The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on Foot
“But the armor scheme--it's a little risky, Friend Chick.”
“But it has been the trade-mark of unselfishness ever since the days of
the Crusaders,” declared Mr. Chick. “Why shouldn't its significance
be revived in these modern times? At any rate,” he added, with Yankee
shrewdness, “it's necessary to give the world quite a jump these days
before it will stop, look, and listen.”
“Some advertising concern will make you an offer that will pull you into
camp your second day out, if you're not careful. You've certainly got a
good idea of the business.”
“I am sincere. I am not trifling. I have pondered on this for a long
time. I shall be misjudged--but I shall not be afraid!”
III
KNIGHT-ERRANTRY TESTED
The two marched on, side by side, and Walker Farr, piecing in his mind,
from the scraps he had heard, the entire history of the Chick family,
indulged the whim of Jared and forgot for a moment the grotesque figure
presented by his companion.
“No, I am not afraid!” repeated the new apostle of world harmony.
But it became promptly apparent that Mr. Chick could not communicate his
intrepidity to other creatures.
Around the bend of the road came a sleepy horse, stubbing his hoofs into
the dust, dragging a wagon in which rode a farmer and his wife.
The horse became wide awake at sight of Mr. Chick.
With head up, eyes goggling, nostrils dilating, and mane erect, the
animal stopped short on straddled legs. Then he snorted, whirled, took
the wagon around in a circle on two wheels in spite of the farmer's
endeavors, and made off in the opposite direction, the driver pulling
hard on the reins, hands above his head, elbows akimbo.
“It occurs to me, Friend Chick,” said his companion, after the outfit
had disappeared, “that in planning this pilgrimage of yours you have
failed to take everything into account. If that farmer-man and his
wife pile into the ditch and break their necks, then all your general
mediating in other quarters will hardly make up for the damage you have
caused right here.”
“The world is full of problems,” sighed the man in armor. “There seems
to be a hitch to about everything!”
After a few moments the farmer came pelting into sight on foot.
“What in the name of bald-headed Nicodemus do you call yourself, and
what are you trying to do?” he shouted. “It's only by luck and chance
and because the webbin's held that me and my wife ain't laying stiff and
stark in the ditch.”
“I am sorry,” said friend Chick with dignity.
“Get a hoss used to bicycles, flying-machines, red whizzers and blue
devils, and then along comes something else that ain't laid down in the
back of the Old Farmer's Almanick! You there, the one that ain't crazy,
what's this thing you're teaming round?” the farmer demanded, addressing
Farr.
“In this case I am not my brother's keeper,” stated the young man.
“Well, where is his keeper, then? He needs one.” He walked around Chick
and rudely rapped his whip-butt on the breastplate. “If I wasn't
afraid of spraining a toe I'd boot you from here to hackenny, you old
two-legged cook-stove!”
“If there has been damage done, I'll pay for it.”
“There isn't any damage and I'm not looking for anybody's money. But
there _will_ be damage unless you get out of this highway. If you're in
sight when I drive my hoss past here again I'll lick you, even if I have
to use blasting-powder and a can-opener to get you out of that suit.”
Jared Chick went apart into the bushes and Farr accompanied him.
“This is a rather vulgar and discouraging adventure for high ideals to
run into so soon,” averred the younger man.
“I am not discouraged.”
“I'm afraid you'll be even more greatly misunderstood.”
“I don't expect silly old horses to understand me. My appeal is to men.”
Farr sniffed scornfully. “You'd better let men alone,” he advised.
“The world needs pure unselfishness,” insisted Chick.
“The purer it is the more it is misunderstood. I have tested the matter.
I know.”
“Then you yourself would not go forth into the world and do good to men,
without calculation and without price?”
“I don't think I would,” declared Farr, dryly. “And I am so little
interested in the matter that I think you'll have to excuse me from
further talk about it. You have just had one illustration in a crude way
of how the world misunderstands anything that's out of the ordinary.”
“Have you any advice to give me?”
“Not a word. I'm not even able to give myself sensible counsel. Good day
to you!”
“Then you do not care for my company longer on the way?”
“I do not. Excuse my bluntness, but these are parlous times for
wayfarers and I cannot afford to have a tin can tied to me as I go
about.”
“And you are absolutely selfish?” called Chick.
“I think so,” replied Farr from the highway, getting into his stride.
“When I see you again I expect you'll be wondering why you ever were
altruistic. That will be the case, providing you wear that armor any
longer.”
Jared Chick from behind his bush called, appealingly, “But I fear I
shall never see thee again and I have some questions to ask of thee!”
“Oh, I promise to look you up somewhere in the world. If you keep on
wearing that suit it will be easy to find you.”
The man in armor leaned against a tree and pondered.
“A strange young man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly
something under his shell. I would relish putting some questions to
him.”
Then Jared Chick plunked an ash staff from a pile of hoop-poles left by
a chopper and went on his way along shaded woodland paths, avoiding
the main highroad. He decided that it would be better to go by the
roundabout way and show himself on the streets of town instead of on a
rural turnpike where countrified horses did not take kindly to a real
knight-errant.
