was no difference. He was there to tell them that prunes were wheat and wheat was prunes. He would prove it.
    The proof was intricate. Dreadwind’s attention wandered from the speaker to the audience. His position was such that he could see the faces and remain himself unseen, leaning on the fence, outside the lighted circle. And there at the far edge of the group, a little apart, sat his old man—namely, Absalom Weaver. He was not alone. Beside him sat a young woman with her two hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the speaker, her mind apparently in rapt contemplation of the abstract idea that wheat was prunes.
    How simple it sounds!
    There sat a young woman. But what if she were the only young woman in the world? And when this manner of thing happens she is. The unsearchable moment, I suppose, is that in which the man for the first time sees all women in one, the eternal symbol embodied and undivided, and conceives a fixation for it. No other event in life is comparable to this. Everything that ever occurred in the universe must have occurred precisely as it did through infinite chance to bring it to pass. And there is the choice of only one or two commonplace phrases to describe it. He fell in love with her. Yes? What does that mean?
    At this point of the story he groped, wandered into irrelevancies, fell into sudden silences. It seemed like trying to recall a very old dream. He was for going on. I brought him back. What did he do? I wanted to know what he did. He remembered standing behind her, close enough to have touched her; how he got there he could not recall. One will suppose that he opened the gate with his two hands, went in on his two feet, walked around the group and stood near her. No one would have been likely to notice him.
    It was curious that he should have remembered something that had nothing to do with it. That was the speaker’s climax. It was this:
    “The farmer sells and the farmer buys. What does he sell? A primal substance, the food that sustains the world. What does he buy? Machinery, wagons, building materials, hardware, cloth, sugar, sometimes a piano or a phonograph—such things. When he sells the primal substance what does he say to the buyer? He says: ‘How much will you give me?’ But when he buys what does he say? He says: ‘How much will you take?’ Think it over. In every case it is like that: ‘How much will you give me?’ for what he sells: ‘How much will you take?’ for what he buys.”
    At this an assenting, brooding murmur went through the crowd. Until then it had listened in a stolid manner. Now the speaker, who was an organizer for a state-wide coöperative marketing association, began to solicit signatures, passing the printed blanks around.
    A voice was lifted up, calling, “Weaver!”
    The old man did not stir. He