I
Harry Baggs came walking slowly over the hills in the blue May dusk.
He could now see below him the clustered roofs and tall slim stack of
a town. His instinct was to avoid it, but he had tramped all day, his
blurred energies were hardly capable of a detour, and he decided to
settle near by for the night. About him the country rose and fell,
clothed in emerald wheat and pale young corn, while trees filled the
hollows with the shadowy purple of their darkening boughs. A robin piped
a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of beginning
buds.
A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam
indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward sensations,
drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and had a short
powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were steady, light
blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the forlorn trousers,
the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick shoulders, and incongruous
hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly position: he was a tramp.
He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly
down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and
orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company
of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction,
for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly
acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This,
now, probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of
temporary rest.
Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path trod
in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow beyond.
His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the ground,
a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at their back
were grouped four or five small huts.
Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence,
he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering
suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other
silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing
and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black
hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of
a stupid and conventional parody of a tramp.
Another, sitting with clasped knees beyond the fire, interrupted a
monotonous whining recital to question Harry Baggs. “Where'd you come
from?”
“Somewhere by Lancaster.”
“Ever been here before?” And, when Baggs had said no: “Thought I hadn't
seen you. Most of us here come back in the spring. It's a comfortable
dump when it don't rain cold.” He was uncommonly communicative. “The
Nursery's here for them that want work; and if not nobody's to ask you
reasons.”
A third, in a grimy light overcoat, with a short bristling red mustache
and morose countenance, said harshly: “Got any money?”
“Maybe two bits.”
“Let's send him in for beer,” the other proposed; and a new animation
stirred the dilapidated one and the talker.
“You can go to hell!” Baggs responded without heat.
“That ain't no nice way to talk,” the second proclaimed. “Peebles, here,
meant that them who has divides with all that hasn't.”
Peebles directed a hard animosity at Harry Baggs. His gaze flickered
over the latter's heavy-set body and unmoved face. “Want your jaw
slapped crooked?” he demanded with a degree of reservation.
“No,” the boy placidly replied.
A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the
disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the
clip-clip of a horse's hoofs passed in the distance and night. Harry
Baggs became flooded with sleep.
“I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?” he queried,
indicating the huts.
No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced to
bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed into
instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he cried out,
in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of rain fell on
the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body.