Chapter 2

“I am sincere. I am not trifling. I have pondered on this for a long time. I shall be misjudged--but I shall not be afraid!”

III

KNIGHT-ERRANTRY TESTED

The two marched on, side by side, and Walker Farr, piecing in his mind, from the scraps he had heard, the entire history of the Chick family, indulged the whim of Jared and forgot for a moment the grotesque figure presented by his companion.

“No, I am not afraid!” repeated the new apostle of world harmony.

But it became promptly apparent that Mr. Chick could not communicate his intrepidity to other creatures.

Around the bend of the road came a sleepy horse, stubbing his hoofs into the dust, dragging a wagon in which rode a farmer and his wife.

The horse became wide awake at sight of Mr. Chick.

With head up, eyes goggling, nostrils dilating, and mane erect, the animal stopped short on straddled legs. Then he snorted, whirled, took the wagon around in a circle on two wheels in spite of the farmer's endeavors, and made off in the opposite direction, the driver pulling hard on the reins, hands above his head, elbows akimbo.

“It occurs to me, Friend Chick,” said his companion, after the outfit had disappeared, “that in planning this pilgrimage of yours you have failed to take everything into account. If that farmer-man and his wife pile into the ditch and break their necks, then all your general mediating in other quarters will hardly make up for the damage you have caused right here.”

“The world is full of problems,” sighed the man in armor. “There seems to be a hitch to about everything!”

After a few moments the farmer came pelting into sight on foot.

“What in the name of bald-headed Nicodemus do you call yourself, and what are you trying to do?” he shouted. “It's only by luck and chance and because the webbin's held that me and my wife ain't laying stiff and stark in the ditch.”

“I am sorry,” said friend Chick with dignity.

“Get a hoss used to bicycles, flying-machines, red whizzers and blue devils, and then along comes something else that ain't laid down in the back of the Old Farmer's Almanick! You there, the one that ain't crazy, what's this thing you're teaming round?” the farmer demanded, addressing Farr.

“In this case I am not my brother's keeper,” stated the young man.

“Well, where is his keeper, then? He needs one.” He walked around Chick and rudely rapped his whip-butt on the breastplate. “If I wasn't afraid of spraining a toe I'd boot you from here to hackenny, you old two-legged cook-stove!”

“If there has been damage done, I'll pay for it.”

“There isn't any damage and I'm not looking for anybody's money. But there _will_ be damage unless you get out of this highway. If you're in sight when I drive my hoss past here again I'll lick you, even if I have to use blasting-powder and a can-opener to get you out of that suit.”

Jared Chick went apart into the bushes and Farr accompanied him.

“This is a rather vulgar and discouraging adventure for high ideals to run into so soon,” averred the younger man.

“I am not discouraged.”

“I'm afraid you'll be even more greatly misunderstood.”

“I don't expect silly old horses to understand me. My appeal is to men.”

Farr sniffed scornfully. “You'd better let men alone,” he advised.

“The world needs pure unselfishness,” insisted Chick.

“The purer it is the more it is misunderstood. I have tested the matter. I know.”

“Then you yourself would not go forth into the world and do good to men, without calculation and without price?”

“I don't think I would,” declared Farr, dryly. “And I am so little interested in the matter that I think you'll have to excuse me from further talk about it. You have just had one illustration in a crude way of how the world misunderstands anything that's out of the ordinary.”

“Have you any advice to give me?”

“Not a word. I'm not even able to give myself sensible counsel. Good day to you!”

“Then you do not care for my company longer on the way?”

“I do not. Excuse my bluntness, but these are parlous times for wayfarers and I cannot afford to have a tin can tied to me as I go about.”

“And you are absolutely selfish?” called Chick.

“I think so,” replied Farr from the highway, getting into his stride. “When I see you again I expect you'll be wondering why you ever were altruistic. That will be the case, providing you wear that armor any longer.”

Jared Chick from behind his bush called, appealingly, “But I fear I shall never see thee again and I have some questions to ask of thee!”

“Oh, I promise to look you up somewhere in the world. If you keep on wearing that suit it will be easy to find you.”

The man in armor leaned against a tree and pondered.

“A strange young man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish putting some questions to him.”

Then Jared Chick plunked an ash staff from a pile of hoop-poles left by a chopper and went on his way along shaded woodland paths, avoiding the main highroad. He decided that it would be better to go by the roundabout way and show himself on the streets of town instead of on a rural turnpike where countrified horses did not take kindly to a real knight-errant.

“It was a good place back there for sleeping,” reflected Walker Farr, remembering the brook, singing over the stones, the whispering alders, the old-fashioned house, and the somnolent landscape. “That man who has been living there until the day of his emigration has certainly been asleep for a long time and is sleeping soundly now; he is having a wonderful dream. The nightmare will begin shortly and he will wake up.”

