Читать книгу A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days - Walter A. Wyckoff - Страница 5

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He was an American of Irish stock; his name was Farrell; he was two-and-twenty, a little more than six feet high, and as straight as an arrow. We met on the line of the Rock Island Railway just west of Morris, Ill.

But first, I should like to explain that in the course of eighteen months’ experience as a wandering wage-earner, drifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, this was the only day that I spent in company with a tramp.

It was in the character of a workingman and not as a tramp, that I began, in the summer of 1891, a casual experiment, by which I hoped to gain some personal acquaintance with the conditions of life of unskilled laborers in America. Having no skill, I could count on employment only in the rudest forms of labor, and I maintained consistently the character of a laborer—a very indifferent one, I am bound to own—yet finding it possible everywhere to live by the work of my hands.

I did tramp, it is true, walking in all some twenty-five hundred miles of the distance from Connecticut to California; but I did it from set purpose, discovering that in this way I could get a better knowledge of the people and the country and of opportunities for work, than if I should spend my savings in car-fare from place to place. It cost me nothing to walk, and I not infrequently covered two hundred miles in the course of a week, but it generally proved that, in actual cash from the savings of my last job, I was out quite as much as I should have been had I ridden the distance. This was because it was often necessary to pay for food and lodging by the way, an odd job not always being procurable, and the people being far readier to give a meal than to take the trouble of providing work in payment for it. I could little blame them, and I soon began to make use of the wayside inns, trusting for contact with people more to chance acquaintance and the admirable opportunities that came with every event of employment, when my savings were gone.

Tramp is a misnomer, I fancy, as descriptive of the mode of motion of the members of the professionally idle class which in our vernacular we call hoboes. The tramp rarely tramps; he “beats his way” on the railroads.

Everyone knows of the very thorough-going and valuable work that Mr. Josiah Flynt has done in learning the vagrant world, not only of America, but of England, and widely over the Continent as well, and the light that he has let in upon the habits of life and of thought of the fraternity, and its common speech and symbols, and whence its recruits come, and why, and how it occupies a world midway between lawlessness and honest toil, lacking the criminal wit for the one and the will power for the other.

That the hobo, in going from place to place, makes little use of the highways, I can freely testify, so far as my limited experience goes. His name was legion among the unemployed in Chicago, and he flocked about railway centres, but he was a rare bird along the country roads where work was plentiful.

It is easy to recount individually all that I met: a lusty Yankee beggar who hailed me as a brother one blistering July day, not far from the Connecticut border, when I was making for Garrisons; a cynical wraith, who rose, seemingly, from the dust of the road, in the warm twilight of a September evening, in eastern Pennsylvania and scoffed at my hope of finding work in Sweet Valley; a threadbare, white-haired German with a truly fine reserve and courtesy, who so far warmed to me, when we met in the frosty air of late November, on the bare, level stretch of a country road between Cleveland and Sandusky, as to tell me that he had walked from Texas, and was on his way to the home of friends near Boston; then Farrell, in central Illinois; and finally, a blear-eyed, shaggy knave, trudging the sleepers of the Union Pacific in western Nebraska, his rags bound together and bound on with strings, and a rollicking quality in his cracked voice, who must have had difficulty in avoiding work among the short-handed gangs of navvies along the line.

All this is by way of fruitless explanation that I myself was not a tramp, but a workman, living by day’s labor; a fruitless explanation, because a reputation once established is difficult to dislodge. I have grown accustomed to references to my “tramp days,” even among those who knew my purpose best, and I had no sooner returned to my university than I found that to its members I was already known as “Weary,” in which alliterative appellation I saw the frankest allusion to a supposed identification with the “Weary Willies” of our “comic” prints. And having incurred the name, I may as well lay bare the one day that I tramped with a tramp.

I am not without misgivings in speaking of Farrell as a tramp. He had held a steady job some weeks before, and our day together ended as we shall see; but if I was a hobo, so was he, and although clearly not of the strictest sect, and perhaps of no true sect at all, yet let us grant that, for the time, we both were tramps.

