They sat on the rocks by the fire and opened the farmer’s bundle. There were cold, gristly roast beef, bread and cheese, and a large, angry-looking sausage.
“Um!” meditated Father; then, “I’ll heat up the roast beef.” Which he grandly did, on little sticks, and they ate it contemplatively, while their souls and toes relaxed in the warmth, and the black tree-trunks shone cozily in the glow.
“No cockroaches and no smell of fried fish here, like there is on Avenue B,” said Father. “And we don’t have to go home from our picnic. I wonder why folks let themselves get all old and house-bound, when they could be like us?”
“Yes,” said Mother, drowsily.
He hadn’t nerved himself to play the mouth-organ, not all day, but now, with the luxury of fire and solitude, he played it, and, what’s more, he tried to whistle a natty little ballad which touchingly presented a castaway as “long-long-longing for his Michigan, his wish-again ho-o-ome.”
Yet Father wasn’t altogether satisfied with his fire. The dry twigs he kept feeding to it flared up and were gone. The Innocents huddled together, closer and closer to the coals. Father gave little pats to her shoulder while she shivered and began to look anxious.
“Cold, old honey?”
“Yes, but it don’t matter,” she declared.
“Come on, I guess we’d better go look for a place to sleep. I’m afraid—don’t know as I could keep this fire up all night, after all.”
“Oh, I can’t walk any. Oh, I guess it will be all right when I get going again.” She tried tosmile at him, and with the slowness of pain she reached for her bundle.
He snatched it from her. “I can carry all our stuff, anyway,” he said.
Leaning on him, moving step by step, every step an agony of soreness and cold, lifting her feet each time by a separate effort of her numbed will, she plodded beside him, while he tried to aid her with a hand under her elbow.
“There! There’s where we’ll go!” he whispered, as the shapes of farm-buildings lifted against the sky. “We won’t ask permission. We mightn’t get it! Like that last farmer. And I won’t let you go one step farther. We’ll butt right into the barn and sleep in the hay.”
“But—do you—think we’d better?”
“We will!”
The mouse-like Father was a very lion, emboldened by his care for her. He would have faced ten farmers terrible with shot-guns. Without one timorous glance he led her to the small side-door of the barn, eased down the latch, lifted her over the sill, closed the door. In the barn was a great blackness, but also a great content. It seemed warm, and was intimate with the scent of cows and hay, alivewith the quiet breathing of animals. Father lit a match and located the stairs to the haymow.
Mother was staggering. With his arm about her waist, very tender and reverent, he guided her to the stairs and up them, step by agonized step, to the fragrant peace of the haymow. She sank down and he covered her so deep with hay that only her face was left uncovered.
“Warm, Mother?”
She did not answer. She was already asleep.
Through a night haunted by vague monsters of darkness—and by sneezes whenever spears of hay invaded his indignant city nose—Father turned and thrashed. But he was warm, and he did sleep for hours at a time. At what must have been dawn he heard the farmer at the stalls in the stable below. He felt refreshed, cozily drowsy, and he did a shameless thing, a trick of vagrants and road-wallopers: he put his thumb to his nose, aimed his hand toward the supposititious location of the farmer below, and twirled his outspread fingers in a flickering manner. It is believed that he intended to convey spirited defiance, or possibly insult, by this amazing gesture. He grinned contentedly and went to sleep again.... FortunatelyMother was asleep and did not see him acting—as she often but vainly defined it—“like a young smart Aleck.”
Father awakened from an agitating dream of setting the barn afire, and beheld Mother sitting up amid the hay—an amazing, a quite incredible situation for Mrs. Seth Appleby. She mildly dabbled at her gray hair, which was still neat, and looked across in bewilderment. Like a jack-in-the-box, Father came up out of the hay to greet her.
“How do you like your room in the Wal-dorf-As-torya?” he said. “Sleep well, old honey?”
“Why—why, I must have!” she marveled. “I don’t hardly remember coming here, though.”
“Ready to tramp on?”
She swore that she was. And indeed her cheeks were ruddy with outdoors, the corners of her eyes relaxed. But she was so stiff that they had hobbled a mile, and Father had shucked several tons of corn in return for breakfast, before she ceased feeling as though her legs were made of extraordinarily brittle glass.
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SOMETIMES they were fêted adventurers who were credited with having tramped over most of the globe. Sometimes they were hoboes on whom straggly women shut farm-house doors. But never were they wandering minstrels. Father went on believing that he intended to play the mouth-organ and entertain the poor, but actually he depended on his wood-chopping arm, and every cord he chopped gave him a ruddier flush of youth, a warmer flush of ambition.
Most people do not know why they do things—not even you and I invariably know, though of course we are superior to the unresponsive masses. Many people are even unconscious that they are doing things or being things—being gentle or cruel or creative or parasitic. Quite without knowing it, Father was searching for his place in the world. The New York shoe-stores had decided that he was too old to be useful. But age is as fictitious astime or love. Father was awakening from the sleep of drudgery in the one dusty shop, and he was asking what other place there was for him. He was beginning to have another idea, a better idea, which he pondered as he came to shoe-stores in small towns.... They weren’t very well window-dressed; the signs were feeble.... Maybe some day he’d get back into the shoe business in some town, and he’d show them—only, how could he talk business to a shoeman when he was shabby and winter-tanned and none too extravagant in the care of his reddening hands?
But he was learning something more weighty—the art of handling people, in the two aspects thereof—bluffing, and backing up the bluff with force and originality. He came to the commonplace people along the road as something novel and admirable, a man who had taken his wife and his poverty and gone seeing the world. When he smiled in a superior way and said nothing, people immediately believed that he must have been places, done brave things. He didn’t so much bluff them as let them bluff themselves.... He had never been able to do that in his years as a foggy-day shadow to the late J. Pilkings.
It is earnestly recommended to all uncomfortable or dissatisfied men over sixty that they take their wives and their mouth-organs and go tramping in winter, whether they be bank presidents or shoe-clerks or writers of fiction or just plain honest men. Though doubtless some of them may have difficulty in getting their wives to go.