After a time Farr came into a village, a hamlet of small houses which toed the crack of a single street. It was near the hour of noon and from the open windows of kitchens drifted scents of the dinners which the women were preparing. All the men of the place seemed to be afield; only women were in sight here and there at back doors, pinning freshly washed garments on lines, beating dust from rugs, or, seen through the windows, were bustling about the forenoon tasks set for patient household slaves in gingham.

At one back door, his back comfortably set against a folded clothes-reel, was a greasily fat tramp, gobbling a hand-out lunch which a housewife had given to him.

Under a little hill where the road dipped at the edge of the hamlet here sounded clink of steel on rock, suggesting that men labored there with trowel and drill. There was complaining creaking of cordage--the arm of a derrick sliced a slow arc across the blue sky of June.

The fat tramp held up his empty plate and whined a request and the hand of a woman emerged from a close-by window and placed something in the dish.

Farr slowed his steps and looked at the tramp, and a woman in a yard near by stared over the top of a sheet which she was pinning on the line and scowled at the new arrival.

“I wonder if I'm considered as the Damon of that Pythias?” Farr asked himself, smiling into her frown. “But Damon is nomad spelled backward! I wish I dared to ask her for a piece of that pie cooling on the sill.”

Just then, over the clink of metal under the hill, above wail of straining pulley, rose the screech of a man in agony, the raucous male squall whose timbre is more hideous than the death-cry of swine.

Then came a man running from the valley under the hill.

“It's your husband, Mrs. Jose,” he panted, turning in at the house where the fat tramp ate with his back against the clothes-reel. “You better go! I'll telephone for a doctor.”

She ran, white-faced, gasping cries. Other women ran. The spirit of helpfulness and curiosity to know what had happened set wings on the heels of the little community. The messenger telephoned and followed them.

The fat tramp set down his plate and glanced to right and left and all about. Then he shuffled into the deserted house and after a brief stay hastened out with his pockets crammed and bearing garments in his arms; he scuttled away with sagging trot across the fields.

Farr saw him go and did not pursue.

“Yonder goes the spirit of the age,” he told himself, with sardonic twisting of his lips. “When Opportunity knocks, knock Opportunity down. Embrace Opportunity, but be sure it's with the strangle hold. The directors of a robbed railroad make a more dignified getaway than that porcine pedestrian is making--but it's the same as far as the stockholders are concerned.”

He went on slowly toward the hollow under the hill.

The procession met him--a limp man, moaning, borne in the arms of his sweating mates, women trotting alongside and crossing the road, to and fro, like frightened hens--clucking sympathy.

Farr found a half-finished stone bridge under the hill. A paunchy boss with underset jaw and overhanging upper lip was profanely urging his helpers back to their jobs.

“Fifteen minutes before knock-off time--fifteen minutes! You can't help that man by standing around and doing his grunting for him. Get busy!”

The men lifted their tools slowly and sullenly.

“It's hell what can happen when you're fifteen days behind on a contract, with county commissioners waiting and anxious to grab off a penalty,” declared the boss, to nobody in particular. “One man bunged, and four to lug him home, and the rest of the crew taking a sympathetic vacation!”

Farr, sauntering, swung off the highway down the lane leading to the temporary bridge.

“Here, you long-horned steer, want a job?” called the contractor from his rostrum on the granite block.

“No, my Sussex shote, I do not!”

“Damnation! You dare to call me names, you hobo?”

“Yes,” returned Farr, quite simply.

“Well, quit it. I need men here. You're husky. Two dollars a day, even if you're not a regular mason.”

“No.”

He drawled both the affirmative and the negative and there was something subtly insolent in his tone--something that aroused more ire than a cruder retort would have accomplished. He turned his back on the cursing man and went on down to the bridge. He waited there for a time and watched the drift of foam on the fretted waters. The steady burbling of the stream made him oblivious to other sounds and he did not hear the two men approach. They leaped on him and seized him. One of his captors was the paunchy man, and his hands were heavy and his fingers gripped viciously.

“No wonder you wouldn't work! You're making your living in an easier way.”

“What is the occasion of this effusive welcome to your city?” asked Farr.

The man who held one of the captive's arms was panting. He had run at top speed from the house to which he and his mates had borne the injured man.

“You thief! You sneak! Eat a man's grub, his hard-earned grub, and steal when his wife's back is turned!”

“Of all dirty work this job is the worst,” declared the big man.

“She gave you all you could stuff into yourself, you loafer. You ransacked when her back was turned. You even stole her husband's Sunday suit. Where is it?”

“I saw a fat tramp running away into the woods,” returned Farr, quietly. “He was carrying articles in his arms.”

