A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days. Walter A. Wyckoff
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