It was early March, a snowy, blustery March, and the Applebys were plodding through West Virginia. No longer were they the mysterious “Smiths.” Father was rather proud, now, of being Appleby, the pedestrian. Mother looked stolidly content as she trudged at his side, ruddy and placid and accustomed to being wept over by every farm-wife.
At an early dusk, with a storm menacing, with the air uneasy and a wind melancholy in the trees, they struck off by a forest road which would, they hoped, prove a short cut to the town of Weatherford. They came to cross-paths, and took the more trodden way, which betrayed them and soon dwindled to a narrow rut which they could scarcely follow in the twilight. Father was frightened. They would have to camp in the woods—and a blizzard was coming.
He saw a light ahead, a shifting, evasive light.
“There’s a farm-house or something,” he declared, cheerily. “We’ll just nach’ly make ’em give us shelter. Going to storm too bad to do much work for ’em, and I bet it’s some cranky old shellback farmer, living ’way out here like this. Well, we’ll teach the old codger to like music, and this time Iwillplay my mouth-organ. Ain’t you glad we’re young folks that like music and dancing—”
“How you run on!” Mother said, trustingly.
From the bleakness ahead came a cracked but lusty voice singing “Hello, ’Frisco!”
“Man singing! Jolly! That’s a good omen,” chuckled Father. “All the folks that are peculiar—like we are—love to sing.”
“Yes, and talk!” However much she enjoyed Father’s chatter, Mother felt that she owed it to her conscience—which she kept as neat and well dusted, now that they were vagrants, as she had in a New York flat—to reprove him occasionally, for his own good.
“Say, this is exciting. That’s a bonfire ahead,” Father whispered.
They slowed their pace to a stealthy walk. Behind them and beside them was chilly darknesslurking in caverns among black, bare tree-trunks. Before them they could see a nebulous glow and hear the monotonous voice singing the same words over and over.
Mother shrieked. They stopped. A vast, lumbering bulk of a man plunged out from the woods, hesitated, stooped, brandished a club.
“Tut, tut! No need to be excited, mister. We’re just two old folks looking for shelter for the night,” wavered Father, with spurious coolness.
“Huh?” growled a thick, greasy voice. “Where d’yuh belong?”
“Everywhere. We’re tramping to San Francisco.”
As he said it Father stood uneasy, looking into the penetrating eye of an electric torch which the man had flashed on him. The torch blotted out the man who held it, and turned everything—the night, the woods, the storm mutters—into just that one hypnotizing ball of fire suspended in the darkness.
“Well, well,” gasped the unknown, “a moll, swelp me! Welcome to our roost, ’bo! You hit it right. This is Hoboes’ Home. There’s nine ’boes of us got a shack up ahead. Welcome, ma’am. What’s your line? Con game or just busted?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, young man,” snapped Mother.
“Well, if you two are like me, nothing but just honest workmen, you better try and make ’em think you’re working some game—tell ’em you’re the Queen of the Thimble-riggers or some dern thing like that. Come on, now. Been gathering wood; got enough. You can follow me. The bunch ain’t so very criminal—not for hoboes they ain’t.”
The large mysterious man started down the path toward the glow, and Father and Mother followed him uncomfortably.
“It’s a den of vice he’s taking us into,” groaned Father. “And if we go back they’ll pursue us. Maybe we better—”
“I don’t believe a con game is a nice thing, whatever it is,” said Mother. “It sounds real wicked. I never heard of thimble-rigging. How do you rig a thimble?”
“I don’t know, but I think we better go back.”
They stopped. The large man turned on them and growled, “Hustle up.”
Obediently the Innocents trailed after his dark, shaggy back that, in his tattered overcoat, seemed as formidable as it was big. The glowgrew more intense ahead of them. They came into a clearing where, round a fire beside a rude shanty, sat several men, one of whom was still droning “Hello, ’Frisco!”
“Visitors!” shouted the guide.
The group sprang up, startled, threatening—shabby, evil-looking men.
Father stood palsied as grim, unshaven faces lowered at him, as a sinister man with a hooked nose stalked forward, his fist doubled.
But Mother left his side, darted past the hook-nosed man, and snapped: “That’s no way to peel potatoes, young man. You’re losing all the best part, next to the skin. Here, give me that. I’ll show you. Waste and carelessness—”
While Father and the group of circled hoboes stared, Mother firmly took a huge jack-knife away from a slight, red-headed man who was peeling potatoes and chucking them into a pot of stew that was boiling on the fire.
“Well—I’ll—be—darned!” said every one, almost in chorus.
“Who are you?” the hook-nosed man demanded of Father. But his voice sounded puzzled and he gazed incredulously at Mother as she cozily peeled potatoes, her delicate cheeks and placid eye revealed in the firelight.She was already as sturdily industrious and matter-of-fact as though she were back in the tea-room.
“I’m Appleby, the pedestrian,” said Father. “Wife and I went— Say, ain’t she the nicest-looking woman in that firelight! Great woman, let me tell you. We went broke in New York and we’re tramping to ’Frisco. Can you take us in for the night? I guess we’re all fellow-hoboes.”
“Sure will,” said the hook-nosed man. “Pleased to have you come, fellow-bum. My name’s Crook McKusick. I’m kind of camp boss. The boys call me ‘Crook’ because I’m so honest. You can see that yourself.”
“Oh yes,” said Father, quite innocently.
“The lad that the madam dispossessed is Reddy, and this fish-faced duck here is the K. C. Kid. But I guess the most important guy in the gang is Mr. Mulligan, the stew. If your missus wants to elect herself cook to-night, and make the mulligan taste human, she can be the boss.”
“Bring me the salt and don’t talk so much. You’ll have the stew spoiled in about one minute,” Mother said, severely, to Crook McKusick, and that mighty leader meeklysaid, “Yes, ma’am,” and trotted to a box on the far side of the fire.
The rest of the band—eight practical romanticists, each of whom was in some ways tougher than the others—looked rather sullenly at Mother’s restraining presence, but when the mulligan was served they volunteered awkward compliments. Veal and chicken and sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes and carrots and corn were in the stew, and it was very hot, and there was powerful coffee with condensed milk to accompany it.