The line of a railway was an unusual course, for I much preferred the country roads as offering better walking, and far more hope of meeting the people that I wished to know. Heavy rains, however, had made the roads almost impassable on foot, and I was walking the sleepers from necessity.

The spring of 1892 had been uncommonly wet. The rains set in about the time that I quit work with a gang of roadmakers on the Exposition grounds. So incessant were they that it grew difficult to leave Chicago on foot, and when, in the middle of May, I did set out, I got only as far as Joliet, when I had to seek employment again.

At the yards of the Illinois Steel Company I was taken on and assigned to a gang of laborers, mostly Hungarians. But my chief association of a week’s stay there is with a boarding-house, and especially its landlady.

She was a girlish matron, with a face that made you think of a child-wife, but she was a woman in capacity. Her baby was a year old, and generous Heaven was about to send another. Her boarders numbered seven when I was made welcome; and to help her in the care of a crippled husband and the child and guests, she had a little maid of about fifteen, while, to add to the income from our board, she took in all our washing, and did it herself with no outside help. She may have been twenty, but I should have guessed eighteen, and every man of us stood straight before her and did her bidding thankfully.

It was a proud moment, and one which made me feel more nearly on equal terms with the other men, when one evening she came to me and,

“John, you mind the baby this time while I finish getting supper,” she said, as she put the child in my arms.

On the sofa in the sitting-room we would lay the little wide-eyed, sunny creature whom we rarely heard cry, and who never showed fear at the touch of our rough hands, nor at the thundering laughter that answered to her smiles and her gurgling attempts at speech.

The mother waited at the table, and joined freely in our talk. She had a way of saying “By gosh!” that fairly broke your heart, and at times she would stand still and swear softly, while her deep blue eyes widened in innocent surprise.

They were haunting eyes, and they followed me far out on the rain-soaked roads of the valley of the Illinois. The walking was not bad at first. Over a rolling country the way wound past woodland and open fields, between banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but for the evident richness of soil, and the entire absence of rock, it might have been a New England valley with nothing to suggest the earlier monotony of undulating prairie.

But the walking became steadily worse, until by nightfall each step was a painful pulling of a foot out of the mire then planting it in the mire ahead, with Morris a good ten miles beyond. I was passing in the late twilight a farm-house that stood close to the road. In his shirt-sleeves, and seated in a tilted chair on the porch, was a young farmer with a group of lightly clad children about him. He accepted the explanation that I found the walking too heavy to admit of my reaching Morris that evening, and, readily giving me leave to sleep on his hay-mow, asked me in to have something to eat.

I was struck at first sight with a marked resemblance in him to my friend Fitz-Adams, the manager of the logging camp in Pennsylvania. All through our talk, while seated on the porch in the evening, there were reminders in his manner and turns of speech and ways of looking at things of that very efficient boss.

He was living in apparent poverty. The house was small and slightly built and meanly furnished. Indeed, there was an effect of squalor in its scant interior, and in the unkempt appearance of his wife and children. But the man impressed you with the resolute reserve of one who bides his time and knows what he is about. It appeared in his evident contentment, joined with a certain hopefulness that was very engaging. It is true that the spring was wet, so wet that he had not yet been able to plant his corn, and it was growing late for planting, but, even if the crop should fail completely, he had much corn in the best condition, he said, left over from the uncommonly large crop of the year before, which would be selling in the autumn at a better price. He was depressed by the persistent rains, but not discouraged, and, as for the region in which he had cast his lot, he clearly thought it one of the best for a man beginning the world as a farmer. With land at fifty dollars an acre, there was a good market near at hand, and money on the security of the land could be had at five per cent. It was best to buy, he said. Four thousand dollars would secure a farm of eighty acres, and two hundred dollars would pay the interest, whereas the rental might reach three hundred or even three hundred and fifty. Unmistakably he was poor, but he was certainly not of the complaining sort, and I thought that it did not require a long look into the future to see him in full possession of the land and the owner of a more comfortable home besides.

