On a balmy forenoon a jovial-appearing old gentleman went jogging out of the mill city of Marion and along a country road in his two-wheeled chaise. He sat erect and he was tall above the average of men, and he was very neat in his attire.
“I wish,” he mused, “that the men who could really appreciate a good outfit of clothing and could use the same properly were not so infernally touchy. As it is, cranky human nature drives me out on an expedition like this—and I'm afraid I am just as cranky as the rest of 'em, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this!”
The old gentleman hummed a song under his breath and slapped his reins against the flanks of the plodding horse to keep time. He came into a piece of woodland. He seemed to take cheery and fresh interest in this place. He poked his rubicund face out from the shadow of the chaise's canopy and peered to right and to left. There was a smile in his puckery eyes. When there were trees ahead of him, trees behind him, and trees all about he pulled his old horse to a standstill.
He listened, squinted quizzically through the glass of his chaise's rear curtain, and then climbed down. From a box at the rear of the vehicle he secured various articles of clothing and draped them over his arm. There was a frock-coat, not too badly worn, trousers in good repair, waistcoat, and a shirt. He also took out of the box a pair of shoes and a hat. With this load he went to the roadside and began to rig out a fence-post. When the garments were hung on it and the broad-brimmed, black, slouch-hat had been jauntily set on top of the post, anybody could see that the old gentleman was thus disposing of some of his own extra clothing. He was wearing a similar hat and a frock-coat, himself, and the decorated post took on a bizarre and slouchy resemblance to its decorator.
He went back to the chaise and found a nickel alarm-clock in the box. He wound this up carefully and propped it on a rail of the fence near the clothing.
Before he could escape from the vicinity of the exhibit and get into his chaise a wagon came rattling around the bend of the road. There were firkins and jars in the rear of this wagon and the driver was plainly a farmer-man.
He pulled up short and then saluted the old gentleman with a stab of forefinger at his hat-brim.
“Any trouble, Judge?” he inquired, affably.
“None at all,” replied the old gentleman, edging away from the fully garbed fence-post.
“Airing 'em out, hey?” A jab of the forefinger toward the garments.
“No, leaving them out.”
All at once the old gentleman appeared to remember something else. He took off his hat and produced a placard. He straightened it and stuck it into a crack in a fence-rail. Its legend was “Help Yourself.”
“You're giving them clothes away, are you, Judge Peterson?”
“I am leaving them here for any one who chooses to take them. Do you want first pick, Jolson?”
“Not me! I ain't taking charity hand-me-downs from any man, Judge. If it's a polite question, why are you giving away your duds this way?”
“I think you have just answered that question, Jolson. I offered you these clothes. Your nose went into the air. Other men have acted in the same way in the past when I have offered to give a fellow a good suit. I don't want to hurt other folks' feelings. I don't want to have my own feelings hurt. So, let any man help himself when no one is looking.”
“I'll take the alarm-clock, if you say so,” volunteered Jolson. “It'll help to rout me out of bed at milking-time.”
“No, you cannot have the clock, Jolson. I have tinkered it so that it will purr a little every half-hour. It will call attention to the clothes. You see, a good many men rush through life without looking to right or left, and so they miss a lot of opportunities.”
Jolson clucked to his horse and rattled away down the road, muttering sour remarks.
The old gentleman, with the air of a man who has satisfied his philanthropic ambitions, climbed into his chaise and followed the farmer.
The brisk breeze flirted the tails of the frock-coat and the trousers legs tried out a modest little gig as if some of the jocose spirit of the old gentleman had remained with the garments he had discarded.
There were several passers before another half-hour had elapsed.
The trousers kicked out quite hilariously when a young couple drove by in a buggy. The girl was pretty, and companionship with her might have suited even a judge's garments. But the young man and the girl were quite absorbed in each other, and the trousers kicked and the frock-coat flirted ineffectually.
A peddler's cart passed very slowly, but the driver did not look up from a paper filled with figures.
There were others to whom the judge's garments offered themselves mutely, but no one glanced that way and the clock was discreetly silent. The breeze died down and the trousers and the coat hung with a sort of homeless, homesick, and wistful air. One might have thought they were trying to conceal themselves when the next person appeared, so still were they. He was not an inviting person—not such a new lord and master as a judge's garments might be expected to welcome.