Father shook his head and tried to make himself believe that he really was where he was—in a rim of bare woods reddened with firelight, surrounding a little stumpy clearing, on one side of which was a shack covered with tar-paper fastened with laths. The fire hid the storm behind its warm curtain. The ruffians about the fire seemed to be customers in a new “T Room” as Mother fussed over them and kept their plates filled.
Gradually the hoboes thawed out and told the Applebys that they had permission from the owner of the land to occupy this winter refuge, but that they liberally “swiped” their supplies from the whole countryside.
Mother exclaimed: “You poor boys, I don’t suppose you know any better. Father, I think we’ll stay here for a few days, and I’ll mend up the boys’ clothes and teach them not to steal.... You boys—why, here you are great big grown-up men, and you can jus’ as well go out every day and work enough to get your supplies. No need to be leading an immoral life jus’ because you’re tramps. I don’t see but what being tramps is real interesting and healthy, if you jus’ go about it in a nice moral way. Now you with the red hair, come here and wipe the dishes while I wash them. I swear to goodness I don’t believe these horrid tin plates have been washed since you got them.”
As Mother’s bland determined oration ended, Crook McKusick, the hook-nosed leader, glanced at her with a resigned shrug and growled: “All right, ma’am. Anything for a change, as the fellow said to the ragged shirt. We’ll start a Y. M. C. A. I suppose you’ll be having us take baths next.”
The youngster introduced as the K. C. Kid piped up, truculently: “Say, where do you get this moral stuff? This ain’t a Sunday-school picnic; it’s a hoboes’ camp.”
Crook McKusick vaulted up with startlingquickness, seized the K. C. Kid by the neck, wrenched his face around, and demanded: “Can that stuff, Kid. If you don’t like the new stunt you can beat it. This here lady has got more nerve than ten transcontinental bums put together—woman, lady like her, out battering for eats and pounding the roads! She’s the new boss, see? But old Uncle Crook is here with his mits, too, see?”
The Kid winced as Crook’s nails gouged his neck, and whimpered: “All right, Crook. Gee! you don’t need to get so sore about it.”
Unconscious that there had been a crisis, Mother struck in, “Step lively now, boys, and we’ll clean the dishes while the water’s hot.”
With the incredulous gentry of leisure obeying her commands, Mother scoured the dishes, picked up refuse, then penetrated the sleeping-shack and was appalled by the filth on the floor and by the gunny-sacking mattresses thrown in the crude wooden bunks.
“Now we’ll tidy this up,” she said, “and maybe I can fix up a corner for Mr. Appleby and me—sort of partition it off like.”
The usual evening meditations and geographical discussions of the monastery of hoboes had been interrupted by collecting garbage and bya quite useless cleaning of dishes that would only get dirty again. They were recuperating, returning to their spiritual plane of perfect peace, in picturesque attitudes by the fire. They scowled now. Again the K. C. Kid raised his voice: “Aw, let the bunk-house alone! What d’yuh think this is? A female cemetery?”
Crook McKusick glared, but Reddy joined the rebellion with: “I’m through. I ain’t no Chink laundryman.”
The bunch turned their heads away from Mother, and pretended to ignore her—and to ignore Crook’s swaying shoulders and clenching fists. In low but most impolite-sounding voices they began to curse the surprised and unhappy Mother. Father ranged up beside her, protectingly. He was sure there was going to be a fight, and he determined to do for some one, anyway. He was trapped, desperate. Crook McKusick stood with them, too, but his glance wavered from them to the group at the fire and back again, and he was clearing his throat to speak when—
“Hands up!” came a voice from the shadows beyond the fire.
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WHILE he was raising his arms so high that his cuffs were pulled half-way down to his elbows, Father was conscious that the hoboes by the fire, even the formidable Crook McKusick, were doing the same. Facing them, in the woods border, was a farmer in a coon-skin overcoat, aiming a double-barreled shot-gun, beside him two other farmers with rifles under their arms. It seemed to Father that he was in a wild Western melodrama, and he helplessly muttered, “Gosh! Can you beat it?”
The man with the leveled shot-gun drawled, “I’m the deputy sheriff for this locality and I’ll give you dirty bums just five minutes to pick up your duffle and git out, and keep a-going. I guess we don’t need you around here. You been robbing every hen-roost for ten miles. Now step lively, and no funny business.”
“Stung!” muttered Crook McKusick, hopelessly. “Got us.”
Suddenly a downy figure—who might herselfhave come from a large, peaceful human hen-roost—fluttered straight at the muzzle of the sheriff’s shot-gun. It was Mother.
“Hands up, I told juh!” stormed the sheriff, amazedly.
“Oh, lookout, Mother!” wailed Father, rushing after her, his own hands going down to his sides in his agitation.
“Look out, aunty!” echoed Crook McKusick. “That’s a bad actor, that guy.”
But Mother continued straight at the gun, snapping: “Don’t point that dratted thing at me. You bother me.”
The sheriff wavered. The gun dropped. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Never you mind who I am, young man. I’m responsible for these boys, though. And they promised me they wouldn’t do no more stealing. They’re going to work for what they get. And they got a right here on this land. They got permission. That’s more than you got, I venture, with your nasty guns and all, coming around here— Have you got a warrant?”
“No, I ain’t, but you—”
“Then you just step yourself away, young man! Coming here, fairly shaking a body’snerves. I vow, you almost scare me, carrying on— Put down that dratted gun, I told you. You’ll either go, Mr. Deputy Monkey, or I’ll see your boss, and we’ll see what we’ll see.”
With which Mother—who was rapidly becoming almost impolite in her indignation over this uninvited visit from a person whom she couldn’t find it in her heart to like—seized the muzzle of the gun, pushed it down, and stood glowering at the sheriff, her arms akimbo.
“Well, ma’am, I don’t know who you are, but if you got any idee that this bunch of cut-throats is likely to turn into any W. C. T. U. pink-tea party—”
“Now none of your nonsense and impudence and sneering, young man, and be off with you, or I’ll see somebody that’ll have something to say to you. Illegal goings-on, that’s what they are; no warrant or nothing.”