When the barn-yard fowls wakened me in the morning the sun was rising to a cloudless dawn. But, by the time that I took to the road, all the sky was overcast again, and progress was as difficult as on the night before. The stoneless soil was saturated, until it could absorb not another drop, and water formed a pool in every foot-print and ran in muddy streams in the wheel-tracks.

Two miles down the road was a railway. I reached it after an hour’s hard walk and followed it to the tow-path of a canal, which afforded comparatively firm footing over the remaining eight miles into Morris. It was now ten o’clock, and for the past hour a steady drizzle had been falling, which increased to a down-pour as I entered the town. There I remained sheltered until nearly noon, when the rain ceased and I renewed the journey. The roads I knew by experience to be almost impassable, so I found the line of the Rock Island Railway and started west in the hope of reaching Ottawa by night.

Dense clouds lay heavily upon the fields that stood, many of them, deep in water. The moist air was hot and sluggish, but under foot was the hard road-bed, and the course was the straightest that could be cut to the Mississippi. The line was a double one, and the gutter between formed a good cinder-track, so that I had not to measure the distance from sleeper to sleeper at every step, which grows to be a horrible monotony.

I had cleared the town by two miles or more and was settling to the swing of a long walk when I saw, not far ahead, a gang of navvies at work; almost at the same moment there appeared, emerging from the fog beyond, the figure of a man. We were about equally distant from the gang, and I had passed the workmen only a few yards when we met. The impression grew as he drew near that here was a typical tramp, and, being unaccustomed to his order and its ways, I wondered how we should fare, if thrown together. But if I recognized him as a tramp, he had done as much by me; for, when we met, he hailed me as a confrère with,

“Hello, partner! which way?”

“I’m going to Ottawa,” I said.

“How long will you hold Ottaway down?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m only passing through on my way to Davenport.”

That was enough for Farrell as evidence of my being a hobo, however raw a recruit; but there was a certain courtesy of the road which he wished to maintain, if he could, in the face of my awkward ignorance. I was conscious of an embarrassment which I could not understand.

“How far is it to Morris?” he asked next, and the opening should have been enough for any man, but I answered dully, with painful accuracy as to the distance that I had come.

Clearly nothing would penetrate such density but the frankest directness, so out he blurted:

“Well, partner, if you don’t mind, I’ll go with you.”

Light dawned upon me then, and I tried to make up in cordiality for a want of intuition. Embarrassment was gone at once, and with an ease, as of long acquaintance, Farrell began to tell me how that, on the day before, he had lost his partner and for twenty-four hours had been alone. The loneliness was a horror to him, from which he shrunk, even in the telling, and he expanded, in the companionship of a total stranger, like a flower in light and warmth.

Without a moment’s hesitation he abandoned the way toward Morris and turned back upon his former course, with a light-heartedness at having a partner that was highly flattering.

Here certainly was life reduced to simple terms. As we stood at meeting on the railway line, Farrell was as though he had no single human tie with a strong hold upon him. The clothes that covered him were his only possessions, and a toss of a coin might well determine toward which point of the compass he would go. The casual meeting with a new acquaintance was enough to give direction to an immediate plan and to change the face of nature.

There was trouble in his blue eyes when we met, the fluttering, anxious bewilderment that one sees in the eyes of a half-frightened child. It was an appeal for relief from intolerable loneliness; all his face brightened when we set off together. He had the natural erectness of carriage which gives a distinction of its own, and, apart from a small, weak mouth, slightly tobacco-stained, and an ill-defined chin, he was good to look at, with his straight nose and well set eyes and generous breadth of forehead, the thick brown hair turning gray about it and adding to his looks a good ten years above his actual two-and-twenty. A faded coat was upon his arm and he wore a flannel shirt that had once been navy blue, and ragged trousers, and a pair of boots, through rents in which his bare feet appeared. A needle was stuck through the front of his shirt, and the soiled white cotton with which it was threaded was wound around the cloth within the projecting ends.