He was grossly fat and his own trousers were lashed about his bulging waist with a frayed belt; his coat was sun-faded, a greasy Scotch cap was pulled over to one side on his head with the peak hauled down upon his ear, and he scuffed along in boots that were disreputable. Surely, a most unseemly and unwholesome character to be wrapped in the habiliments of a judge! But just then, with that cursed inappropriateness of inanimate things, the clock jangled its alarm.
The tramp—there was no mistaking that gait and that general air of the vagrant—snapped himself about, located the noise, stared at the post, and then hurried to it. He made sure that there was no one in sight. He scooped all into his arms, climbed the fence and trotted into the woods. He kept looking behind him as if he feared pursuit. It was plain from his disturbed demeanor that he was much perplexed and was chased by the uncomfortable thought that he was stealing this property. He bestowed so much attention behind him that he paid but little attention to what was ahead of him, and so he ran down into a little bowl of a valley among the trees and stopped short there, for he had come upon a man.
It was the man who called himself Walker Farr.
The man was kneeling beside a tiny fire, toasting bread on the end of a beech twig. He held the twig in one hand and an open book in the other. He looked up without changing his position when the tramp came charging down the hillside.
He had wide-open, brown eyes, this man in the hollow. The eyes were not merely wide open on account of surprise at this irruption—one could see that they were naturally that way—keenly observant eyes. He had hair as brown as his eyes; his cap was on the ground beside him.
But the tramp was not taking account of the attractions of this stranger; he was more interested in searching for flaws.
He had been frightened at first sight of the man—for the tramp had the timidity of his kind; now he began to feel cheered. This stranger in the hollow had not been shaved recently, his clothing was unkempt, his shoes bore the marks of a long hike. He was cooking in the open—plain indication of the nomad.
“Well, I say, bo,” chaffed the tramp, shifting from fright to high spirit with the hysteria of weak natures. “I'm sure glad to see one of the good old sort. I didn't know what I was dropping in on when I fell down that hill. But it's all right, hey? I'm on the road. My name is Boston Fat, and my monacker is a bean-pot.”
The brown eyes moved slowly from the grinning face to the garments heaped in the man's arms. They were cold and critical eyes and there was no humor in them.
“I do not do business during my lunch-hours, my man. I do not desire to change tailors just yet and I do not buy stolen property.”
His chilliness did not dampen the other's good nature.
“Oh, that's all right, old top. I'm no thief. These clothes were hung on a fence-post just above here on the road. I reckon they were only waiting for first-comer.”
He dropped the shoes, cocked the hat on his head, and began to fumble the garments. The placard dropped out of the folds of the coat and the man at the fire craned his neck and read aloud: “Help Yourself.”
“Oh, that's what the paper says, hey? I never learned to read any of the modern languages,” confided Boston Fat. “I was too much taken up with the dead ones at Harvard. Well, comrade, now you can see for yourself that I didn't steal this mess of moth-food. There was the sign right on it saying, 'Help Yourself.' It was there, even if I couldn't read it. Instinck told me them clothes was for me. I took 'em and came in here.”
He shook out the garments one by one and hung them on a bush, chattering his comments. He set the ticking clock on a stump.
The man at the fire slipped a piece of meat between two slabs of toasted bread and began to eat. He still held the open book in his hand but his eyes were watching the tramp.
The vagrant was orally appraising his find, exhibiting the wisdom of one who has begged garments at back doors for the purposes of peddling them to second-hand shops.
“A moucher,” observed the man at the fire. He continued aloud, evidently and sardonically exercising his vocabulary, plainly enjoying the amazement he provoked by his style of language. “The spirit of a stray cat at midnight, the tastes of the prowling hyena! The fat thief I saw running away into the woods! When such as these began to take to the road, knight-errantry vanished from the face of the earth. The varlets borrowed the grand idea of care-free itinerancy and debased it, as waiters borrow a gentleman's evening dress for their menial uniform, and drunken coachmen wear the same head-gear that a duke wears to a wedding! Why prove evolution by searching for a man with a tail? The performances of human nature must convince any thinking man that we have descended from apes!”
The astonished tramp stared for a short time at this person who employed such peculiar language—then mumbled an oath and shook his head.
He began to try on the frock-coat, paying scant attention to the other's monologue. The coat was a ludicrous misfit; it would not meet over the bulging belly; its tails dragged on the fat man's heels.