One of the sheriff’s companions muttered: “Come on, Bill. I think she’s the wife of that nosey new preacher over to Cordova.”
“All right,” said the sheriff. Before he turned away he threatened, “Now if I hear of anything more from you boys, I’ll get that warrant, all righty, and you’ll land in the calaboose, where you belong.”
But the hoboes about the fire cheered derisively, and as the sheriff disappeared in the woods they surrounded Mother in a circle of grins and shining eyes, and the K. C. Kid was the first to declare: “Good for you, aunty. You’re elected camp boss, and you can make me perm’nent cookee, if you want to.”
“Well, then,” said Mother, calmly, “let’s get that nasty shack cleaned up right away. I do declare I’m beginning to get sleepy.”
Nothing in his life was more to Father’s credit than the fact that he did not envy Mother the credit of having become monarch of the camp and protector of the poor. “I’m with you, Mother,” he said. “What you want me to do? Let’s hustle. Blizzard coming—with a warrant.”
Round a camp-fire in the woods a group of men were playing cards, wire-bearded men in rough coats and greasy flannel shirts; but the most violent thing they said was “Doggone it,” and sometimes they stopped to listen to the strains of “Dandy Dick and the Candlestick,” which a white-haired cheerful old gentleman rendered on the mouth-organ.
Father was perched on a powder-can. Hisfeet were turned inward with comfort and soul-satisfaction, and now and then he jerked his head sideways, with an air of virile satisfaction. The collar of his blue-flannel shirt poked up beside his chin as cockily as the ear of a setter pup.... Father didn’t know it, but he was making believe be King of the Bandits.
Across the fire, in an aged and uncertain rocking-chair, placid as though she were sitting beside a gas-log instead of a camp-fire over-gloomed with winter woods, was Mother, darning a sock and lecturing the homicidal-looking Crook McKusick on cursing and swearing and carryings-on. Crook stared down at her adoringly, and just when she seemed to have penetrated his tough hide with her moral injunctions he chuckled: “By golly! I believe I’ll marry and settle down—just as soon as I can find a moll that’ll turn into a cute old lady like you, aunty.”
“Now, Mr. McKusick,” she said, severely, “you want to reform for the sake of reforming, not just to please some girl—not but what a nice sweet woman would be good—”
“Nothing will ever be good for me, aunty. I’m gone. This sweet civilization of ours has got me. The first reform school I went to reformedme, all right—formed me into a crook. I used to show signs of growing up to be fair to middling intelligent, once. But now—nothing to it. You people, though you’re twice as old as I am, you’re twice as young. You got a chance. Look here, Uncle Appleby, why don’t you go out for being one of these famous old pedestrians that get their mugs in the papers? Will you do what I tell you to, if I train you? I’ve trained quite some pugs before—before I quit.”
Mother acerbically declined to learn the art of physical culture. “Me at my time of life learning to do monkey-shines and bending and flapping my arms like a chicken with its head cut off.” But Father enthusiastically and immediately started in to become the rival of the gentlemen in jerseys who wear rubber heels in the advertisements and spend their old ages in vigorously walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, merely in order to walk back again.
While his fellow-hoboes about the fire jeered, Father bent over forty times, and raised himself on his toes sixty, and solemnly took breathing-exercises.
Next day he slowly trotted ninety times aboutthe clearing, his chin up and his chest out, while Crook McKusick, excited at being a trainer again, snapped orders at him and talked about form.... A ludicrous figure, a little old man, his white locks flapping under a mushy cap as he galloped earnestly through the light snow. But his cheeks were one red glow, his eyes were bright, and in his laugh, when he finished, was infinite hope.
If it had been Mother who had first taken charge of the camp and converted it to respectability and digestible food, it was Father who really ran it, for he was the only person who could understand her and Crook McKusick and the sloppy Kid all at once.
Crook McKusick had long cultivated a careful habit of getting drunk once a week. But two weeks after the coming of the Applebys he began to omit his sprees, because Mother needed him to help her engineer variations of the perpetual mulligan, and Father needed him for his regular training.
To the training Crook added a course in psychology. As a hobo he was learned in that science. The little clerk, the comfortable banker, the writer of love-stories—such dull plodders have their habits all set out for them.But the hobo, who has to ride the rods amid flying gravel to-day, and has to coax food out of a nice old lady to-morrow, must have an expert working knowledge of psychology if he is to climb in his arduous profession.
Father and Mother had started out from New York on a desperate flight, with no aspirations beyond the hope that they might be able to make a living. It was the hobo, Crook McKusick, who taught Father that there was no reason why, with his outdoor life and his broadened experience, he should not be a leader among men wherever he went; be an Edward Pilkings and a Miss Mitchin, yea, even a Mrs. Lulu Hartwig, instead of a meek, obedient, little Seth Appleby. It was Crook who, out of his own experience in doing the unusual, taught Father that it was just as easy to be unusual, to live a life excitedly free, as to be a shop-bound clerk. Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at a time, keeping at it, forming the habit.... So, an outcast among outcasts, grubbily bunked in a camp of hoboes, talking to a filthy lean man with an evil hooked nose, Seth Appleby began to think for himself, to the end that he should be one of the class that rules and is unafraid.
The amiable boarders at Hoboes’ Home didn’t at all mind Mother’s darning their socks. They didn’t much mind having her order them to wash their faces at a hole through the ice in the near-by creek before coming to dinner. But it took her many days to get them used to going off to work for money and supplies. Yet every day half the camp grumblingly disappeared to shuck corn, mend fences, repair machinery, and they came back with flour, potatoes, meat, coffee, torn magazines, and shirts. Father regularly went out to work with them, and was the first to bring water, to cut wood. They all took a pride in the camp. They kept the bunk-house scrubbed, and inordinately admired the new mattresses, stuffed with fresh straw and covered with new calico, which Mother made for them. In the evenings the group about the camp-fire was not so very different from any other happy family—except that there was an unusually large proportion of bright eyes and tanned faces.