However accustomed to “beating his way,” instead of going on foot, Farrell may have been, he was a good walker. Stretching far ahead was the level reach of the road-bed, with the converging lines of rails disappearing in the mist. Our muscles relaxed in the hot, unmoving air, until we struck the gait which becomes a mechanical swing with scarcely a sense of effort. Then Farrell was at his best. Snatches of strange song fell from him and remembered fragments of stage dialogue with little meaning and with no connection, but all expressing his care-free mood. It was contagious. Oh, but the world was wide and fair, and we were young and free, and vagabond and unashamed! Walt Whitman was our poet then, but I did not tell Farrell so; for the new, raw wine of life was in his veins, and he sang a song of his own.

A breeze sprang up from the west, and the heavy mists began to move, but from out the east great banks of clouds rose higher with the sound of distant thunder, which drew nearer, until spattering raindrops fell, fairly hissing on the hot rails. No shelter was at hand; when the storm broke it came with vindictive fury and drenched us in a few moments. We walked on with many looks behind to make sure of not being run down, for we could scarcely have heard the approach of a train in the almost unbroken peals of thunder that nearly drowned our shouts. Then the shower passed; the thunder grew distant and faint again, and from a clear sky the sun shone upon us with blistering heat, through air as still and heavy and as surcharged with electricity as before the storm.

Farrell had been quite indifferent to the rain, accepting it with a philosophic unconcern that was perfect. There was certainly little cause to complain, for in half an hour our clothing was dry; meantime the expression of his mood was changed. He had been friendly before, but impersonal; now he wished to get into closer touch.

“Where are you from, partner?” he asked.

“I worked last winter in Chicago,” I said.

“What at?”

“Trucking in a factory for awhile, then with a road-gang on the Fair Grounds. I had a job in Joliet, but I quit in a week,” I concluded. I was short, for I knew that this was merely introductory, and that Farrell was fencing for an opening.

“I’ve been on the road seven weeks now, looking for a job, and, in that time, I ain’t slept but two nights in a bed,” he began.

“Two nights in a bed out of forty-nine?” I asked.

“Yes. In that time I’ve beat my way out to Omaha and back to Lima and up and down; and one night a farmer near Tiffin, Ohio, give me a supper and let me sleep in a bed in his wagon-house, and one wet night in Chicago I had the price of a bunk in me jeans, and I says to meself, says I, ‘I’d sooner sleep dry to-night than get drunk.’ ”

It came then of itself, needing only an occasional prompting question, and the narrative was essentially true, I fancy; for, free from embellishment, it moved with the directness of reality.

Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emigrated from Ireland, Farrell was bred in an Illinois village, about fifty miles north of where we were walking at the time. His two sisters lived there still, he thought, but his mother had died when he was but a lad. His father was a day laborer at work in Peoria, so far as Farrell knew. He had not seen him for many years, and he kept up no contact with his people.

Much the most interesting part of the story to me was that which related to the past year. Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he hardly knew how, and was already a confirmed roadster, with an inordinate love for tobacco, and a well-developed taste for drink.

In the early summer he had drifted into Ottawa, the very town that we were nearing, and, being momentarily tired of the road, he sought and found a job in a tile factory. At this point his narrative grew deeply absorbing, because of the unconscious art of it in its simple adherence to life; but being unable to reproduce his words, I can only suggest their import.

It was a crisis in his history. The change began with an experience of a mechanics’ boarding-house. He was a vagabond by breeding, with no clearly defined ideas beyond food and drink, and immunity from work. He was awaking to manhood, and there began to dawn for him at the boarding-house a sense of home, and of something more in the motherly care of the housekeeper.