“If I happened to stand handy by when a Kansas cyclone ripped the insides out of a clothing-store only the boys' sizes would drop in the same county with me,” grumbled the tramp, working his arms out of the sleeves.
“The coat was plainly built for a gentleman,” stated the man at the fire. “Therefore it is of no value to you.”
Boston Fat surveyed the stranger with a vicious glint in his little eyes, as a pig might stare at a man who had struck it across the snout.
“Good afternoon, perfesser,” he sneered.
“Why 'professor,' my frayed and frowsled Falstaff?”
“There you go with it—showing yourself up out of your own mouth! Words a yard long—words that would break a decent man's teeth! You're one of these college dudes out on the road getting stuff to write into a book. I've heard about your kind. And that kind is getting too thick and plenty and you're putting slush all over the real profesh. Quit it and go back to college. Don't use me for your book.”
This was reciprocation of derogatory sentiment with a vengeance!
The man at the fire sat back on his haunches. He finished chewing his mouthful, regarding the tramp with a languid stare that traveled from crown of his head to tip of his battered shoe.
“The only thing about a book that you would be good for,” he said, “would be for use in a volume of this sort.” He tapped the book in his palm. “Your anatomy could supply the binding. It is bound in pigskin.”
The tramp squealed an oath in the falsetto voice that the weak and the flabby possess and took one step forward. The man at the fire came to his feet and stood erect. He was tall, and the brown eyes talked for him better than threats or bluster. The vagrant shifted his gaze from those eyes and backed away.
“If I hadn't been penned in a pie-belt jail all winter up North, and all the strength starved out of me,” he whined, “you wouldn't call me a pig and get away with it.”
“A person who forces himself into the presence of a gentleman who is dining mustn't expect compliments,” stated the stranger.
“You ain't a tramp—not a real one,” snarled Boston Fat.
Farr's eyes glistened; he smiled; he continued to play on this ignoramus his satiric pranks of mystifying language:
“More of your lack of acuteness, my fat friend. Because I do not patter the flash lingo with you, you appear to take me for a college professor in disguise. You are not a real tramp. You are a bum, a loafer, a yeg. You never traveled more than two hundred miles away from Hoboken—the capital city of hoboes. Have you ever hit the sage-brush trail, hiked the milk-and-honey route from Ogden through the Mormon country, decked the Overland Express, beaten the blind baggage on the Millionaires' Flier? Hey?”
The sullen vagrant blinked stupidly.
“Or have you made the prairie run on the truss of a Wagner freight, or thrown a stone at the Fox Train crew, or beaten the face off the Katy Shack when he tried to pitch you off a gondola-car?”
“I don't know what you're chewing about,” sneered the fat man.
“Probably not, for you are not a true man of the road. You disgrace the name of nomad, you sully an ancient profession. I'll venture to say you don't know who Ishmael was.”
“Who said I did?”
“Not I, because I'm not a flatterer. I am going to follow the example of the man who cast pearls before swine—I'm going to cast you a pearl from one of my own poems. You may listen. It will pass your ears, that's all. You cannot contaminate it by taking it in, so I repeat it for my own entertainment, to refresh my memory:
“Of the morrow we take no heed, no care infests the day;
Some hand-out gump and a train to jump, a grip on the rods, and
away!
To the game of grab for gold we give no thought or care.
We own with you the arch of blue—our share of God's fresh air.
One coin to clear the law, a section of rubber hose.
To soften the chafe of a freight-car's truss, our portion of
cast-off clothes,
And the big wide world is ours—a title made good by right—
By mankind's deed to the nomad breed with the taint of the
Ishmaelite.
Some from the wastes of the sage-brush, some from the orange land,
Some from God's own country, dusty and tattered and tanned.
Why are we? It's idle to tell you—you'd never understand.
To and fro
We come and go.
Old Father Ishmael's band.”
He leaned back and laughed in the tramp's puzzled face.
“Well, what's the answer?” scoffed Boston Fat.
The other man talked on, humor in his eyes, plainly enjoying this verbal skylarking.
“I'm afraid I cannot waste time and breath on you in an attempt to answer the riddle of the ages, to explain the wanderlust that sent forth the tribes from the Aryan bowl of the birth of the races, my corpulent bean-pot. Your blank eyes and your flattened skull suggest a discouraging incapacity for information.”
