Father awakened from an agitating dream of setting the barn afire, and beheld Mother sitting up amid the hay--an amazing, a quite incredible situation for Mrs. Seth Appleby. She mildly dabbled at her gray hair, which was still neat, and looked across in bewilderment. Like a jack-in-the-box, Father came up out of the hay to greet her.
"How do you like your room in the Wal-dorf-As-torya?" he said. "Sleep well, old honey?"
"Why--why, I must have!" she marveled. "I don"t hardly remember coming here, though."
"Ready to tramp on?"
She swore that she was. And indeed her cheeks were ruddy with outdoors, the corners of her eyes relaxed. But she was so stiff that they had hobbled a mile, and Father had shucked several tons of corn in return for breakfast, before she ceased feeling as though her legs were made of extraordinarily brittle gla.s.s.
CHAPTER XIV
Sometimes they were feted adventurers who were credited with having tramped over most of the globe. Sometimes they were hoboes on whom straggly women shut farm-house doors. But never were they wandering minstrels. Father went on believing that he intended to play the mouth-organ and entertain the poor, but actually he depended on his wood-chopping arm, and every cord he chopped gave him a ruddier flush of youth, a warmer flush of ambition.
Most people do not know why they do things--not even you and I invariably know, though of course we are superior to the unresponsive ma.s.ses. Many people are even unconscious that they are doing things or being things--being gentle or cruel or creative or parasitic. Quite without knowing it, Father was searching for his place in the world. The New York shoe-stores had decided that he was too old to be useful. But age is as fict.i.tious as time or love. Father was awakening from the sleep of drudgery in the one dusty shop, and he was asking what other place there was for him. He was beginning to have another idea, a better idea, which he pondered as he came to shoe-stores in small towns....
They weren"t very well window-dressed; the signs were feeble.... Maybe some day he"d get back into the shoe business in some town, and he"d show them--only, how could he talk business to a shoeman when he was shabby and winter-tanned and none too extravagant in the care of his reddening hands?
But he was learning something more weighty--the art of handling people, in the two aspects thereof--bluffing, and backing up the bluff with force and originality. He came to the commonplace people along the road as something novel and admirable, a man who had taken his wife and his poverty and gone seeing the world. When he smiled in a superior way and said nothing, people immediately believed that he must have been places, done brave things. He didn"t so much bluff them as let them bluff themselves.... He had never been able to do that in his years as a foggy-day shadow to the late J. Pilkings.
It is earnestly recommended to all uncomfortable or dissatisfied men over sixty that they take their wives and their mouth-organs and go tramping in winter, whether they be bank presidents or shoe-clerks or writers of fiction or just plain honest men. Though doubtless some of them may have difficulty in getting their wives to go.
It was early March, a snowy, bl.u.s.tery March, and the Applebys were plodding through West Virginia. No longer were they the mysterious "Smiths." Father was rather proud, now, of being Appleby, the pedestrian. Mother looked stolidly content as she trudged at his side, ruddy and placid and accustomed to being wept over by every farm-wife.
At an early dusk, with a storm menacing, with the air uneasy and a wind melancholy in the trees, they struck off by a forest road which would, they hoped, prove a short cut to the town of Weatherford. They came to cross-paths, and took the more trodden way, which betrayed them and soon dwindled to a narrow rut which they could scarcely follow in the twilight. Father was frightened. They would have to camp in the woods--and a blizzard was coming.
He saw a light ahead, a shifting, evasive light.
"There"s a farm-house or something," he declared, cheerily. "We"ll just nach"ly make "em give us shelter. Going to storm too bad to do much work for "em, and I bet it"s some cranky old sh.e.l.lback farmer, living "way out here like this. Well, we"ll teach the old codger to like music, and this time I _will_ play my mouth-organ. Ain"t you glad we"re young folks that like music and dancing--"
"How you run on!" Mother said, trustingly.
From the bleakness ahead came a cracked but l.u.s.ty voice singing "h.e.l.lo, "Frisco!"
"Man singing! Jolly! That"s a good omen," chuckled Father. "All the folks that are peculiar--like we are--love to sing."
