THE GYPO CAMP
HALF an hour after learning that Lester preferred a ducking to life in
the boundless West, Joshua, a David bereft of his Jonathan, entered the
Crescent Rink and put on his skates again. He had earned twenty-five
cents that afternoon, and there was the possibility of earning more
when the evening crowd came in. He looked all about for Madge Mundy,
but caught no sight of her. His heart was bitter against Lester, but
finally he decided that, after all, his brother had acted wisely. It
was barely possible that, when news reached home of his own expulsion,
the upheaval would be so great that Lester’s minor infraction would be
forgotten. Anyway, Lester was not old enough to go West with him--he
lacked nerve. But Joshua missed his companionship, and, now all alone
on his great adventure, felt lonely and downcast beyond all words.
He was unfortunate that evening, for no one asked for his services as
skating instructor. And about eight o’clock, as he was beginning to be
ravenously hungry by reason of having missed his lunch, he left the
rink and sought a restaurant.
Sandwiches at five cents each and a hungry boy of fourteen with a
lone twenty-five-cent piece in his sweaty palm do not make a very
satisfactory combination. One sandwich after another he felt obliged
to eat, until four had been consumed. Then, still hungry but painfully
aware that only five cents remained of his precious quarter, he paid up
and went out into the lighted street.
Back at the rink he skated for an hour with no more luck than earlier
in the evening. Only then did the problem of quarters for the night
present itself to him as a grim reality. So he skated on until closing
time, and then went out no richer than he had entered.
Well, he had become an outlaw, and outlaws must make the best of
things. He sauntered along the street, marveling that a March night
could be so cold at twelve o’clock. The crowds had long since
thinned, and only here and there he encountered a lone pedestrian
hurrying--somewhere. He avoided three policemen, and took to a side
street, wandering toward the railroad yards.
He wondered if he could find Madge’s camp. Surely, in a camp, there
would be some place for him to sleep. This was a trifle different than
he had planned--different from his imaginings over there in the sunny,
swampy lot where he and his brother had awaited the coming of Slinky
Dawson.
He found the freight yards eventually, avoided the depot and other
railroad buildings, and made his way to the farther end of the
property. He crossed a system of tracks, and then the open door of an
empty boxcar invited him to enter and make himself at home. He crawled
inside, closed the creaky door, and lay down in a corner on the floor.
It was warmer here, and he made a pillow of his arm. He began to revise
his plans, but in the midst of this he fell asleep.
Several times that night he awoke with the cold, but was so worn out
and sleepy that he at once dozed off again. A severe shock brought
him fully awake at last, and he felt the car moving gently. He ran to
the door and slid it open. Sitting down with his feet dangling, he
jumped unexpertly to the ground, and was at once confronted by a grimy
switchman.
“Well, kid, where’d you come from?” he asked in a not unkindly tone.
“From in there,” was Joshua’s unnecessary answer to an equally
unnecessary question.
“On the bum?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh! You don’t look it. Ain’t been on it long, have you?”
Joshua grinned, not daring to make reply.
“Well, you better keep your eye peeled for the railroad cop,” said the
switchman, as he marched on about his own affairs beside the slowly
moving train, to which Joshua’s car had been coupled on.
“Say, Mister!” Joshua called after him.
“Well, get it outa ye!”
“I want to know if there’s a railroad camp about here somewhere--where
they’re double-trackin’ the road?”
“Lookin’ for a job?”
“Yeah--sure.”
“Husky stiff you’ll make! Right down the tracks, son. You can’t miss
it.”
It was very early in the morning; the sun had not yet risen. The air
was cool and the strips of steel that would sprawl eventually to all
corners of the continent were wet with dew. Birds were singing in the
treetops. The blood of the earth throbbed with the tonic of spring.