“Say, she was good to me,” was his own expression, “she done me proud. She used to mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never chewed the rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I swore off for good; and then I used to give her me wages to keep for me, and she’d allow me fifty cents a week above me board.”

The picture went on unfolding itself naturally in the portrayal of interests undreamed of beyond idleness, and enough of plug and beer. The savings grew to a little store; then there came the suggestion of a new suit of clothes, and a hat and boots, and a boiled shirt and collar, and a bright cravat. Farrell little thought of the native touch of art in his description of how, when all these were procured, he would fare forth on a Sunday morning, not merely another man, but other than anything that he had imagined. A sense of achievement came and brought a dawning feeling of obligation, and a desire to take standing with other men, and to know something and to bear a part in the work of a citizen of the town.

Some glimmer had remained to him of religious teaching before his mother died, and, in the conscious virtue of new dress, he sought out the church, and began to go regularly to mass.

I knew what was coming then; there had been an inevitableness that foretold it in the tale, and I found myself breathing more freely when he began to speak without self-consciousness of the girl.

He said very little of her, but it was not at all difficult to catch the ampler meaning of his words. Sunday began to hold a new interest, quite apart from Sunday clothes. He found himself looking forward through the week to a glimpse of her at church, but the week was far too long, and in the autumn evenings he would dress himself in his best, regardless of the jeers of the other men, and would walk past her father’s corner grocery. Sometimes he saw her on the pavement in front of the shop, or helping her father to wait on customers within.

All this was very disturbing; a new world had opened to him with a steady job. It was unfolding itself with quite wonderful revelations in the home-life of his boarding-house, and the friendship of the matron, and the companionship of other workingmen, and the responsibility which was beginning to replace his former recklessness. Moreover, he was getting on in the tile factory. He was strong and active, and the chances of being transferred to piece-work was a spur to do his best at his present unskilled labor. Utterly unforeseen in its train of consequences had come into this budding consciousness, the vision of a girl. He had merely seen her at church, then seen her again, then found himself looking forward to sight of her, and unable to wait patiently for Sunday. The very thought of her carried with it a feeling of contempt for his former life, and a distressing sense of difference in their present stations, which developed, sometimes, into the temptation to go back to the road and forget. That was the temptation that was always in the background, and always coming to the fore when the craving for drink was strongest, or when the monotony of ten hours’ daily labor grew more than commonly burdensome. For four months and more he had resisted now, and, as a reward, he had become just man enough to know feebly that he could not easily forget, even on the road.

How he plucked up courage to meet her I do not know, for he did not tell me, and not for treasure would I have asked him at this point of the story. He did meet her, however, and the wonder of it was upon him still, as he told me modestly, in quaint speech, that she smiled upon him.

Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo of a few months before, should be reading now in a good girl’s eyes an answering liking to his own! He was little more than a lad, and she but a slip of a girl, and I do not know what it may have meant to her, but to him it was life from the dead. Very swiftly the winter sped and very hard he worked until he earned a job at piecework in the factory, and then harder than ever until he was making good wages. He could see little of her, for she had an instinctive knowledge of her father’s probable displeasure, but there grew up a tacit understanding between them that kept his hope and ambition fired.

Nothing in experience could have been more wonderful than those winter months, when he felt himself getting a man’s grip of things unutterable, that came as from out a boundless sea into the range of his strange awakening. And this new life was centred in her, as though she were its source. He lived for her, and worked and thought for her and tried to be worthy of her, and between his former and his present life was a gulf which by some miracle she had created.

It came upon him with the suddenness of a pistol-shot one evening late in March when they stood talking for a moment before saying good-night at her father’s door. Thundering down the steps from the living-rooms over the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid Irishman. In a moment he was upon them, hot in the newly acquired knowledge that Farrell was “keeping steady company” with his daughter. His ire was up, and his Irish tongue was loosed, and Farrell got the sting of it. It lashed him for a beggarly factory laborer of doubtful birth, and, gaining vehemence, it lashed him for a hobo predestined to destruction, and finally, with strong admonition, it charged him never to speak to the girl and never to enter her home again.

