The wife, who was a barefooted, freckle-faced woman, came out on the porch and, smiling sweetly, sized up my intellect. I made up my mind that here were the two smartest people in America. For they saw I was bulging with intellect. Nobody else had ever discovered it, not even I myself. I thought I was a muscle-bound iron puddler, but they pronounced me an intellectual giant. It never occurred to me that they might have guessed wrong, while the wise old world had guessed right. If the world was in step, they were out of step, but I figured that the world was out of step and they had the right stride. I thought their judgment must be better than the judgment of the whole world because their judgment pleased me. I later learned that their judgment was just like the judgment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em Red. “Are there many of us where you come from?” the man asked. “Many what?” I asked. “Communists, communists,” he said excitedly. I wanted to please him, because we were now cracking the melons and scooping out their luscious hearts. So I told him how many comrades there were in each of the rolling mills where I had worked. I had to invent the statistics out of my own head, but that head was full of intellect, so I jokingly gave him a fine array of figures. The fact was that there may have been an addle-pated Red among the mill hands of that time, but if there was I had never met him. The figures that I furnished Comrade Bannerman surprised him. I counted the seeds in each slice of watermelon and gave that as the number of comrades in each mill. The number was too high. Comrade Bannerman knew how many Reds there were in the country, and it appeared that the few mills I had worked in contained practically the whole communist party. He got rather excited and said the numbers were growing faster than he had imagined. He had figured that it would take forty years to bring about the Red commonwealth, but with the new light I had thrown on the subject he concluded that the times were ripening faster than he had dared to hope, and that there was no doubt the revolution would be upon us within three years. The comrade told me he was not popular in the village for two reasons. The capitalistic storekeepers called him a dead beat and the church people had rotten-egged him for a speech he had made denouncing religion. I saw by his hands that he didn't work much, and from the hands of his wife I learned who raised the watermelons he was feeding to me. I remember wondering why he didn't pay his grocery bill with the money he spent on pamphlets to stuff in the pockets of passers-by. CHAPTER XXI. ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON