The tramp looked to be less savoury than most tramps; and more
dangerous. For he was playing with a serviceable automatic pistol,
throwing it from one hand and catching it with the other, balancing its
muzzle on his forefinger with an anxious eye as it leant first one way
and then another; or letting it slip through his hands until the barrel
was pointing earthwards. This pistol was rather like a precious
plaything; he could neither keep his eyes nor hands from it, and when,
tired of the toy, he slipped it into the pocket of his tattered pants,
the disappearance was momentary. Out it came again, to be fondled and
tossed and spun.
“Such things cannot be!” said the tramp, aloud, not once, but many times
in the course of his play.
He was unmistakably English, and what an English tramp was doing on the
outskirts of Littleburg, in the State of New York, requires, but for the
moment evades, explanation.
He was not pleasant even as tramps go. His face was blotched and
swollen, he carried a week’s growth of beard, one eye was recovering
from the violent impact of a fist delivered a week before by a brother
tramp whom he had awakened at an inconvenient moment. He might explain
the swelling by his ignorance of the properties of poison ivy, but there
was nobody interested enough to ask. His collarless shirt was grimy, his
apology for a jacket had bottomless pits for pockets; on the back of his
head, as he juggled the pistol, he maintained an ancient derby hat,
badly dented, the rim rat-eaten.
“Such things cannot be,” said the tramp, who called himself Robin. The
pistol slipped from his hand and fell on his foot. He said “Ouch!” like
a Christian man and rubbed the toe that was visible between upper and
sole.
Somebody was coming through the little wood. He slipped the pistol into
his pocket, and, moving noiselessly between bushes, crouched down.
A girl, rather pretty he thought; very slim and graceful, he saw. A
local aristocrat, he guessed. She wore a striped silk dress and swung a
walking-stick with great resolution.
She stopped almost opposite to him and lit a cigarette. Whether for
effect or enjoyment was her own mystery. Not a hundred yards away, the
wood path joined the town road, and a double line of big frame houses
were inhabited by the kind of people who would most likely be shocked by
the spectacle of a cigarette-smoking female.
“Effect,” thought Robin. “Bless the woman, she’s going to set ’em
alight!”
From where he crouched he had seen the look of distaste with which she
had examined the feebly smoking cylinder. She puffed tremendously to
bring it into working order, and then went on. He rather sympathised
with people who shocked folks: he had shocked so many himself, and was
to continue.
Leisurely he returned to the path. Should he wait for nightfall or make
a circuit of the town?—there must be a road west of the rolling mills
to the north or past the big cheese factory to the south. Or should he
walk boldly through the main street, endure the questions and
admonitions of a vigilant constabulary, and risk being run out of town,
so long as they ran him out at the right end? He had elected for the
first course even before he gave the matter consideration. The town way
was too dangerous. Red Beard might be there and the fat little man who
ran so surprisingly fast and threw knives with such extraordinary skill.
Another pedestrian was coming—walking so softly on rubber shoes that
Robin did not hear him until too late. He was a lank young man, very
smartly dressed, with a straw hat adorned with a college ribbon tilted
over his right eye. The buckle of the belt which encircled his wasp
waist and supported nicely creased trousers, was golden, his shirt
beautifully figured. He might have just walked out of any advertisement
page of almost any magazine.
The rather large mouth twisted in a grin at the sight of the ragged
figure sitting by the path side.
“’Lo, bo’!”
“’Lo!” said Robin.
“Going far?”
“Not far—Canada, I guess. I’ll get ferried over from Ogdensburg.”
“Fine: got your passport ’n’ everything?”
Sarcasm was wasted on Robin.
“I’ll get past on my face,” he said.
The young man chuckled and offered a very silvery case . . . thought
better of it and withdrew the cigarette himself. Robin respected the
precaution; his hands were not very clean.
He lit the cigarette with a match that he took from the lining of his
hat and smoked luxuriously.
“You won’t find it easy. Those Canadian police are fierce. A fellow I
know used to run hooch across, but you can’t do that now—too fierce.”
He was enjoying his condescension, his fellowship with the lowly and the
possibly criminal. He was broad-minded, he explained. He had often
talked with the genus hobo, and had learnt a lot. Only a man of the
world could talk with tramps without loss of dignity. One need not be
common because one associated with common people.
“That’s what I can’t get our folks to understand,” he complained. “Old
people get kind of narrow-minded—and girls. Colleges ruin girls. They
get stuck up and nobody’s good enough for ’um. And Europe—meeting lords
and counts that are only after their money. I say ‘See America first.’ ”
Robin the tramp sent a cloud of grey smoke up to the pine tops.
“Somebody said it before you,” he suggested.
“It sounds that way to me.”
The young man’s name was Samuel Wasser. His father kept the biggest
store in Littleburg—Wasser’s Universal Store. Samuel believed that
every man was entitled to live his own life, and was careful to explain
that a young man’s own life was an altogether different life from any
that was planned for him by people who were “past it.”
“I made seven thousand dollars in one year,” he said. “I got in with a
live crowd fall before last—but the Canadian police are fierce, and the
Federal officers are fiercer . . . still, seven thousand!”
He was very young; had the joy of youth in displaying his own virtues
and superior possessions. He rattled certain keys in his pocket, hitched
up his vivid tie, looked despisingly at the main street of Littleburg
and asked:
“Did you see a young lady come along? Kind of stripey dress?”
Robin nodded.
“I’m getting married to-night,” said Samuel lugubriously. “_Got_ to!
It’s a mistake, but _they’re_ all for it. My governor and her uncle.
It’s tough on me. A man ought to see something of life. It isn’t as
though I was one of these country jakes, jump at the first skirt he
sees. I’m a college man and I know there’s something beyond . . . a
bigger world”—he described illustrative circles with his hands—“sort
of—well, you know what I mean, bo’.”
Robin knew what he meant.
“Seems funny talking all this stuff to you—but you’re a man of the
world. Folks look down on you boys, but you _see_ things—the wide open
spaces of God’s world.”
“Sure,” said Robin. The tag had a familiar ring. “Where men are men,” he
added. He had not seen a movie show since—a long time; but his memory
was retentive.
“Have another cigarette . . . here . . . two. I’ll be getting along.”
Robin followed the dapper figure of the bridegroom until it was out of
sight. He wished he had asked him for a dollar.
Looking up into the western sky he saw above the dim haze that lay on
the horizon, the mass of a gathering storm.
“Maybe it will come soon,” he said hopefully.
Red Beard did not like rain, and the fat little man who threw knives
loathed it.
Reader notes
Loading reader notes…