Joshua trudged along, whistling. His doubts had vanished with the birth
of a new day, and he thrilled at thought of his grand adventure. He
came to a pool of rain water in which he washed his hands and face,
allowing the soft morning breeze to dry them. Then he walked on and on,
and at times he felt like running from the sheer joy of living, but was
reminded that he was now a man and must carry himself sedately.
He came to where the buildings were few and far between, and smaller
and more disreputable and smoke-stained they became as he forged on.
And now far ahead, in a flat open space, he saw the near-white tents of
a camp.
This quickened his steps despite his new religion of decorum, and
before long he was approaching his destination, and saw men washing in
tin basins that were set on a bench beside one of the larger tents.
From a listing chimney that topped this tent blue smoke arose and was
whipped away on the breeze. And as the adventurer drew closer the odors
of cooking that floated to his nostrils reminded him that he was hungry.
There were several tents. One of them--a large one--had no walls, and
under the canopy top Joshua saw horses and mules eating hay and grain
and switching their tails in anticipation of the onslaught of flies
which would begin when the morning was a little older. The clanking
of the metal parts of their harness Joshua somehow liked to hear. It
suggested all that he hoped might lie before him in the West.
The men were now going into the dining tent, one by one, or in pairs.
All were within before the boy entered the camp. He saw nobody now,
but from the tent came rough voices and an occasional burst of coarse
laughter, mingling with the metallic sounds of knives and forks.
Though the exterior of the camp was deserted, Joshua was seized by
a sudden backwardness. For worlds he would not have gone to the
door of that dining tent, and he feared to move about lest some one
challenge him. So he walked away to a respectful distance and sat down
on the ground, watching the horses and mules in the stable tent and
speculating over the uses of the various implements that he saw about.
For some little time he sat there, then the men began to come from the
tent singly and in small groups. Two or three of them glanced his way,
and this made him rise and move farther off. He decided that he was
foolish to have come. He dreaded ridicule, and these tramplike workmen
looked capable of any form of rude word-torture. He would go back to
the city and wait until Madge came to the skating rink that afternoon.
And then as he cast a last look toward the camp he saw her coming from
a small tent in the rear of the dining tent. Next instant he heard her
calling.
She came to meet him as he turned and made slow steps in her direction.
The men had for the most part gone to the stable tent, and before the
girl reached Joshua somebody began pounding a ringing tattoo on a large
triangle. Then all of the men trooped to the tent, and were leading
forth the teams as Madge began surprised remarks over his coming.
“Why, what on earth brought you here this time o’ day? How’d you find
us? Did you stay away from home all night?”
Joshua grinned in confusion, but he felt better immediately. This girl
was like no other girl that he had met. While she seemed modest enough
and not lacking in that intangible feminine instinct to make no open
approaches toward the male of the species, she was free and easy-spoken
and friendly to a high degree.
“I just thought I’d--now--sneak down this way,” he told her. “A
switchman told me the way. Ole Les quit me, all right. He’s gone home.
I had to sleep in a boxcar last night.”
“Did you really?” she laughed. “That’s nothing for a stiff. They’re all
tramps--all these railroaders. You’d get used to things like that if
you went on the railroad grade. But ain’t you really ever going home
again?”
He shook his head. “No more o’ that duckin’ in mine,” he said.
“I think that’s a perfectly awful way for a father to treat his boy,”
she sympathized. “I told Pa and Ma about you last night.”
“Didja?”--eagerly. “What’d they say?”
“Well, Pa didn’t just know. He said he didn’t like to interfere in
anything like that--you know, come between a boy and his father. But he
said putting your head under water that way was mighty mean, and he’d
bet a dollar he could whip the man that he saw doing it. You see, Pa
isn’t like most folks. He’s lived out in camps so much that he--well,
I don’t just know how to say it--but he’s--well, I guess you’d call it
liberal. But he said you oughta go home, and maybe they’d forgive you.”
“He don’t know my father,” said Joshua, shaking his head. “No, I won’t
go home, Madge, no matter what happens.”
