The sun, a huge brazen ball, was low in the west when he set off along
the river with confident, springy step. He stopped at a farmhouse
and asked for supper. The evening meal was over, the farmer’s wife
explained; but when he assured her that his needs were few and that he
expected to pay for his entertainment, she produced a pitcher of milk
and a plate of corn bread. She brought a bowl of yellow glaze crockery
and he made himself comfortable on a bench by the kitchen door. He
crumbled the bread into the creamy milk and ate with satisfaction.
Her husband appeared, and instantly prejudiced by Bruce’s
knickerbockers, doggedly quizzed him as to the nature and direction
of his journey. Bruce was a new species, not to be confused with the
ordinary tramp who demands food at farmhouses, and suddenly contrite
that the repast she was providing was so meager, the woman rose and
disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a huge piece of spice
cake and a dish of sliced peaches. She was taken aback when he rose
deferentially to accept the offering, but her tired face relaxed in a
smile at his cordial expressions of gratitude. She joined her husband
on the stoop, finding the handsome pilgrim’s visit a welcome break in
the monotonous day. As he ate he answered their questions unhurriedly.
“I guess the war left a lot o’ you boys restless,” she suggested.
“Oh, it wasn’t the war that made a rover of me!” he replied with
a smile. “It was this way with me. When I got home I found I had
something to think out--something I had to get used to”--he frowned
and became silent for a moment--“so I decided I could do it better by
tramping. But I’ve settled things in my own mind pretty well now,” he
ended, half to himself, and smiled, hardly aware of their presence.
“Yes?” The woman’s tone was almost eager. She was curious as to the
real reason for his wanderings and what it was that he had settled. In
the luminous afterglow her dull imagination quickened to a sense of
something romantic in this stranger, and she was disappointed when he
told of an experience as a laborer in a great steel mill, just to see
what it was like, he said--of loitering along the Susquehanna, and of a
more recent tramp through the Valley of Virginia.
“I reckon you don’t have to work?” the farmer asked, baffled in his
attempts to account for a young man who strolled over the country so
aimlessly, wearing what struck him as an outlandish garb.
“Oh, but I do! I’ve done considerable work as I’ve sauntered around.
I’m an architect--or hope to be! I’ve earned my keep as I’ve traveled
by getting jobs as a draughtsman.”
“Going to stop in the city?” the woman inquired. “I guess there’s lots
of architects over there.”
“Yes,” Bruce replied, following the direction of her glance.
“You know folks there?” she persisted. “I guess it’s hard getting
started if you ain’t got friends.”
“There’s a chap living there I knew in college; that’s all. But when
you strike a strange town where you don’t know anyone the only thing to
do is to buckle in and make them want to know you!”
“I guess you can do that,” she remarked with shy admiration.
The farmer shuffled his feet on the brick walk. For all he knew the
young stranger might be a burglar. He resented his wife’s tone of
friendliness and resolved to deny the request if the young man asked
the privilege of sleeping in the barn; but the stranger not only
failed to ask for lodging, but produced a dollar bill and insisted
that the woman accept it. This transaction served instantly to dispel
the farmer’s suspicions. He answered with unnecessary detail Bruce’s
questions as to the shortest way to town, and walked with him to a lane
that ran along the edge of a cornfield and afforded a short cut to the
highway.
Bruce had expected to reach the city before nightfall, but already
the twilight was deepening and the first stars glimmered in the pale
sky. Now that he was near the end of his self-imposed wanderings, he
experienced a sense of elation. The unhappy thoughts with which he had
left his Ohio home a little more than a year earlier had gradually
become dim in his memory. The letters he had burned at the riverside
really marked in his consciousness a dispersion of doubts and questions
that left his spirit free. His mother’s revelation had greatly shaken
him; but she need never have told him; and it spoke for her courage
and her faith in him that she had confessed the truth. They had been
companions in an unusual sense. From his earliest youth she had
interested him in the things that had been her delight--books, music,
pictures. She was herself an accomplished musician, and strains of old
melodies she had taught him recurred to him now, and as he swung along
the country road he whistled them, happy for the first time in the
awakening of old memories.
With the cool breeze blowing upon him from fields of tall ripening
corn, there was no bitterness in his soul. He had beaten down the
bitter thoughts that had assailed him in the early days of his
journeying--the sense that a stigma attached to him, not the less
hateful because he alone had knowledge of it; and the feeling that
there was something fantastic in the idea that he should put himself
where, in any need, he could serve the father he had never known.
This had now all the sanctity of a commission from the dead. Again he
speculated as to what manner of man this could be who had awakened so
deep a love in the heart of the good woman he knew his mother to have
been--a love which she had carried in her heart to her last hours. In
his long ponderings he had, he felt, come to understand her better than
he ever had in her lifetime--her imaginative and romantic side, her
swiftly changing moods, her innumerable small talents that had now a
charm and a pathos in the retrospect. Age had never, to his eyes, laid
hands upon her. Even through the last long illness she had retained the
look and the spirit of youth.
Rounding a bend in the river, the flare of an amusement park apprised
him that he was close upon the city--a city he had heretofore never
visited and knew of only from his newspaper reading as a prosperous
industrial center. Here, for the strangest reason in the world, he was
to make his home, perhaps spend the remainder of his days! He crossed a
stone bridge with a sense that the act marked an important transition
in his life, and quickly passing through the park, boarded a trolley
car and rode into town.
He had formed a very clear idea of what he meant to do, and arriving at
the business center he went directly to the Hotel Fordham, to which he
had expressed his trunk from Cincinnati.