Next day he slowly trotted ninety times about the clearing, his chin up and his chest out, while Crook McKusick, excited at being a trainer again, snapped orders at him and talked about form.... A ludicrous figure, a little old man, his white locks flapping under a mushy cap as he galloped earnestly through the light snow. But his cheeks were one red glow, his eyes were bright, and in his laugh, when he finished, was infinite hope.
If it had been Mother who had first taken charge of the camp and converted it to respectability and digestible food, it was Father who really ran it, for he was the only person who could understand her and Crook McKusick and the sloppy Kid all at once.
Crook McKusick had long cultivated a careful habit of getting drunk once a week. But two weeks after the coming of the Applebys he began to omit his sprees, because Mother needed him to help her engineer variations of the perpetual mulligan, and Father needed him for his regular training.
To the training Crook added a course in psychology. As a hobo he was learned in that science. The little clerk, the comfortable banker, the writer of love-stories--such dull plodders have their habits all set out for them. But the hobo, who has to ride the rods amid flying gravel to-day, and has to coax food out of a nice old lady to-morrow, must have an expert working knowledge of psychology if he is to climb in his arduous profession.
Father and Mother had started out from New York on a desperate flight, with no aspirations beyond the hope that they might be able to make a living. It was the hobo, Crook McKusick, who taught Father that there was no reason why, with his outdoor life and his broadened experience, he should not be a leader among men wherever he went; be an Edward Pilkings and a Miss Mitchin, yea, even a Mrs. Lulu Hartwig, instead of a meek, obedient, little Seth Appleby. It was Crook who, out of his own experience in doing the unusual, taught Father that it was just as easy to be unusual, to live a life excitedly free, as to be a shop-bound clerk. Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at a time, keeping at it, forming the habit.... So, an outcast among outcasts, grubbily bunked in a camp of hoboes, talking to a filthy lean man with an evil hooked nose, Seth Appleby began to think for himself, to the end that he should be one of the cla.s.s that rules and is unafraid.
The amiable boarders at Hoboes" Home didn"t at all mind Mother"s darning their socks. They didn"t much mind having her order them to wash their faces at a hole through the ice in the near-by creek before coming to dinner. But it took her many days to get them used to going off to work for money and supplies. Yet every day half the camp grumblingly disappeared to shuck corn, mend fences, repair machinery, and they came back with flour, potatoes, meat, coffee, torn magazines, and shirts.
Father regularly went out to work with them, and was the first to bring water, to cut wood. They all took a pride in the camp. They kept the bunk-house scrubbed, and inordinately admired the new mattresses, stuffed with fresh straw and covered with new calico, which Mother made for them. In the evenings the group about the camp-fire was not so very different from any other happy family--except that there was an unusually large proportion of bright eyes and tanned faces.
But when spring cleared the snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead--vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about the fire--there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in starting off for new adventures.
That honest workman, "Struck Dumb," disappeared one afternoon, telling Crook that he heard of much building at Duluth.
Crook laughed when Mother admired Mr. Struck Dumb"s yearning for creative toil. "That guy," Crook declared, "is an honest workman except that he ain"t honest and he won"t work. He"ll last about two days in Duluth, and then he"ll pike for Alberta or San Diego or some place. He"s got restless feet, same like me."
The K. C. Kid and Reddy jigged and shouted songs all one evening, and were off for the north. At last no one but Father and Mother and Crook was left. And they, too, were star-eyed with expectation of new roads, new hills. They sat solemnly by the fire on their last evening. Mother was magnificent in a new cloak, to buy which Father had secretly been saving pennies out of the dimes that he had earned by working about the country.
Usually Crook McKusick was gravely cynical when he listened to Father"s cataract of excited plans, but he seemed wistful to-night, and he nodded his head as though, for once, he really did believe that Father and Mother would find some friendly village that would take them in.
Father was telling a story so ardently that he almost made himself believe it: Some day, Mother and he would be crawling along the road and discover a great estate. The owner, a whimsical man, a lonely and eccentric bachelor of the type that always brightens English novels, would invite them in, make Father his steward and Mother his lady housekeeper. There would be a mystery in the house--a walled-off room, a sound of voices at night in dark corridors where no voices could possibly be, a hidden tragedy, and at last Father and Mother would lift the burden from the place, and end their days in the rose-covered dower-house.... Not that Father was sure just what a dower-house was, but he was quite definite and positive about the rose-covering.
"How you run on," Mother yawned.
"Aw, let him," Crook cried, with sudden fierceness. "My Gawd! you two almost make me believe that there is such a thing as faith left in this dirty old world, that"s always seemed to me just the back of an eternal saloon. Maybe--maybe I"ll find my ambition again.... Well--g" night."
When with their pack and their outlooking smiles the Applebys prepared to start, next day, and turned to say good-by to Crook, he started, cried, "I will!" and added, "I"m coming with you, for a while!"
For two days Crook McKusick tramped with them, suiting his lean activity, his sardonic impatience, to their leisurely slowness. He called to the blackbirds, he found pasque-flowers for them, and in the sun-baked hollows between hillocks coaxed them to lie and dream.
But one morning they found a note:
DEAR AUNTY AND UNCLE:
Heard a freight-train whistle and I"m off. But some day I"ll find you again. I"ll cut out the booze, anyway, and maybe I"ll be a human being again. G.o.d bless you babes in the woods.
C. McK.
"The poor boy! G.o.d will bless him, too, and keep him, because he"s opened his heart again," whispered Mother. "Are we babes in the woods, Seth? I"d rather be that than a queen, long as I can be with you."