"Yes, and talk!" However much she enjoyed Father"s chatter, Mother felt that she owed it to her conscience--which she kept as neat and well dusted, now that they were vagrants, as she had in a New York flat--to reprove him occasionally, for his own good.
"Say, this is exciting. That"s a bonfire ahead," Father whispered.
They slowed their pace to a stealthy walk. Behind them and beside them was chilly darkness lurking in caverns among black, bare tree-trunks.
Before them they could see a nebulous glow and hear the monotonous voice singing the same words over and over.
Mother shrieked. They stopped. A vast, lumbering bulk of a man plunged out from the woods, hesitated, stooped, brandished a club.
"Tut, tut! No need to be excited, mister. We"re just two old folks looking for shelter for the night," wavered Father, with spurious coolness.
"Huh?" growled a thick, greasy voice. "Where d"yuh belong?"
"Everywhere. We"re tramping to San Francisco."
As he said it Father stood uneasy, looking into the penetrating eye of an electric torch which the man had flashed on him. The torch blotted out the man who held it, and turned everything--the night, the woods, the storm mutters--into just that one hypnotizing ball of fire suspended in the darkness.
"Well, well," gasped the unknown, "a moll, swelp me! Welcome to our roost, "bo! You hit it right. This is Hoboes" Home. There"s nine "boes of us got a shack up ahead. Welcome, ma"am. What"s your line? Con game or just busted?"
"I"m sure I don"t know what you mean, young man," snapped Mother.
"Well, if you two are like me, nothing but just honest workmen, you better try and make "em think you"re working some game--tell "em you"re the Queen of the Thimble-riggers or some dern thing like that. Come on, now. Been gathering wood; got enough. You can follow me. The bunch ain"t so very criminal--not for hoboes they ain"t."
The large mysterious man started down the path toward the glow, and Father and Mother followed him uncomfortably.
"It"s a den of vice he"s taking us into," groaned Father. "And if we go back they"ll pursue us. Maybe we better--"
"I don"t believe a con game is a nice thing, whatever it is," said Mother. "It sounds real wicked. I never heard of thimble-rigging. How do you rig a thimble?"
"I don"t know, but I think we better go back."
They stopped. The large man turned on them and growled, "Hustle up."
Obediently the Innocents trailed after his dark, s.h.a.ggy back that, in his tattered overcoat, seemed as formidable as it was big. The glow grew more intense ahead of them. They came into a clearing where, round a fire beside a rude shanty, sat several men, one of whom was still droning "h.e.l.lo, "Frisco!"
"Visitors!" shouted the guide.
The group sprang up, startled, threatening--shabby, evil-looking men.
Father stood palsied as grim, unshaven faces lowered at him, as a sinister man with a hooked nose stalked forward, his fist doubled.
But Mother left his side, darted past the hook-nosed man, and snapped: "That"s no way to peel potatoes, young man. You"re losing all the best part, next to the skin. Here, give me that. I"ll show you. Waste and carelessness--"
While Father and the group of circled hoboes stared, Mother firmly took a huge jack-knife away from a slight, red-headed man who was peeling potatoes and chucking them into a pot of stew that was boiling on the fire.
"Well--I"ll--be--darned!" said every one, almost in chorus.
"Who are you?" the hook-nosed man demanded of Father. But his voice sounded puzzled and he gazed incredulously at Mother as she cozily peeled potatoes, her delicate cheeks and placid eye revealed in the firelight. She was already as st.u.r.dily industrious and matter-of-fact as though she were back in the tea-room.
"I"m Appleby, the pedestrian," said Father. "Wife and I went-- Say, ain"t she the nicest-looking woman in that firelight! Great woman, let me tell you. We went broke in New York and we"re tramping to "Frisco.
Can you take us in for the night? I guess we"re all fellow-hoboes."
"Sure will," said the hook-nosed man. "Pleased to have you come, fellow-b.u.m. My name"s Crook McKusick. I"m kind of camp boss. The boys call me "Crook" because I"m so honest. You can see that yourself."
"Oh yes," said Father, quite innocently.
"The lad that the madam dispossessed is Reddy, and this fish-faced duck here is the K. C. Kid. But I guess the most important guy in the gang is Mr. Mulligan, the stew. If your missus wants to elect herself cook to-night, and make the mulligan taste human, she can be the boss."