But when spring cleared the snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead—vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about thefire—there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in starting off for new adventures.
That honest workman, “Struck Dumb,” disappeared one afternoon, telling Crook that he heard of much building at Duluth.
Crook laughed when Mother admired Mr. Struck Dumb’s yearning for creative toil. “That guy,” Crook declared, “is an honest workman except that he ain’t honest and he won’t work. He’ll last about two days in Duluth, and then he’ll pike for Alberta or San Diego or some place. He’s got restless feet, same like me.”
The K. C. Kid and Reddy jigged and shouted songs all one evening, and were off for the north. At last no one but Father and Mother and Crook was left. And they, too, were star-eyed with expectation of new roads, new hills. They sat solemnly by the fire on their last evening. Mother was magnificent in a new cloak, to buy which Father had secretly been saving pennies out of the dimes that he had earned by working about the country.
Usually Crook McKusick was gravely cynical when he listened to Father’s cataract of excitedplans, but he seemed wistful to-night, and he nodded his head as though, for once, he really did believe that Father and Mother would find some friendly village that would take them in.
Father was telling a story so ardently that he almost made himself believe it: Some day, Mother and he would be crawling along the road and discover a great estate. The owner, a whimsical man, a lonely and eccentric bachelor of the type that always brightens English novels, would invite them in, make Father his steward and Mother his lady housekeeper. There would be a mystery in the house—a walled-off room, a sound of voices at night in dark corridors where no voices could possibly be, a hidden tragedy, and at last Father and Mother would lift the burden from the place, and end their days in the rose-covered dower-house.... Not that Father was sure just what a dower-house was, but he was quite definite and positive about the rose-covering.
“How you run on,” Mother yawned.
“Aw, let him,” Crook cried, with sudden fierceness. “My Gawd! you two almost make me believe that there is such a thing as faith left in this dirty old world, that’s always seemed to me just the back of an eternal saloon. Maybe—maybeI’ll find my ambition again.... Well—g’ night.”
When with their pack and their outlooking smiles the Applebys prepared to start, next day, and turned to say good-by to Crook, he started, cried, “I will!” and added, “I’m coming with you, for a while!”
For two days Crook McKusick tramped with them, suiting his lean activity, his sardonic impatience, to their leisurely slowness. He called to the blackbirds, he found pasque-flowers for them, and in the sun-baked hollows between hillocks coaxed them to lie and dream.
But one morning they found a note:
Dear Aunty and Uncle:Heard a freight-train whistle and I’m off. But some day I’ll find you again. I’ll cut out the booze, anyway, and maybe I’ll be a human being again. God bless you babes in the woods.C. McK.
Dear Aunty and Uncle:
Heard a freight-train whistle and I’m off. But some day I’ll find you again. I’ll cut out the booze, anyway, and maybe I’ll be a human being again. God bless you babes in the woods.
C. McK.
“The poor boy! God will bless him, too, and keep him, because he’s opened his heart again,” whispered Mother. “Are we babes in the woods, Seth? I’d rather be that than a queen, long as I can be with you.”
East and west, north and south, the hoboes journeyed, and everywhere they carried withthem fables of Mr. and Mrs. Seth Appleby, the famous wanderers, who at seventy, eighty, ninety, were exploring the world. Benighted tramps in city lock-ups, talking to bored police reporters, told the story, and it began to appear in little filler paragraphs here and there in newspapers.
Finally a feature-writer on a Boston paper, a man with imagination and a sense of the dramatic, made a one-column Sunday story out of the adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Appleby. He represented them as wealthy New-Yorkers who were at once explorers and exponents of the simple life. He said nothing about a shoe-store, a tea-room, a hobo-camp.
The idea of these old people making themselves a new life caught many imaginations. The Sunday story was reprinted and reprinted till the source of it was entirely forgotten. The names of the Applebys became stock references in many newspaper offices—Father even had a new joke appended to his name, as though he were an actor or an author or Chauncey Depew.
The Applebys were largely unconscious of their floating fame. But as they tramped westward through West Virginia, as the flood tide of spring and the vigor of summer bore them acrossOhio and into Indiana, they found that in nearly every town people knew their names and were glad to welcome them as guests instead of making them work for food. When Father did insist on cutting wood or spading a garden, it was viewed as a charming eccentricity in him, a consistent following of the simple life, and they were delighted when he was so whimsical as to accept pay for his work.
But he never played the mouth-organ—except to Mother!
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THEY were in Indiana, now. They had saved up six dollars and twenty cents, despite the fact that Father had overborne her caution and made her dine at a lunch-room, now and then, or sleep at a hotel, while he cheerfully scavenged in the neighborhood.
The shoes he had bought in West Virginia were impossible. They had been mended and resoled, but the new soles had large concentric holes. Mother discovered the fact, and decisively took the problem out of his hands. He was going to take that six dollars and twenty cents, he was, and get new shoes. It was incredible luxury.
He left Mother at a farm-house. He stood meditatively before the window of a shoe-store in Lipsittsville, Indiana. Lawyer Vanduzen, who read the papers, guessed who he was, and imparted the guess to the loafers in front of the Regal Drug Store, who watched him respectfully.
Inside the shoe-store, the proprietor was excited. “Why,” he exclaimed to his assistant, “that must be Appleby, the pedestrian—fellow you read so much about—the Indianapolis paper said just this morning that he was some place in this part of the country—you know, the fellow who’s tramped all over Europe and Asia with his wife, and is bound for San Francisco now.” His one lone clerk, a youth with adenoids, gaped and grunted. It was incredible to him that any one should walk without having to.
Father was aware of the general interest, and as he was becoming used to his rôle as public character, he marched into the store like the Lord Mayor of London when he goes shopping in his gold coach with three men and a boy in powdered wigs carrying his train.
The proprietor bowed and ventured: “Glad to see you with us, Mr. Appleby. It is Mr. Appleby, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” growled Father.