If only he could have known, if only there had been a voice to tell him convincingly that now there had come a crucial test in his life between character and circumstance, a voice “to lift him through the fight”! But all his past was against him. In another hour he was dead drunk and he went drunk to work in the morning, and was discharged.

The pleading of his landlady was of no avail. He thought that he had lost the girl. Nothing remained but the road, and back to the road he would go, and soon, with his savings in his pocket, he was “beating his way” to Chicago. There he could live on beer and free lunches, and, at dives and brothels, he would “blow in” the savings of ten months and try to forget how sacred the sum had seemed to him, when, little by little, he added to it, while planning for the future. Its very sacredness gave a hellish zest to utter abandonment to vice while the money lasted; then he took again to begging on the streets with “a hard-luck story,” until, in the warm April days, he felt the old drawing to the open country and began once more to “beat his way” up and down the familiar railway lines and to beg his bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in feeding him, were fast completing his ruin.

We were entering Seneca now, and another thunder-storm was upon us, but, as it broke in a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under the eaves of the railway station. A west-bound passenger-train drew in as we stood there.

“That’s the way to travel,” I heard Farrell say, half to himself. It was the sheltered comfort of the passengers that he envied, I supposed. But not at all.

“See that hobo?” he continued, and, following the line of his outstretched finger, I saw a ragged wretch dripping like a drowned rat as he walked slowly up and down beside the panting locomotive.

“Yes,” I answered.

“The train’s got a blind baggage-car on,” he continued. “That’s a car that ain’t got no door in the end that’s next the engine. You can get on the front platform when the train starts, and the brakemen can’t reach you till she stops, but then you’re off before they are and on again when she starts up. The fireman can reach you all right, and if he’s ugly, he’ll heave coal at you, and sometimes he’ll kick you off when the train’s going full speed; but generally he lets you be. That hobo come in two hours from Chicago and he’s got a snap for as long as he wants to ride,” he concluded.

Nevertheless, I was glad to see the train go without Farrell’s saying anything about joining our adventurous brother on the fore-platform of the “blind baggage-car.”

In the seething sunlight that followed the storm we left the station and walked along the village street which lay parallel with the railway. At a mineral spring we stopped to drink, while a group of school-children who were loitering homeward stood watching us, the fascination in their eyes which all children feel in the mystery which surrounds the lives of vagabonds and gypsies.

On the outskirts of the village, when we were about to resume the railway, Farrell suggested that he should go foraging. He was hungry, for he had eaten nothing since early morning, while I had bought food at Morris. I promised to wait for him and very gladly sat down on the curbstone in the shade.

Two bare-foot urchins, their trousers rolled up to their knees, who had evidently been watching us from behind a picket-fence, stole stealthily out of the gate when Farrell turned the corner. Creeping as near as they dared, they gathered a handful of small, sun-baked clods and began to throw them at me as a target. It was rare sport for a time, but I was beyond their range and much absorbed in Farrell’s story. Disappointed at not having the excitement of being chased back to the shelter of their yard, they gave up the game and seated themselves on the curb, with their naked, brown feet bathed in the pool which had formed in the gutter. I had become quite unconscious of them, when I suddenly realized that they were in warm discussion. It was about me, I found, for I heard one of them raise his voice in stem insistence.

“Naw,” he said, “that ain’t the same bum, that’s another bum!”

Farrell returned empty-handed and a trifle dejected, I thought. His mind was evidently on food. A little farther down the line he pointed out a farm-house to the right and suggested our trying there. Along the edge of a soft meadow, where the damp grass stood high, nearly ready for mowing, we walked to a muddy lane which led to the barn-yard. A lank youth in overalls tucked into top-boots and a gingham shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat stood in the open doorway of the barn, calmly staring at us as we approached.

Farrell greeted him familiarly and was answered civilly. Then, without further parley, he explained that we were come for something to eat.