“I don’t blame you, I guess. But say--I’ll bet you haven’t had a bite
of breakfast! Of course you haven’t! Well, neither have I. Don’t you
want to come and eat with us? Ma’ll be glad to have you.”
“It wouldn’t be any bother, would it?”
“Of course not, silly! Come on. Ma and I always eat after the stiffs’ve
gone out to work. Pa eats with them. We’ve got a dandy cook. Come
on--Joshua.”
The morning sun accentuated the Pocahontas coloring in her cheeks.
She wore a red-checked gingham dress. Her bronze hair hung loose down
her back, and was gathered with a ribbon at the nape of her neck.
Joshua noticed now that it was “frizzly” instead of straight or wavy
or curly, and he thought that if he were to squeeze it in his hand it
would immediately spring free again, like the stuffing of a curled-hair
mattress.
At the door of the dining tent Madge introduced him to her mother:
“Ma, this is the boy I was telling you about. He slept in a boxcar all
night. And--and he hasn’t had any breakfast. So I invited him.”
Madge’s mother proved to be a comely woman of over forty, and Joshua
was not a little surprised at her apparent refinement. While a boy of
fourteen makes few pretenses of being himself refined, he is quick to
note it or the lack of it in his elders. She was dressed simply and
neatly in an inexpensive house gown. Joshua wondered, too, how she
could look so fresh and unsoiled in a camp by the railroad tracks,
where men worked all day long at moving dirt.
She held out her hand and smiled. “We’d like to have you stay to
breakfast with us,” she said. “Madge has told me quite a bit about you.
I’d like to hear more. And it may be that I can help you.”
“No’m,” said Joshua. “I guess nobody can help me. I guess I only wanta
go West. I can’t go home again--I guess that’s the way you want to help
me.”
Mrs. Mundy only smiled and led the way into the dining tent.
The three sat at one end of a long oilcloth-covered table, and the camp
cook, a dark man with a heavy mustache, in a dingy white apron and
white cook’s coat and cap, waited on them, setting a wide assortment of
food before them in deep granite pans.
“Tell me about yourself,” suggested Madge’s mother when the cook had
left them to themselves.
Joshua told his story again, and Mrs. Mundy listened attentively to
every word.
“It’s rather a strange case,” was her only comment as he finished.
Presently a man with heavy, fiery-red hair entered the tent.
Immediately Joshua knew him for “Bloodmop” Mundy, the father of Madge,
and he knew that he would like this man with the twinkling sky-blue
eyes, at the corners of which queer little crow’s-feet came and went,
giving his face that quizzical, whimsical look which boys interpret
as belonging to a man who is friendly and sympathetic to them and
interested in their boyish activities. Bloodmop Mundy wore dirty yellow
overalls and a disreputable slouch hat, and needed a shave. The sleeves
of his blue chambray shirt were rolled up to his elbows, displaying
great, muscle-corded arms on which the red hairs looked redder still by
reason of the deep tan which was their background.
“Well, who in the dickens is this?” was his method of recognizing
Joshua’s unfamiliar presence, and his voice came in a deep, musical
boom.
Joshua stood up from the table while Mrs. Mundy broke the news.
“Well, I’m a son-of-a-gun!”--and the crow’s-feet shuttled at the
corners of his twinkling blue eyes. “And was you really gonta soak th’
ole devil with th’ poker, kid?”
“George,” cautioned his wife, “watch your tongue.”
“Yes’m--excuse me, ’Lizabeth. Set down, kid--set down an’ finish yer
chow. What ye gonta do about it when all’s said an’ done?”
This, Joshua felt, was his great opportunity. “I--I was thinkin’ maybe
you could gi’me a job, Mr. Mundy. Madge, she said maybe you’d see about
it. Anyway, she said she’d ask. Will you? I’m pretty stout. And I’d
work. I wanta go West.”
