The Landloper: The Romance of a Man on Foot
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.
The man of the brown eyes stepped forward, laid down his little book,
picked up the frock-coat and pulled it on, the fat man squealing
expostulation. With serene disregard of this protest Farr buttoned the
coat, smoothed it down, and then straightened his shoulders.
“You may see that it was built for a gentleman and that it fits a
gentleman, friend pork-barrel.”
“You shuck it off and pass it over, that's what you do,” yelped the
tramp. “It's my coat.”
“It was perfectly apparent that it was not your coat when you tried it
on.”
“I tell you I found it hanging on a fence-post just above here.”
“That was merely by accident, and you should have passed on and left the
garments for one whose frame was fitted to wear them. You illustrate
the curse of modern society. Men are so filled with the greed of getting
that they grab misfits simply out of passion for possessing.”
“I've stood your slurs ever since I got here, but I'll be jobeefed if
I'll stand for your swiping my property.”
The man of the brown eyes smiled. His whole demeanor showed that he was
more than ever hugely enjoying his own verbosity--the florid language
which was both maddening and mystifying the tramp.
“Further evidence of your mean nature: a gentleman resents an insult
that steals away his character much more quickly than he resents an act
that steals mere property. In that little book which I have just laid
down Shakespeare speaks trenchantly on that matter: 'Who steals my purse
steals trash . . . but he that filches from me my good name robs me . . .
and makes me poor indeed.'”
The tramp gave over his work of folding, and awkwardly and cumbersomely
got upon his feet.
“You take off that coat and hand it over. It's mine--I found it. I can
stand a crazy man's gab, but when any one tries to do me out of what's
my own I'll fight.”
“May I ask what you're going to do with these garments of a gentleman
which have fallen into your hands by accident?”
“I'm going to cash 'em in at the nearest second-hand shop, that's just
what I'm going to do.”
“Just as you sold the Sunday suit you stole from a poor man! My friend,
I was insulted that day on account of you. You owe me something!”
Just then the alarm-clock purred a brief signal.
Up to that time the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of
banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the
ignorant stranger who had come blundering upon him.
He stared at the clock, looked down upon the frock-coat, and then
surveyed the other articles of clothing. He scowled as if he had
suddenly begun to reflect. Seriousness smoldered in the brown eyes.
That tinkling touch of metal against metal seemed to change his mood in
astonishing fashion.
“Ah, it may be morning again, O my soul!” he cried with such tense