“Go up to the house and ask the boss,” said the hired man.

The farmer was plainly well-to-do. His house was a large, square, white-painted, wooden structure topped with a cupola, and with well-kept grounds about it, while the farm buildings wore a prosperous air of plenitude. Just then a well-grown watch-dog of the collie type came walking toward us across the lawn, a menacing inquiry in his face.

“Won’t you go?” suggested Farrell.

The hired man had caught sight of the dog, and there was a twinkle in his eye as he answered, airily,

“Oh, no, thank you.”

“Does the dog bite?” Farrell ventured, cautiously.

“Yes,” came sententiously from the hired man.

“We’d better get back to the road,” Farrell said to me, and we could feel amused eyes upon us as we retraced our steps to the track.

Once more Farrell tried his luck; this time at a meagre, wooden, drab cottage that faced a country lane, a hundred yards from the railway. I watched him from the line and noticed that he talked for some time with the woman who answered his knock and stood framed in the door.

When he returned he had two large slices of bread in his hand and some cold meat.

“I didn’t like to take it,” he remarked. “Her husband’s a carpenter and ain’t had no work for six weeks. But she says she couldn’t have me go away hungry. That’s the kind that always helps you, the kind that’s in hard luck themselves, and knows what it is.”

He was for sharing the forage and, hungry as he was, he had not eaten a morsel of it when he rejoined me. That I would take none seemed to him at first a personal slight, but he understood it better when I explained that I had had food at Morris.

There was a cloudless sunset that evening, the sun sinking in a crimson glow that foretold another day of great heat. The stars came slowly out over a firmament of slaty blue, and shone obscurely through the humid air. Farrell and I were silent for some time. Both of us had walked about thirty-six miles that day, and were intent on a resting-place. At last we began to catch the glitter of street-lights in Ottawa, and, at sight of them, Farrell’s spirits rose. He was like one returning home after long absence. The sound of a church-bell came faintly to us. Farrell held me by the arm.

“You hear that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s the Methodist church bell.”

I could see his face light up, as though something were rousing the best that was in him.

At the eastern end of the town, and close to the railway, we came upon a brick-kiln. Farrell was perfectly familiar with his surroundings now, and we stopped for a drink. For some reason the water would not run in the faucet, so we went around to a barn-like building in the rear. Through a large, open doorway he entered, while I remained outside. Soon I heard him in conversation with someone, who proved to be the night-watchman, and, finding that Farrell was not likely to rejoin me soon, I also entered.

Some moments were necessary to accustom one’s eyes to the interior, but I could see at once the figure of a white-bearded old man lying at full length on a bed of gunny-sacks thrown over some sloping boards. His head was propped up, and he held a newspaper which he had been reading by the light of two large torches that hung suspended near him, and from which columns of black smoke rose, curling upward into dark recesses among the rafters. Everything was black with smut and grimy dust. Soon I could see that on one side were great heaps of coal that sloped away to the outer walls like the talus against a cliff.

Farrell was seated on a coal-heap, and was absorbed in the news of the town, as he gathered it from the old man. Quite unnoticed, I sat down on a convenient board and listened dreamily, hoping heartily the while that we should not have to go much further that night.

Presently I found myself alert to what was being said, for they were discussing the question of a night’s lodging. It was from the watchman that the suggestion came that we should remain where we were, and very readily we agreed. Taking a torch from its socket, he lighted us through a long passage to another room that was used as a carpenter’s shop. A carpenter’s bench ran the length of it, and the tools lay strewn over its surface. From a corner he drew a few yards of old matting, which he offered to Farrell as a bed; and he found a door off its hinges, which, when propped up at one end as it lay on the floor, made what proved that night a comfortable bed for me. With a promise to call us early, he left us in the dark, and, quickly off with our boots, we wrapped ourselves in our coats and were soon fast asleep.

