It was the man who called himself Walker Farr.
The man was kneeling beside a tiny fire, toasting bread on the end of a beech twig. He held the twig in one hand and an open book in the other. He looked up without changing his position when the tramp came charging down the hillside.
He had wide-open, brown eyes, this man in the hollow. The eyes were not merely wide open on account of surprise at this irruption--one could see that they were naturally that way--keenly observant eyes. He had hair as brown as his eyes; his cap was on the ground beside him.
But the tramp was not taking account of the attractions of this stranger; he was more interested in searching for flaws.
He had been frightened at first sight of the man--for the tramp had the timidity of his kind; now he began to feel cheered. This stranger in the hollow had not been shaved recently, his clothing was unkempt, his shoes bore the marks of a long hike. He was cooking in the open--plain indication of the nomad.
“Well, I say, bo,” chaffed the tramp, shifting from fright to high spirit with the hysteria of weak natures. “I'm sure glad to see one of the good old sort. I didn't know what I was dropping in on when I fell down that hill. But it's all right, hey? I'm on the road. My name is Boston Fat, and my monacker is a bean-pot.”
The brown eyes moved slowly from the grinning face to the garments heaped in the man's arms. They were cold and critical eyes and there was no humor in them.
“I do not do business during my lunch-hours, my man. I do not desire to change tailors just yet and I do not buy stolen property.”
His chilliness did not dampen the other's good nature.
“Oh, that's all right, old top. I'm no thief. These clothes were hung on a fence-post just above here on the road. I reckon they were only waiting for first-comer.”
He dropped the shoes, cocked the hat on his head, and began to fumble the garments. The placard dropped out of the folds of the coat and the man at the fire craned his neck and read aloud: “Help Yourself.”
“Oh, that's what the paper says, hey? I never learned to read any of the modern languages,” confided Boston Fat. “I was too much taken up with the dead ones at Harvard. Well, comrade, now you can see for yourself that I didn't steal this mess of moth-food. There was the sign right on it saying, 'Help Yourself.' It was there, even if I couldn't read it. Instinck told me them clothes was for me. I took 'em and came in here.”
He shook out the garments one by one and hung them on a bush, chattering his comments. He set the ticking clock on a stump.
The man at the fire slipped a piece of meat between two slabs of toasted bread and began to eat. He still held the open book in his hand but his eyes were watching the tramp.
The vagrant was orally appraising his find, exhibiting the wisdom of one who has begged garments at back doors for the purposes of peddling them to second-hand shops.
“A moucher,” observed the man at the fire. He continued aloud, evidently and sardonically exercising his vocabulary, plainly enjoying the amazement he provoked by his style of language. “The spirit of a stray cat at midnight, the tastes of the prowling hyena! The fat thief I saw running away into the woods! When such as these began to take to the road, knight-errantry vanished from the face of the earth. The varlets borrowed the grand idea of care-free itinerancy and debased it, as waiters borrow a gentleman's evening dress for their menial uniform, and drunken coachmen wear the same head-gear that a duke wears to a wedding! Why prove evolution by searching for a man with a tail? The performances of human nature must convince any thinking man that we have descended from apes!”
The astonished tramp stared for a short time at this person who employed such peculiar language--then mumbled an oath and shook his head.
He began to try on the frock-coat, paying scant attention to the other's monologue. The coat was a ludicrous misfit; it would not meet over the bulging belly; its tails dragged on the fat man's heels.
“If I happened to stand handy by when a Kansas cyclone ripped the insides out of a clothing-store only the boys' sizes would drop in the same county with me,” grumbled the tramp, working his arms out of the sleeves.
“The coat was plainly built for a gentleman,” stated the man at the fire. “Therefore it is of no value to you.”
Boston Fat surveyed the stranger with a vicious glint in his little eyes, as a pig might stare at a man who had struck it across the snout.
“Good afternoon, perfesser,” he sneered.
“Why 'professor,' my frayed and frowsled Falstaff?”