“I don't know what you're gabbing abut. But there's one thing I do know. I'll tip 'em off at the next insane-asylum I come to that I met you headed north.” The tramp gathered the articles of clothing from the bushes and got down on his knees and began to fold them.
The man of the brown eyes stepped forward, laid down his little book, picked up the frock-coat and pulled it on, the fat man squealing expostulation. With serene disregard of this protest Farr buttoned the coat, smoothed it down, and then straightened his shoulders.
“You may see that it was built for a gentleman and that it fits a gentleman, friend pork-barrel.”
“You shuck it off and pass it over, that's what you do,” yelped the tramp. “It's my coat.”
“It was perfectly apparent that it was not your coat when you tried it on.”
“I tell you I found it hanging on a fence-post just above here.”
“That was merely by accident, and you should have passed on and left the garments for one whose frame was fitted to wear them. You illustrate the curse of modern society. Men are so filled with the greed of getting that they grab misfits simply out of passion for possessing.”
“I've stood your slurs ever since I got here, but I'll be jobeefed if I'll stand for your swiping my property.”
The man of the brown eyes smiled. His whole demeanor showed that he was more than ever hugely enjoying his own verbosity—the florid language which was both maddening and mystifying the tramp.
“Further evidence of your mean nature: a gentleman resents an insult that steals away his character much more quickly than he resents an act that steals mere property. In that little book which I have just laid down Shakespeare speaks trenchantly on that matter: 'Who steals my purse steals trash . . . but he that filches from me my good name robs me . . . and makes me poor indeed.'”
The tramp gave over his work of folding, and awkwardly and cumbersomely got upon his feet.
“You take off that coat and hand it over. It's mine—I found it. I can stand a crazy man's gab, but when any one tries to do me out of what's my own I'll fight.”
“May I ask what you're going to do with these garments of a gentleman which have fallen into your hands by accident?”
“I'm going to cash 'em in at the nearest second-hand shop, that's just what I'm going to do.”
“Just as you sold the Sunday suit you stole from a poor man! My friend, I was insulted that day on account of you. You owe me something!”
Just then the alarm-clock purred a brief signal.
Up to that time the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who had come blundering upon him.
He stared at the clock, looked down upon the frock-coat, and then surveyed the other articles of clothing. He scowled as if he had suddenly begun to reflect. Seriousness smoldered in the brown eyes. That tinkling touch of metal against metal seemed to change his mood in astonishing fashion.
“Ah, it may be morning again, O my soul!” he cried with such tense feeling in his voice that the tramp surveyed him with gaping mouth and bulging eyes, as one stares at a person suddenly become mad.
“I will talk to you though you will not understand! Once upon a time the world was ruled by men who were ruled by omens. Man was then not so wise in his own conceit. His own soul was nearer the soul of things. He was not a mere gob of bumptiousness covered with the shell of cocksureness. He was willing to be informed. He sought the omens of true nature—he allowed Fate to guide him. He was not a pig running against the goad of circumstances, unheeding the upflung arms of Fortune, waving him toward the right path. He was simpler—he was truer. He felt that he was a part of nature instead of being boss of nature. Well, I have got nearer to true nature since I have been in the open. I am in contact with the soul of things. I am no longer insulated. I am not reformed, I am simply ready once again to grab Opportunity. So you think I am crazy, do you?”
“They had a gink in a padded cell in the jail where I was last winter and he didn't take on much worse'n you,” stated the tramp.
“As a brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me. A moment later came habiliments of a gentleman, borne in the arms of a wretch who could not wear them. There came Opportunity. Then the jangle of that clock signaled Opportunity—and there was a throb in me as though my sleeping soul had rolled and blinked at the sunlight of hope and had murmured, 'It's morning again.' Such are omens, when one is ready to heed.”
He set his teeth, clenched his fists, and by expression and attitude showed that he had arrived at a decision of moment. He walked close to the tramp. “I will admit, Friend Belly-brains, that you came upon Opportunity before I did this day. But tell me again, are you to make no further use of said Opportunity than to run to an old-clothes shop and exchange for a few pennies that which will help to make a man?”
“They are mine and I'm going to sell 'em,” retorted the sullen vagrant.
