melon patch. The man who lived there was a chap named Frank
Bannerman. I always remember him because he was a communist, the first
one I ever saw, and he filled my pockets with about ten pounds of
radical pamphlets which I promised to read. He made a bargain with me
that if I would read and digest the Red literature he would give me all
the watermelons I could eat.

"I'm a comrade already," I said, meaning it as a merry jest, that I
would be anything for a watermelon. But he took it seriously and his
eyes lit up like any fanatic's.

"I knew it," he said. "With a face like yours--look at the brow, look
at the intellect, the intellect." I was flattered. "Come here, wife," he
called through the door. "Come here and look at the intellect."

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 ha