“Wanta go West, huh! Grow up with th’ country--’sthat it?”
“Yes, sir.”
The sky-blue eyes twinkled, and one of them bestowed a prodigious wink
on Mrs. Mundy. “Well, now, what could ye do? Think ye could skin Jack
an’ Ned on roller-skates?”--and Bloodmop laughed loudly at his own joke.
“He means drive a team of mules,” Madge explained. “On the railroad
grade a span of mules are always called Jack and Ned.” Then to her
father: “Don’t try to tease him, Pa. He’s had enough trouble, I’d
think.”
“Well, he’s lookin’ f’r more,” laughed Bloodmop Mundy. “It’s a sure
thing there’s plenty o’ trouble on the railroad grade. Well, kid, you
stick around to-day and I’ll think it over. Yes, sir, I’ll just do
that. Ma, I bet ye don’t know what I drifted in here for.”
“I haven’t the remotest idea,” asserted Mrs. Mundy, in a tone and with
a smile that proved her speech a mild prevarication.
Bloodmop Mundy stepped to her side. “I was goin’ to drive the buckboard
up town to see about some more hay,” he said. “And I thought I might be
killed er somethin’ ’fore I got back.”
“In that case--” And here she lifted her face.
He bent over her, and never had Joshua seen a man’s face so tender as
he kissed her softly on the lips. Joshua had seen his father peck at
his mother’s lips when he would be leaving for a trip, and the coldness
of it had made him consider the kiss of man and wife a sort of ceremony
that must be endured. He realized that men loved women and women men,
but it had never occurred to him that fathers and mothers loved each
other.
“Thank ye, ma’am,” said Bloodmop Mundy. “And now I’ll throw the leather
on the ponies an’ be gettin’ on. Anythin’ you want? Cook need anythin’?”
“Nothing, I think,” said his wife.
“Well, keep an eye on these here Westerners. I guess they’ll need
watchin’, when all’s said an’ done.”
And with great, mannish strides he left the tent.
Mrs. Mundy asked many questions about Joshua’s father and mother and
his home life, and continued to ask long after they had finished
eating. Joshua told her of a day when there had been ten negro servants
in the house. The family had lived on Park Avenue then, which was in
the heart of the most exclusive residential section of Hathaway. He
told what little he knew of his mother’s aristocratic family, and of
how he had heard servants’ gossip about their having ostracized her
after her marriage to one of the insignificant Coles. But mostly he
dwelt upon his father’s seeming delight in holding him with his head
submerged in water in the bathtub until he fell on the floor, sometimes
unconscious.
What effect his disclosures had on Madge’s mother he had no means of
knowing, for she appeared to be a woman of few words, and now she made
no comments. But her dark eyes were thoughtful as she rose from the
table, and the boy knew that he had made a deep impression, although he
was unable to interpret her mood.
She had risen at the sound of wheels before the door of the dining
tent. Bloodmop had been delayed, it seemed, and was only then starting
on his trip to Hathaway. His wife hurried out to him, leaving Madge
and Joshua at the table, and the two heard them engaged in low-voiced
conversation.
“They’re talking about you, I think,” Madge whispered. “Listen!”
But they were unable to distinguish words.
Then the conversation ceased, and they heard the buckboard drive away.
Mrs. Mundy reëntered the tent.
“Well, Joshua,” she said, “can you find something to do for a couple of
hours?”
“Yes’m--I guess so.”
“Madge must get at her lessons right away, and--”
“Oh, Ma! Couldn’t I put ’em off just for to-day?” interposed her
daughter.
“I think not,” said her mother. “Joshua can find something to interest
him about camp, I suspect. In two hours you’ll be through.”
This seemed final, for Madge raised no further protest. Nor did she
pout or look downcast. It seemed to Joshua that Elizabeth Mundy
possessed some gentle, secret control over the rough-necked Bloodmop
and their pretty daughter which would always get her what she wished.