East and west, north and south, the hoboes journeyed, and everywhere they carried with them fables of Mr. and Mrs. Seth Appleby, the famous wanderers, who at seventy, eighty, ninety, were exploring the world.
Benighted tramps in city lock-ups, talking to bored police reporters, told the story, and it began to appear in little filler paragraphs here and there in newspapers.
Finally a feature-writer on a Boston paper, a man with imagination and a sense of the dramatic, made a one-column Sunday story out of the adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Appleby. He represented them as wealthy New-Yorkers who were at once explorers and exponents of the simple life.
He said nothing about a shoe-store, a tea-room, a hobo-camp.
The idea of these old people making themselves a new life caught many imaginations. The Sunday story was reprinted and reprinted till the source of it was entirely forgotten. The names of the Applebys became stock references in many newspaper offices--Father even had a new joke appended to his name, as though he were an actor or an author or Chauncey Depew.
The Applebys were largely unconscious of their floating fame. But as they tramped westward through West Virginia, as the flood tide of spring and the vigor of summer bore them across Ohio and into Indiana, they found that in nearly every town people knew their names and were glad to welcome them as guests instead of making them work for food. When Father did insist on cutting wood or spading a garden, it was viewed as a charming eccentricity in him, a consistent following of the simple life, and they were delighted when he was so whimsical as to accept pay for his work.
But he never played the mouth-organ--except to Mother!
CHAPTER XVI
They were in Indiana, now. They had saved up six dollars and twenty cents, despite the fact that Father had overborne her caution and made her dine at a lunch-room, now and then, or sleep at a hotel, while he cheerfully scavenged in the neighborhood.
The shoes he had bought in West Virginia were impossible. They had been mended and resoled, but the new soles had large concentric holes. Mother discovered the fact, and decisively took the problem out of his hands.
He was going to take that six dollars and twenty cents, he was, and get new shoes. It was incredible luxury.
He left Mother at a farm-house. He stood meditatively before the window of a shoe-store in Lipsittsville, Indiana. Lawyer Vanduzen, who read the papers, guessed who he was, and imparted the guess to the loafers in front of the Regal Drug Store, who watched him respectfully.
Inside the shoe-store, the proprietor was excited. "Why," he exclaimed to his a.s.sistant, "that must be Appleby, the pedestrian--fellow you read so much about--the Indianapolis paper said just this morning that he was some place in this part of the country--you know, the fellow who"s tramped all over Europe and Asia with his wife, and is bound for San Francisco now." His one lone clerk, a youth with adenoids, gaped and grunted. It was incredible to him that any one should walk without having to.
Father was aware of the general interest, and as he was becoming used to his role as public character, he marched into the store like the Lord Mayor of London when he goes shopping in his gold coach with three men and a boy in powdered wigs carrying his train.
The proprietor bowed and ventured: "Glad to see you with us, Mr.
Appleby. It is Mr. Appleby, isn"t it?"
"Uh-huh," growled Father.
"Well, well! Tramping like yours is pretty hard on the footgear, and that"s a fact! Well, well! Believe me, you"ve come to just the right store for sport shoes. We got a large line of smart new horsehide shoes.
Dear me! Tut, tut, tut, tut! What a pity, the way the tramping has worn out yours--fine shoe, too, I can see that. Well, well, well, well! how it surely does wear out the shoes, this long tramping. Peter, bring a pair of those horsehide shoes for Mr. Appleby. Nice, small, aristocratic foot, Mr. Appleby. If you worked in a shoe-store you"d know how uncommon--"
"Huh! Don"t want horsehide. Try a pair o" those pigskin shoes over there that you got a sale on."
"Well, well, you do know what you want," fawned the shoeman. "Those pigskins are a very fine grade of shoe, and very inexpensive, very good for tramping--"
"Yump. They"ll do."
"Going to be with us long?" inquired the shoeman, after trying on the shoes and cursing out Peter, the adenoidic clerk, in an abstracted, hopeless manner.
"Nope." Father was wonderfully bored and superior. Surely not this Seth Appleby but a twin of his, a weak-kneed inferior twin, had loafed in Tompkins Square and wavered through the New York slums, longing for something to do. He didn"t really mean to be curt, but his chief business in life was to get his shoes and hurry back to Mother, who was waiting for him, a mile from town, at a farm where the lordly Father had strung fence-wire and told high-colored stories for his breakfast.
The fascinated shoeman hated to let him go. The shoeman knew few celebrities, and a five-mile motor ride was his wildest adventure. But by the light of a secret lamp in the bathroom, when his wife supposed him to have gone to bed, he breathlessly read the _Back o" the Beyond Magazine_, and slew pirates with a rubber sponge, and made a Turkish towel into a turban covered with quite valuable rubies, and coldly defied all the sharks in the bathtub. He was an adventurer and he felt that Father Appleby would understand his little-appreciated gallantry.
He continued, "The madam with you?"
"Yump."
"Say--uh--if I may be so bold and just suggest it, we"d be honored if you and the madam could take dinner at our house and tell us about your trip. The wife and me was talking about it just this morning. The wife said, guessed we"d have to pike out and do the same thing! Hee, hee! And Doc Schergan--fine bright man the doc, very able and cultured and educated--he"s crazy to meet you. We were talking about you just this morning--read about your heading this way, in the Indianapolis paper.
Say," he leaned forward and whispered, after a look at his clerk which ought to have exterminated that unadventurous youth--"say, is it true what they say, that you"re doing this on a ten-thousand-dollar bet?"