“Well, well! Tramping like yours is pretty hard on the footgear, and that’s a fact! Well, well! Believe me, you’ve come to just the right store for sport shoes. We got a large line of smart new horsehide shoes. Dear me! Tut, tut,tut, tut! What a pity, the way the tramping has worn out yours—fine shoe, too, I can see that. Well, well, well, well! how it surely does wear out the shoes, this long tramping. Peter, bring a pair of those horsehide shoes for Mr. Appleby. Nice, small, aristocratic foot, Mr. Appleby. If you worked in a shoe-store you’d know how uncommon—”
“Huh! Don’t want horsehide. Try a pair o’ those pigskin shoes over there that you got a sale on.”
“Well, well, you do know what you want,” fawned the shoeman. “Those pigskins are a very fine grade of shoe, and very inexpensive, very good for tramping—”
“Yump. They’ll do.”
“Going to be with us long?” inquired the shoeman, after trying on the shoes and cursing out Peter, the adenoidic clerk, in an abstracted, hopeless manner.
“Nope.” Father was wonderfully bored and superior. Surely not this Seth Appleby but a twin of his, a weak-kneed inferior twin, had loafed in Tompkins Square and wavered through the New York slums, longing for something to do. He didn’t really mean to be curt, but his chief business in life was to get his shoes andhurry back to Mother, who was waiting for him, a mile from town, at a farm where the lordly Father had strung fence-wire and told high-colored stories for his breakfast.
The fascinated shoeman hated to let him go. The shoeman knew few celebrities, and a five-mile motor ride was his wildest adventure. But by the light of a secret lamp in the bathroom, when his wife supposed him to have gone to bed, he breathlessly read theBack o’ the Beyond Magazine, and slew pirates with a rubber sponge, and made a Turkish towel into a turban covered with quite valuable rubies, and coldly defied all the sharks in the bathtub. He was an adventurer and he felt that Father Appleby would understand his little-appreciated gallantry. He continued, “The madam with you?”
“Yump.”
“Say—uh—if I may be so bold and just suggest it, we’d be honored if you and the madam could take dinner at our house and tell us about your trip. The wife and me was talking about it just this morning. The wife said, guessed we’d have to pike out and do the same thing! Hee, hee! And Doc Schergan—fine bright man the doc, very able and cultured and educated—he’s crazy to meet you. We were talking aboutyou just this morning—read about your heading this way, in the Indianapolis paper. Say,” he leaned forward and whispered, after a look at his clerk which ought to have exterminated that unadventurous youth—“say, is it true what they say, that you’re doing this on a ten-thousand-dollar bet?”
“Well,” and Father thawed a little, “that’s what they’re all saying, but, confidentially, and don’t let this go any further, it isn’t as much as that. This is between you and I, now.”
“Oh yessss,” breathed the flattered shoeman. “There’s your shoes, Mr. Appleby. Four dollars, please. Thank you. And let me tell you, confidentially, you got the best bargain in the store. I can see with half an eye you’ve learned a lot about shoes. I suppose it’s only natural, tramping and wearing them out so fast and visiting the big burgs and all—”
“Huh! Ought to know shoes. Used to be in business. Pilkings & Son’s, little old New York. Me and old Pilky practically started the business together, as you might say.”
“Well, well, well, well!” The shoeman stared in reverent amazement. Then, as he could think of nothing further to say, he justly observed, “Well!”
“Yump. That reminds me. Make that boy of yours rearrange that counter case there. Those pink-satin evening slippers simply lose all their display value when you stick those red-kid bed-slippers right up ferninst them that way.
“Yes, yes, that’s so. I’m much obliged to you for the tip, Mr. Appleby. That’s what it is to be trained in a big burg. But I’ll have to rearrange it myself. That boy Peter is no good. I’m letting him go, come Saturday.”
“That so?” said Father; then, authoritatively: “Peter, my boy, you ought to try to make good here. Nothing I’d like better—if I had the time—than to grow up in a shoe-store in a nice, pretty village like this.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ve told him many’s the time. Do you hear what Mr. Appleby says, Peter?... Say, Mr. Appleby, does this town really strike you as having the future for the shoe business?”
“Why, sure.”
“Are you ever likely to think about going back into the shoe business again, some day? ’Course,” apologetically, “you wouldn’t ever want to touch anything in as small a burg as this, but in a way it’s kind of a pity. I wasjust thinking of how the youngsters here would flock to have you give ’em your expert advice as a sporting gentleman, instead of hanging around that cheap-John shoe-store that those confounded worthless Simpson boys try to run.”
Father carefully put down the bundle of his new shoes, drew a long breath, then tried to look bored again. Cautiously: “Yes, I’ve thought some of going back into business. ’Course I’d hate to give up my exploring and all, but— Progress, you know; hate to lay down the burden of big affairs after being right in the midst of them for so long.” Which was a recollection of some editorial Father had read in a stray roadside newspaper. “And you mustn’t suppose I’d be sniffy about Lipsittsville. No, no; no, indeed. Not at all. I must say I don’t know when I’ve seen a more wide-awake, pretty town—and you can imagine how many towns I must have seen. Maples and cement walks and nice houses and—uh—wide-awake town.... Well, who knows! Perhaps some day I might come back here and talk business with you. Ha, ha! Though I wouldn’t put in one cent of capital. No, sir! Not one red cent. All my money is invested with my son-in-law—youknow, Harris Hartwig, the famous chemical works. Happen to know um?”
“Oh yes, indeed! Harry Sartwig. I don’t know himpersonally, but of course I’ve heard of him. Well, I do wish you’d think it over, some day, Mr. Appleby. Indeed I understand about the capital. If you and me ever did happen to come to terms, I’d try to see my way clear to giving you an interest in the business, in return for your city experience and your expert knowledge and fame and so on as an explorer—not that we outfit so many explorers here. Hee, hee!”
“Well, maybe I’ll think it over, some day. Well—well, maybe I’ll see you again before I get out of town. I’m kind of planning to stick around here for a day or two. I’ll talk over the suggestion with Mrs. Appleby. Me, I could probably call off my wager; but she is really the one that you’d have to convince. She’s crazy for us to hike out and tramp clear down into Mexico and Central America. Doesn’t mind bandits and revolutions no more than you and I would a mouse.”