“It was a good place back there for sleeping,” reflected Walker Farr,
remembering the brook, singing over the stones, the whispering alders,
the old-fashioned house, and the somnolent landscape. “That man who has
been living there until the day of his emigration has certainly been
asleep for a long time and is sleeping soundly now; he is having a
wonderful dream. The nightmare will begin shortly and he will wake up.”
After a time Farr came into a village, a hamlet of small houses which
toed the crack of a single street. It was near the hour of noon and from
the open windows of kitchens drifted scents of the dinners which the
women were preparing. All the men of the place seemed to be afield; only
women were in sight here and there at back doors, pinning freshly washed
garments on lines, beating dust from rugs, or, seen through the windows,
were bustling about the forenoon tasks set for patient household slaves
in gingham.
At one back door, his back comfortably set against a folded
clothes-reel, was a greasily fat tramp, gobbling a hand-out lunch which
a housewife had given to him.
Under a little hill where the road dipped at the edge of the hamlet here
sounded clink of steel on rock, suggesting that men labored there with
trowel and drill. There was complaining creaking of cordage--the arm of
a derrick sliced a slow arc across the blue sky of June.
The fat tramp held up his empty plate and whined a request and the hand
of a woman emerged from a close-by window and placed something in the
dish.
Farr slowed his steps and looked at the tramp, and a woman in a yard
near by stared over the top of a sheet which she was pinning on the line
and scowled at the new arrival.
“I wonder if I'm considered as the Damon of that Pythias?” Farr asked
himself, smiling into her frown. “But Damon is nomad spelled backward! I
wish I dared to ask her for a piece of that pie cooling on the sill.”
Just then, over the clink of metal under the hill, above wail of
straining pulley, rose the screech of a man in agony, the raucous male
squall whose timbre is more hideous than the death-cry of swine.
Then came a man running from the valley under the hill.
“It's your husband, Mrs. Jose,” he panted, turning in at the house where
the fat tramp ate with his back against the clothes-reel. “You better
go! I'll telephone for a doctor.”
She ran, white-faced, gasping cries. Other women ran. The spirit of
helpfulness and curiosity to know what had happened set wings on the
heels of the little community. The messenger telephoned and followed
them.
The fat tramp set down his plate and glanced to right and left and all
about. Then he shuffled into the deserted house and after a brief stay
hastened out with his pockets crammed and bearing garments in his arms;
he scuttled away with sagging trot across the fields.
Farr saw him go and did not pursue.
“Yonder goes the spirit of the age,” he told himself, with sardonic
twisting of his lips. “When Opportunity knocks, knock Opportunity
down. Embrace Opportunity, but be sure it's with the strangle hold. The
directors of a robbed railroad make a more dignified getaway than
that porcine pedestrian is making--but it's the same as far as the
stockholders are concerned.”
He went on slowly toward the hollow under the hill.
The procession met him--a limp man, moaning, borne in the arms of his
sweating mates, women trotting alongside and crossing the road, to and
fro, like frightened hens--clucking sympathy.
Farr found a half-finished stone bridge under the hill. A paunchy boss
with underset jaw and overhanging upper lip was profanely urging his
helpers back to their jobs.
“Fifteen minutes before knock-off time--fifteen minutes! You can't help
that man by standing around and doing his grunting for him. Get busy!”
The men lifted their tools slowly and sullenly.
“It's hell what can happen when you're fifteen days behind on a
contract, with county commissioners waiting and anxious to grab off a
penalty,” declared the boss, to nobody in particular. “One man bunged,
and four to lug him home, and the rest of the crew taking a sympathetic
vacation!”
Farr, sauntering, swung off the highway down the lane leading to the
temporary bridge.
“Here, you long-horned steer, want a job?” called the contractor from
his rostrum on the granite block.
“No, my Sussex shote, I do not!”
“Damnation! You dare to call me names, you hobo?”
“Yes,” returned Farr, quite simply.
“Well, quit it. I need men here. You're husky. Two dollars a day, even
if you're not a regular mason.”
“No.”
He drawled both the affirmative and the negative and there was something
subtly insolent in his tone--something that aroused more ire than a
cruder retort would have accomplished. He turned his back on the cursing
man and went on down to the bridge. He waited there for a time and
watched the drift of foam on the fretted waters. The steady burbling of
the stream made him oblivious to other sounds and he did not hear the
two men approach. They leaped on him and seized him. One of his captors
was the paunchy man, and his hands were heavy and his fingers gripped
viciously.
“No wonder you wouldn't work! You're making your living in an easier
way.”
“What is the occasion of this effusive welcome to your city?” asked
Farr.
The man who held one of the captive's arms was panting. He had run at
top speed from the house to which he and his mates had borne the injured
man.
“You thief! You sneak! Eat a man's grub, his hard-earned grub, and steal
when his wife's back is turned!”
“Of all dirty work this job is the worst,” declared the big man.
“She gave you all you could stuff into yourself, you loafer. You
ransacked when her back was turned. You even stole her husband's Sunday
suit. Where is it?”
“I saw a fat tramp running away into the woods,” returned Farr, quietly.
“He was carrying articles in his arms.”
“You're the only tramp in sight around here,” insisted the contractor.