The watchman was true to his word; for the stars were still shining when Farrell and I, hungry and stiff, set off down the track in the direction of the railway station. His mood was that of the evening before, as though, after long wandering, he was returning to his native place. Recollections of those ten months of sober industry crowded painfully upon him, and he shrunk like a culprit from possible recognition. Yet every familiar sight held a fascination for him. With kindling interest he pointed out the locality of the boarding-house, and again held me by the arm and made me listen, until I, too, could catch the sound of escaping steam at the tile factory where he had worked.

The iron was entering into his soul, but he knew it only as a painful struggle between a desire to return to a life of work and the inertia that would keep him on the road. We walked on, in silence for the most part, under the morning stars that were dimming at the approach of day. When Farrell spoke, it was to reveal, unconsciously, the progress of the struggle within him.

“It ain’t no use tryin’ for a job; I’ve been lookin’ seven weeks now.” That was the lie to smooth the road to vagabondage.

“I’d have a hell of a time to get square in this town again. Everybody that knowed me, knowed I got fired for drinkin’.” That was the truth that made strait the gate and narrow the way that led to life.

In a moment of encouragement he spoke of the boarding-house keeper and of her promise to take him back again, if he would return to work; but his thoughts of the girl he kept to himself, and deeply I liked him for it.

We were leaving Ottawa behind. With a sharp curve the railway swept around the base of bluffs that rose sheer on our right from the road-bed, rugged and grim in the twilight, the trees on top darkly outlined against the sky. At our left were the flooded lowlands of the Illinois bottom. We could see the decaying cornstalks of last year’s growth just appearing above the water in the submerged fields, and, here and there, a floating out-building which had been carried down by the flood and was caught among the trees.

Was he man enough to hold fast to his chance, or would he allow himself to drift? This was the drama that was unfolding itself there in the dark before the dawn, under frowning banks beside a flooded river, while the silent stars looked down.

We came to another brick-kiln, with its buildings on the bank just above the railway. A light was shining from a shanty window, and a well-worn foot-path led from the road up through the underbrush of the hillside to the shanty door. A night-watchman was making a final round of the kiln to see that all was right before the day’s work began.

Farrell stood still for a moment, the struggle fierce within him.

“Let’s get a drink of water,” he said.

The night-watchman led us to a spring and answered, encouragingly, Farrell’s inquiry about a possible job.

“Go up and ask the boss,” he said. “He’s just finished his breakfast. That’s his house,” he added, pointing to the shanty with the light in the window.

From the foot of the path I watched Farrell climb to the shanty door and knock. The door opened and the voices of two men came faintly down to me. My hopes rose, for it was not merely a question and a decisive reply, but the give and take of continued dialogue. The suspense had grown to physical suffering, when I saw Farrell turn from the door and begin to descend the path.

I could not see his face distinctly; but, as he drew nearer, I caught its expression of distress. The half-frightened, worried bewilderment that I had noticed on the day before was back in his eyes, as he stood looking into mine, evidently expecting me to speak. I remained silent.

“I’ve got a job,” he said, presently, and I could have struck him for the joy of it.

“Me troubles is just begun, for the whole town knows me for a bum,” he added, while his anxious eyes moved restlessly behind frowning brows. I said nothing, but waited until I could catch his eye at rest. Then out it came, a little painfully:

“I’ll go to the boarding-house to-night, when me day’s work is done, and put up there, if the missus can take me.”

“Good,” I said, and I waited again until his gaze was steady upon me.

For a day we had tramped together, and slept together for a night, and, quite of his own accord, he had given me his confidence. We were parting, now that he had found work, and I hoped that I might receive the final mark of his trust, so I waited.

He read my question, and his eyes wandered, but they came back to mine, and he spoke up like a man:

“I can’t, till I’m a bit decent again and got some clothes; but I’ll hold down me job, and, as soon as I can, I’ll go back to her.”

A warning whistle blew; Farrell went up the path to take his place in the brick-kiln, and I was soon far down the line in the direction of Utica.

WITH IOWA FARMERS