In his attempt to let people bluff themselves and accept him as a person to be taken seriously, Father kept on trying to adhere to the truth.But certainly this last statement of his was the grossest misrepresentation of Mother’s desires. Mother Appleby, with her still unvanquished preference for tea and baths, did not have the slightest desire to encounter bandits, snakes, deserts, or cacti of any variety.
“Well, lookhere, Mr. Appleby; if you are going to be around, couldn’t you and the madam come to dinner, as I was so bold as to suggest awhile ago? That would give us a chance to discuss things. Aside from any future business dicker between you and me personally, I’d like to show you just why Lipsittsville is going to be a bigger town than Freiburg or Taormina or Hongkong or Bryan or any of the other towns in the county, let ’em say what they like! Or couldn’t you come to supper to-night? Then we could let the ladies gossip, and I’ll have Doc Schergan come in, and maybe him and me between us could persuade you to think of taking a partnership with me—wouldn’t cost you a cent of capital, neither. Why, the doc was saying, just this morning, when we was speaking of having read about you in the paper—he was saying that you were the kind of man we need for president of our country club, instead of some dude like that sissified Buck Simpson.Buck is as punk an athlete as he is a shoeman, and, believe me, Mr. Appleby, we’ve got the makings of a fine country club. We expect to have a club-house and tennis-courts and golluf-links and all them things before long. We got a croquet-ground right now! And every Fourthajuly we all go for a picnic. Now can’t the madam come? Make it supper this evening. But, say, I want to warn you that if we ever did talk business, I don’t see how I could very well offer you more than a forty-per-cent. interest, in any case.”
“No,” growled Father, “wouldn’t take over a third interest. Don’t believe in demanding too much. Live and let live, that’s my motto.”
“Yes, sir, and a fine motto it is, too,” admired the shoeman.
“What time is supper?”
“... and before I get through with it I’ll own a chain of shoe-stores from here to Indianapolis,” said Father. “I’ll be good for twenty years’ more business, and I’ll wake this town up.”
“I do believe you will, Father. But I just can’t believe yet that you’ve actually signed the contract and are a partner,” Mother yearned. “Why, it ain’t possible.”
“Guess it is possible, though, judging by this hundred dollar advance,” Father chuckled. “Nice fellow, that shoeman—or he will be when he gets over thinking I’m a tin god and sits down and plays crib like I was an ordinary human being.... We ought to have larger show-windows. We’ll keep Peter on—don’t want to make the boy lose his job on account of me. Give him another chance.... I’m just wambling, Mother, but I’m so excited at having a job again—”
With tiny pats of her arm, he stalked the street, conscious of the admiring gaze of the villagers, among whom ran the news that the famous explorer was going to remain with them.
When the landlord himself had preceded them up-stairs to the two rooms which the shoeman had engaged for the Applebys at the Star Hotel, Father chuckled: “Does it look more possible, now, with these rooms, eh? Let’s see, we must get a nice little picture of a kitten in a basket, to hang over that radiator. Drat the landlord, I thought he’d stick here all evening, and—I want to kiss you, my old honey, my comrade!”
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THE Lipsittsville Pioneer Shoe Store found Mr. Seth Appleby the best investment it had ever made. The proprietor was timorous about having given away thirty-three per cent. of his profits. But Mr. Appleby did attract customers—from the banker’s college-bred daughter to farmers from the other side of the Lake—and he really did sell more shoes. He became a person of lasting importance.
In a village, every clerk, every tradesman, has something of the same distinctive importance as the doctors, the lawyers, the ministers. It really makes a difference to you when Jim Smith changes from Brown’s grocery to Robinson’s, because Jim knows what kind of sugar-corn you like, and your second cousin married Jim’s best friend. Bill Blank, the tailor, is not just a mysterious agent who produces your clothes, but a real personality, whose wife’s bonnet is worth your study, even though you are the wife of the mayor. So to every person inLipsittsville Mr. Seth Appleby was not just a lowly person on a stool who helped one in the choice of shoes. He was a person, he was their brother, to be loved or hated. If he had gone out of the shoe business there would have been something else for him to do—he would have sold farm machinery or driven on a rural mail route or collected rents, and have kept the same acquaintances.
It was very pleasant to Father to pass down the village street in the sun, to call the town policeman “Ben” and the town banker “Major” and the town newspaperman “Lym,” and to be hailed as “Seth” in return. It was diverting to join the little group of G. A. R. men in the back of the Filson Land and Farms Company office, and have even the heroes of Gettysburg pet him as a promising young adventurer and ask for his tales of tramping.
Father was rather conscience-stricken when he saw how the town accepted his pretense of being an explorer, but when he tried to tell the truth everybody thought that he was merely being modest, and he finally settled down contentedly to being a hero, to the great satisfaction of all the town, which pointed out to unfortunate citizens of Freiburg and Hongkongand Bryan and other rival villages that none of them had a real up-to-date hero with all modern geographical improvements. In time, as his partner, the shoeman, had predicted, Father was elected president of the clubless country club, and organized a cross-country hike in which he outdistanced all the others, including the young and boastful Buck Simpson.
He was slowly recognized as being “in society.” To tell the truth, most of Lipsittsville was in society, but a few citizens weren’t—Barney Bachschluss, the saloon-keeper; Tony, who sawed wood and mowed lawns; the workmen on the brick-yard and on the railway. Father was serenely established upon a social plane infinitely loftier than theirs.
He wore a giddy, spotted, bat-wing tie, and his grand good gray trousers were rigidly creased. He read editorials in the Indianapolis paper and discussed them with Doc Schergan at the drug-store.
The only trouble was that Mother had nothing to do. She was discontented, in their two rooms at the Star Hotel. No longer could she, as in her long years of flat life in New York, be content to sit dreaming and reading the paper. She was as brisk and strong and effective asFather. Open woods and the windy road had given her a restless joy in energy. She made a gown of gray silk and joined the Chautauqua Circle, but that was not enough.
