While he was raising his arms so high that his cuffs were pulled
half-way down to his elbows, Father was conscious that the hoboes by the
fire, even the formidable Crook McKusick, were doing the same. Facing
them, in the woods border, was a farmer in a coon-skin overcoat, aiming
a double-barreled shot-gun, beside him two other farmers with rifles
under their arms. It seemed to Father that he was in a wild Western
melodrama, and he helplessly muttered, "Gosh! Can you beat it?"
The man with the leveled shot-gun drawled, "I'm the deputy sheriff for
this locality and I'll give you dirty bums just five minutes to pick up
your duffle and git out, and keep a-going. I guess we don't need you
around here. You been robbing every hen-roost for ten miles. Now step
lively, and no funny business."
"Stung!" muttered Crook McKusick, hopelessly. "Got us."
Suddenly a downy figure--who might herself have come from a large,
peaceful human hen-roost--fluttered straight at the muzzle of the
sheriff's shot-gun. It was Mother.
"Hands up, I told juh!" stormed the sheriff, amazedly.
"Oh, look _out_, Mother!" wailed Father, rushing after her, his own
hands going down to his sides in his agitation.
"Look out, aunty!" echoed Crook McKusick. "That's a bad actor, that
guy."
But Mother continued straight at the gun, snapping: "Don't point that
dratted thing at me. You bother me."
The sheriff wavered. The gun dropped. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"Never you mind who I am, young man. I'm responsible for these boys,
though. And they promised me they wouldn't do no more stealing. They're
going to work for what they get. And they got a right here on this land.
They got permission. That's more than you got, I venture, with your
nasty guns and all, coming around here-- Have you got a warrant?"
"No, I ain't, but you--"
"Then you just step yourself away, young man! Coming here, fairly
shaking a body's nerves. I vow, you almost scare me, carrying on-- Put
down that dratted gun, I told you. You'll either go, Mr. Deputy Monkey,
or I'll see your boss, and we'll see what we'll see."
With which Mother--who was rapidly becoming almost impolite in her
indignation over this uninvited visit from a person whom she couldn't
find it in her heart to like--seized the muzzle of the gun, pushed it
down, and stood glowering at the sheriff, her arms akimbo.
"Well, ma'am, I don't know who you are, but if you got any idee that
this bunch of cut-throats is likely to turn into any W. C. T. U.
pink-tea party--"
"Now none of your nonsense and impudence and sneering, young man, and be
off with you, or I'll see somebody that'll have something to say to you.
Illegal goings-on, that's what they are; no warrant or nothing."
One of the sheriff's companions muttered: "Come on, Bill. I think she's
the wife of that nosey new preacher over to Cordova."
"All right," said the sheriff. Before he turned away he threatened, "Now
if I hear of anything more from you boys, I'll get that warrant, all
righty, and you'll land in the calaboose, where you belong."
But the hoboes about the fire cheered derisively, and as the sheriff
disappeared in the woods they surrounded Mother in a circle of grins and
shining eyes, and the K. C. Kid was the first to declare: "Good for you,
aunty. You're elected camp boss, and you can make me perm'nent cookee,
if you want to."
"Well, then," said Mother, calmly, "let's get that nasty shack cleaned
up right away. I do declare I'm beginning to get sleepy."
Nothing in his life was more to Father's credit than the fact that he
did not envy Mother the credit of having become monarch of the camp and
protector of the poor. "I'm with you, Mother," he said. "What you want
me to do? Let's hustle. Blizzard coming--with a warrant."
* * * * *
Round a camp-fire in the woods a group of men were playing cards,
wire-bearded men in rough coats and greasy flannel shirts; but the most
violent thing they said was "Doggone it," and sometimes they stopped to
listen to the strains of "Dandy Dick and the Candlestick," which a
white-haired cheerful old gentleman rendered on the mouth-organ.
Father was perched on a powder-can. His feet were turned inward with
comfort and soul-satisfaction, and now and then he jerked his head
sideways, with an air of virile satisfaction. The collar of his
blue-flannel shirt poked up beside his chin as cockily as the ear of a
setter pup.... Father didn't know it, but he was making believe be King
of the Bandits.
Across the fire, in an aged and uncertain rocking-chair, placid as
though she were sitting beside a gas-log instead of a camp-fire
over-gloomed with winter woods, was Mother, darning a sock and lecturing
the homicidal-looking Crook McKusick on cursing and swearing and
carryings-on. Crook stared down at her adoringly, and just when she
seemed to have penetrated his tough hide with her moral injunctions he
chuckled: "By golly! I believe I'll marry and settle down--just as soon
as I can find a moll that'll turn into a cute old lady like you, aunty."
"Now, Mr. McKusick," she said, severely, "you want to reform for the
sake of reforming, not just to please some girl--not but what a nice
sweet woman would be good--"
"Nothing will ever be good for me, aunty. I'm gone. This sweet
civilization of ours has got me. The first reform school I went to
reformed me, all right--formed me into a crook. I used to show signs of
growing up to be fair to middling intelligent, once. But now--nothing to
it. You people, though you're twice as old as I am, you're twice as
young. You got a chance. Look here, Uncle Appleby, why don't you go out
for being one of these famous old pedestrians that get their mugs in the
papers? Will you do what I tell you to, if I train you? I've trained
quite some pugs before--before I quit."
Mother acerbically declined to learn the art of physical culture. "Me at
my time of life learning to do monkey-shines and bending and flapping my
arms like a chicken with its head cut off." But Father enthusiastically
and immediately started in to become the rival of the gentlemen in
jerseys who wear rubber heels in the advertisements and spend their old
ages in vigorously walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific,
merely in order to walk back again.
While his fellow-hoboes about the fire jeered, Father bent over forty
times, and raised himself on his toes sixty, and solemnly took
breathing-exercises.
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 class 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. God bless you babes in the woods.
C. McK.
"The poor boy! God 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!