“There you go with it--showing yourself up out of your own mouth! Words a yard long--words that would break a decent man's teeth! You're one of these college dudes out on the road getting stuff to write into a book. I've heard about your kind. And that kind is getting too thick and plenty and you're putting slush all over the real profesh. Quit it and go back to college. Don't use me for your book.”
This was reciprocation of derogatory sentiment with a vengeance!
The man at the fire sat back on his haunches. He finished chewing his mouthful, regarding the tramp with a languid stare that traveled from crown of his head to tip of his battered shoe.
“The only thing about a book that you would be good for,” he said, “would be for use in a volume of this sort.” He tapped the book in his palm. “Your anatomy could supply the binding. It is bound in pigskin.”
The tramp squealed an oath in the falsetto voice that the weak and the flabby possess and took one step forward. The man at the fire came to his feet and stood erect. He was tall, and the brown eyes talked for him better than threats or bluster. The vagrant shifted his gaze from those eyes and backed away.
“If I hadn't been penned in a pie-belt jail all winter up North, and all the strength starved out of me,” he whined, “you wouldn't call me a pig and get away with it.”
“A person who forces himself into the presence of a gentleman who is dining mustn't expect compliments,” stated the stranger.
“You ain't a tramp--not a real one,” snarled Boston Fat.
Farr's eyes glistened; he smiled; he continued to play on this ignoramus his satiric pranks of mystifying language:
“More of your lack of acuteness, my fat friend. Because I do not patter the flash lingo with you, you appear to take me for a college professor in disguise. _You_ are not a real tramp. You are a bum, a loafer, a yeg. You never traveled more than two hundred miles away from Hoboken--the capital city of hoboes. Have you ever hit the sage-brush trail, hiked the milk-and-honey route from Ogden through the Mormon country, decked the Overland Express, beaten the blind baggage on the Millionaires' Flier? Hey?”
The sullen vagrant blinked stupidly.
“Or have you made the prairie run on the truss of a Wagner freight, or thrown a stone at the Fox Train crew, or beaten the face off the Katy Shack when he tried to pitch you off a gondola-car?”
“I don't know what you're chewing about,” sneered the fat man.
“Probably not, for you are not a true man of the road. You disgrace the name of nomad, you sully an ancient profession. I'll venture to say you don't know who Ishmael was.”
“Who said I did?”
“Not I, because I'm not a flatterer. I am going to follow the example of the man who cast pearls before swine--I'm going to cast you a pearl from one of my own poems. You may listen. It will pass your ears, that's all. You cannot contaminate it by taking it in, so I repeat it for my own entertainment, to refresh my memory:
“Of the morrow we take no heed, no care infests the day; Some hand-out gump and a train to jump, a grip on the rods, and away! To the game of grab for gold we give no thought or care. We own with you the arch of blue--our share of God's fresh air. One coin to clear the law, a section of rubber hose. To soften the chafe of a freight-car's truss, our portion of cast-off clothes, And the big wide world is ours--a title made good by right-- By mankind's deed to the nomad breed with the taint of the Ishmaelite. Some from the wastes of the sage-brush, some from the orange land, Some from God's own country, dusty and tattered and tanned. Why are we? It's idle to tell you--you'd never understand. To and fro We come and go. Old Father Ishmael's band.”
He leaned back and laughed in the tramp's puzzled face.
“Well, what's the answer?” scoffed Boston Fat.
The other man talked on, humor in his eyes, plainly enjoying this verbal skylarking.
“I'm afraid I cannot waste time and breath on you in an attempt to answer the riddle of the ages, to explain the wanderlust that sent forth the tribes from the Aryan bowl of the birth of the races, my corpulent bean-pot. Your blank eyes and your flattened skull suggest a discouraging incapacity for information.”
“I don't know what you're gabbing abut. But there's one thing I do know. I'll tip 'em off at the next insane-asylum I come to that I met you headed north.” The tramp gathered the articles of clothing from the bushes and got down on his knees and began to fold them.