On an evening of late August, when a breeze was in the maples, when the sunset was turquoise and citron green and the streets were serenely happy, Father took her out for a walk. They passed the banker’s mansion, with its big curving screened porch, and its tower, and brought up at a row of modern bungalows which had just been completed.
“I wanted you to see these,” said Father, “because some time—this is a secret I been keeping—some time I guess we’ll be able to rent one of these! Don’t see why we can’t early next year, the way things are going!”
“Oh, Father!” she said, almost tearfully.
“Would you like it?”
“Like it! With a real house and something to keep my hands busy! And maybe a kitty! And I would make you tea (I’m so tired of hotel food!) and we would sit out here on the porch—”
“Yes, you’d have old Mr. Seth Appleby for tea-room customer. He’s better ’n anybody they got on Cape Cod!”
“Yes, and youarebetter, too, Father!”
“You old honeymooner! Say, I’ve got an idea. I wonder if we couldn’t sneak in a look inside of one of these bungalows. Let’s try this door.”
He shook the door-knob of a bungalow so new that laths and mortar were still scattered about the yard. The door was locked. He tried the windows as well. But he could not get in. Three other bungalows they tried, and the fourth, the last of the row, was already occupied. But they did steal up on the porch of one bungalow, and they exclaimed like children when they beheld the big living-room, the huge fireplace, the built-in shelves and, beyond the living-room, what seemed to be the dining-room, with an enormous chandelier which may not, perhaps, have been of the delicate reticence of a silver candlestick, but whose jags and blobs of ruby and emerald and purple glass filled their hearts with awe.
“Wewillget one of these houses!” Father vowed. “I thought you’d like them. I swear, I’ll cut out my smoking, if necessary. Say! Got another idea! I wonder if we couldn’t make up some excuse and butt into the bungalow that’s been rented, and see how it looksfurnished. I understand there’s some new-comers living there. We’ll sort of make them a neighborly call.”
“Oh, do you think we ought to?”
Mother, she who had faced a sheriff’s shot-gun, was timorous about facing an irate matron, and she tagged hesitatingly after Father as he marched along the row of bungalows, up the steps of the one that was rented, and rang the bell.
The door was opened by a maid, in a Lipsittsville version of a uniform.
“Lady or gent o’ the house in?” asked Father, airily sticking his new derby on one side of his head and thrusting a thumb in an armhole, very impudent and fresh and youthful.
“No, sir,” said the maid, stupidly.
Mother sighed. To tell the truth, she had wanted to see the promised land of this bungalow.
“Well, say, girl, Mrs. Appleby and I are thinking of renting one of these here bungalonies, like the fellow says, and I wonder if we could take a look at this house, to see how it looks furnished?”
The maid stared dumbly at him, looked suspiciously at Mother. Apparently she decidedthat, though the flamboyant Father was likely to steal everything in the house, Mother was a person to be trusted, and she mumbled, “Yass, I gass so.”
Father led the way in, and Mother stumbled over every possible obstacle, so absorbed was she by the intimate pleasantness which furniture gave to this big living-room—as large as the whole of their flat in New York. Actually, the furniture wasn’t impressive—just a few good willow chairs, a big couch, a solid table. There were only two or three pictures, one rug, and, in the built-in shelves, no books at all. But it had space and cheerfulness; it was a home.
“Here’s the dining-room, with butler’s pantry, and that door on the right looks like it might be a bedroom,” Father announced, after a hasty exploration, while the maid stared doubtfully. He went on, half whispering, “Let’s peep into the bedroom.”
“No, no, we mustn’t do that,” Mother insisted, but regretfully. For she was already wondering where, if she were running things, she would put a sewing-machine. She had always agreed with Matilda Tubbs that sewing-machines belonged in bedrooms.
While the maid shadowed him and Mother opened her mouth to rebuke him, Father boldly pushed open the door on the right. He had guessed correctly. It was a bedroom. Mother haughtily stayed in the center of the living-room, but she couldn’t help glancing through the open door, and she sighed enviously as she saw the splendor of twin beds, with a little table and an electric light between them, and the open door of a tiled bathroom. It was too much that the mistress of the house should have left her canary-yellow silk sweater on the foot of one bed. Mother had wanted a silk sweater ever since she had beheld one flaunted on Cape Cod.
Father darted out, seized her wrists, dragged her into the bedroom, and while she was exploding in the lecture he so richly deserved she stopped, transfixed. Father was pointing to a picture over one bed, and smiling strangely.
The picture was an oldish one, in a blackened old frame. It showed a baby playing with kittens.
“Why!” gasped Mother—“why—why, it’s just like the picture—itisthe picture—that we got when Lulu was born—that we had to leave on the Cape.”
“Yump,” said Father. He still smiled strangely. He pointed at the table between the twin beds. On the table was a little brown, dusty book. Mother gazed at it dazedly. Her step was feeble as she tottered between the beds, picked up the book, opened it. It was the New Testament which she had had since girlhood, which she had carried all through their hike, which she supposed to be in their rooms back at the Star Hotel.
There was a giggle from the doorway, and the apparently stupid maid was there, bowing.
“Lena, has our trunk come from the hotel?” Father asked.
“Yessir, I just been sneaking it in the back way. Welcome home, mum,” said the maid, and shut the door—from the other side.
Mother suddenly crumpled, burrowed her head against Father’s shoulder and sobbed: “This is ours? Our own? Now?”
“Yes, Mother, it sure am ours.” Father still tried to speak airily, but in his voice were passion and a grave happiness. “It’s ours—yours! And every stick of the furniture more than half paid for already! I didn’t tell you how well we’re doing at the store. Say, golly, I sure did have a time training Lena to playthe game, like she didn’t know us. She thought I was plumb nutty, at first!”
“And I have a maid, too!” marveled Mother.
“Yes, and a garden if you want to keep busy outdoors. And a phonograph with nineteen records, musical and comic, by Jiminy!”
To prove which he darted back into the living-room, started “Molly Magee, My Girl,” and to its cheerful strains he danced a fantastic jig, while the maid stared from the dining-room, and Mother, at the bedroom door, wept undisguisedly, murmuring, “Oh, my boy, my boy, that planned it all to surprise me!”
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