“I am sorry because you have no wit—no power to understand. Otherwise you would gladly lay these garments in my hands and bid me Godspeed. You don't understand at all, do you?”
“Look here, are you trying to frisk me for these duds?”
“It's all a waste of breath to explain to you that Providence meant these things for me. You are not acute enough to understand close reasoning. I could not show you that, for the sake of a few coins, which would do you only that harm which would come from their value in cheap whisky or beer, you might be wrecking the future of a soul that is awake. I simply tell you that I shall keep the clothing for myself. Perhaps you can understand that plain statement!” The brown eyes became resolute and piercing. “Even if I had money I would not pay you for these garments. Money does such as you no good; it may bring you trouble. My dear Boston Fat, I cannot afford to let you prejudice my future, which, so instinct tells me, is wrapped up in those poor things of wool and warp.” He snapped a finger into his palm and extended his hand. “Give me that hat and then pass on about your business.”
The tramp backed away. His little blinking eyes expressed both fear and rebelliousness. More than ever did he resemble a pig at bay. The black hat, set on top of his greasy cap and topping with its respectability his disreputable general outfit, added a bizarre touch to the scene between the two men.
“You think now that you are the injured party,” calmly pursued the man of the brown eyes. “You haven't intelligence enough to take my own case into account. You are injured because you are losing a few coins—but I may be injured in all that gives life its flavor if I do not grasp this opportunity.” Both raillery and earnestness dropped out of his tones. He became merely matter-of-fact. “I'll make it plain. Trot along about your business, fat one, or I shall proceed to pound the face off you and then kick you a few rods on your happy way. You deserve it as a thief—I worked two weeks as a stone-mason on your account. Do you get me?”
For answer the infuriated vagrant rushed at him and kicked.
With one hand the stranger plucked the hat from the tramp's head and sailed it to a place of safety. With the other hand he grabbed the attacker's ankle before the foot hit him and with a jerk he laid the tramp on his back.
The victim fell so helplessly that the concussion knocked the breath and a groan out of him.
The man of the brown eyes had moved languidly and had talked languidly till then. When he grabbed the foot he moved with a sort of steel-trap efficiency and quickness. He promptly straddled his victim, seated himself on the protruding abdomen, and began to beat the man's face. He battered the flabby cheeks and punched his fists into the pulpy neck. He ground his knees against the fat flanks and redoubled his blows when the tramp struggled. After the squalling falsetto had implored for a long time, the assailant at last gave over the exercise.
“Are you licked?” he asked.
“Yes,” whined the tramp.
“You have stolen—in most dirty style. I whipped you for that job. Now will you stay licked for some time?”
“Yes.”
“You'll go on about your own business, will you, without any more foolish talk about those garments?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sorry you stole from that good woman who fed you?”
“Yes.”
The man of the brown eyes swung himself off his prostrate victim, as a rider dismounts from a horse, and the tramp sat up, moaning and patting his purple face.
“I never had no luck, never,” he blubbered. “I was kicked out of jail before the weather got warmed up, I was thrown in last fall just when the Indian summer was beginning. When other fellows get hand-outs of pie I get cold potatoes and bannock bread. I have to walk when other fellows ride. I'm too fat for the trucks and they can always see me on the blind baggage. I'll keep on walking. I never had no luck in all my life.”
He rolled upon his hands and knees and then stood up. He started away, wholly cowed, whining like a quill-pig, bewailing his luck.
“Luck!” the man of the brown eyes shouted after him in a tone which expressed anger and regret. “What do you know about luck, you animated lard-pail? A thing like you is in luck when he is in jail where there is no workshop. Better luck than that is too good for you. Hold on one minute! Turn around and look at me.”
The tramp obeyed. The stranger pounded one of those hard fists on his own breast.
“I say look at me! No matter what I was once! But to-day you found me cooking bacon over three sticks and ready to fight for another man's cast-off clothes. And in between whiles I have hiked every path that the hobo knows between the oceans. Now jog on and think that over and keep your jaw shut on luck! I say jog on! Don't look back. Forget that you ever saw me.”
He waved angry gesture and took two steps as though to enforce his command with his fists.
The tramp jogged on at a brisk pace. He hurried to the highway and set out on his shuffling pilgrimage, rubbing his aching face and muttering to himself.
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