I
There are not many who will remember him as Thomas Jefferson Brown. For
ten years he had been mildly ashamed of himself, and out of respect for
people who were dead, and for a dozen or so who were living, he had the
good taste to drop his last name. The fact that it was only Brown didn’t
matter.
“Tack Thomas Jefferson to Brown,” he said, “and you’ve got a name that
sticks!”
It had an aristocratic sound; and Thomas Jefferson, with the Brown cut
off, was still aristocratic, when you came to count the red corpuscles
in him. In some sort of way he was related to two dead Presidents, three
dead army officers, a living college professor, and a few common people.
He was legitimately born to the purple, but fate had sent him off on a
curious ricochet in a game all of its own, and changed him from Thomas
Jefferson Brown into just plain Thomas Jefferson without the Brown.
He was one of those specimens who, when you meet them, somehow make you
feel there are a few lost kings of the earth, as well as lost lambs. He
was what we called a “first-sighter”--that is, you liked him the instant
you looked at him. You knew without further acquaintance that he was a
man whom you could trust with your money, your friendship--anything you
had. He was big, with a wholesome brown face, blond hair, and gray
eyes that seemed always to be laughing and twinkling, even when he was
hungry. He carried about with him a load of cheerfulness so big that it
was constantly spilling over on other people.
There was a time when Thomas Jefferson Brown had little white cards
with his name on them. That was when he went to college, and his lungs
weren’t so good. It was then that some big doctor told him that if he
wanted to live to have grandchildren, the best thing for him to do was
to “tramp it” for a time--live out of doors, sleep out of doors, do
nothing but breathe fresh air and walk. That doctor was Fate, playing
his game behind a pair of spectacles and a bumpy forehead. He saved
Thomas Jefferson Brown, all right; but he turned him into plain Thomas
Jefferson.
For Thomas Jefferson Brown never got over taking his medicine. He kept
on tramping. He got big and broad and happy. Somewhere, perhaps in a
barn, he caught a microbe that made him dislike ordinary work. He would
set to and help a farmer saw wood all day, just for company and grub;
but you couldn’t hire him to go into an office, or settle down to
anything steady, for twenty-five dollars a day. He had a scientific name
for the thing that was in him--the _wanderlust_ bug, I think he called
it; and he said it was better than the Chinese lady-bugs that the
government imports to save California fruit.
The nearest Thomas Jefferson ever came to going back to Thomas Jefferson
Brown was when he took a job at braking on the Southern Pacific. That
held him for three, days less than two weeks.
“The _wanderlust_ bug wouldn’t stand for it,” he explained.
Right after that he struck a farmer’s house where the farmer was sick,
almost dying, with three little kids and a frail little woman trying
to keep things up. He worked like ten men for more than a month on that
farm, and when he went away he wouldn’t take a cent. That’s the sort of
ne’er-do-well Thomas Jefferson was.
He wouldn’t beg. He’d go three days without grub, and laugh all the
time. It was mostly in the country and in small villages that he made
his living. He could play seven different kinds of instruments without
any instruments at all. Did it all with his mouth. And the kids--they
went wild over him. In return for his entertainment, Thomas Jefferson
wasn’t ashamed to take whatever came to him in the way of odd nickels
and dimes.
Once the manager of a vaudeville house heard him on a street corner, and
offered him a job at fifty a week if he’d sign a contract for a dozen
weeks.
“Good Lord,” said Thomas Jefferson, “I wouldn’t know what to do with six
hundred dollars!”
The next week he was cooking in a lumber-camp for his board. That’s
Thomas Jefferson--or, rather, that’s what he was.
And now we’re coming to the girl who killed the bug in Thomas
Jefferson--and rescued the king. She was born swell. She has blue
eyes--the sort that can light up a dark day, and can make your head turn
dizzy when they smile at you. And she’s got the right sort of hair to
go with ‘em--red and gold and brown all mixed up, until you can’t tell
which is which; the sort that makes you wonder if some big artist hasn’t
been painting a picture for you, when you see it out in the sunshine.
She comes of a titled family, but she’d want to die to-morrow if Thomas
Jefferson Brown didn’t worship her from the tips of her little toes to
the top of her pretty head. She thinks he’s a king. And he is--one of
those great, big, healthy kings that nature sometimes grows when it has
half a chance.