“You're the only tramp in sight around here,” insisted the contractor. “Where did you hide the plunder?”

“She said she fed a tramp. She left him at the back door. You're the sneak,” indorsed the panting emissary.

“If you will take me back to the house you may get some new light on the affair,” suggested their captive. “You need not drag me there. I'll go with much pleasure.”

The mistress of the despoiled home, red of eyes, hurrying from her sink with a cold compress in her trembling hands, viewed Farr from her back door.

“That isn't the man. I never saw him before. Oh, he is in awful pain. Why doesn't that doctor get here? But there doesn't seem to be anything broken. He took my pocketbook, too, with two dollars and twenty-seven cents in it. And it's every cent of money we've got by us. And it may be weeks before he can go to work again. Troubles don't come singly. That mis'able, fat, greasy thief! After I had fed him--even gave him pie!”

“As I told you, gentlemen, it was a fat tramp. I saw him run away into the woods.”

“If you call yourself a man why didn't you chase him?” inquired the contractor, with disgust.

“I took no interest in his affairs--no interest whatever,” stated Farr, with languid tone.

“You don't care much what happens to anybody else, you hog!”

“My interest in other persons is very limited.”

“You'll stand by and see one of your kind run away with the property of poor folks, will you? You meet him later and get your whack?” asked the big man.

“No,” said Farr, mildly. He directed compelling gaze into the eyes of his detractor. “And you do not think so yourself.”

“Perhaps not. But you're worse. You have just said it. You're a selfish renegade!”

“Peculiarly selfish, hard, and unfeeling.”

“And wouldn't turn your hand over to do a good turn for anybody?”

“I don't think so.”

“I'll tell you what I think _I'll_ do--I'll detail four of my men to ride you out of this town on a rail.”

“I wouldn't call them off their jobs if I were you! I overheard you say that you are short of time and men. By the way, you offered me a job. I'll take it.”

The contractor blinked and hesitated.

“If after a half-day you find I'm not worth the money I'll pass on and you'll have a half-day's work free.”

“Get on to the job, then.”

Through the open door Farr could see the woman of the house wringing cloths at the sink.

He stepped to the door and addressed her. “Madame, will you take a boarder? I'm going to do your husband's work on the job yonder. I will pay liberally. In your present difficulties the money may help. I'll be small trouble.”

“We need the money terribly,” she said, after pondering. “Yes, I will take you. In the face you do not look like a tramp!”

“I thank you,” said Farr. “If you will give me some food in my hands I'll take myself out of your way.”

That afternoon Jared Chick came over the hill where the trowels clinked and the great derrick complained with its pulleys. He carried his armor on his back.

He stopped and watched for some time his former companion of the road, who was sweating over his man's toil.

“May I have sixty seconds off to speak with that man yonder?” Farr asked the contractor. “It partly concerns your business.”

The big man nodded surly assent.

“Thee sees I have taken off the armor for a time. I will wear it in the city where horses and people are not so silly. What is thee doing here?”

“I have no time to talk about myself, Friend Chick. I want to ask you if you are still of the same mind about your mission?”

“I am.”

“Then throw down that hardware and come to work on this job. A man has been hurt here--his wife is in need. Earn some money and give it to them.”

“But my mission concerns the world--the wide world.”

“Real selfishness's chief excuse! Here's something ready to your hand. Will you do it?”

“But thee told me thee would not go forth and do good!”

“No matter about me. I am not a professional knight-errant! Will you do this?”

“Ten seconds more!” warned the boss.

“I cannot change my plans so suddenly,” protested Chick.

“A knight-errant should not have plans! My time is up and I have work. Good-by, Friend Chick!”

The young man went back to his task and the Quaker passed on, muttering reaffirmation of his own high aims.

“And how could I expect a vagrant to understand?” he asked himself.

The vagrant toiled two weeks at his heavy task and when the man Jose was about again the volunteer slipped away without farewell.

He left on the table of his under-the-eaves bedroom in the Jose house all the pay he received for his work, to the last penny.

“He wasn't what he seemed to be,” ran the burden of Mrs. Jose's various disquisitions on this strange guest. “He ate his vittles and asked no questions, and was out from underfoot, and was always willing to set up with my husband and give me a snippet of rest and a wink of sleep; and he read out of little books all the time--he had 'em stuffed into his pockets. And there needn't anybody tell _me_! He left all his pay on the table, every cent of it, and stole away without waiting for no thanks from nobody!”

IV

FARR, THE FAT TRAMP, AND A SUIT OF CLOTHES

On a balmy forenoon a jovial-appearing old gentleman went jogging out of the mill city of Marion and along a country road in his two-wheeled chaise. He sat erect and he was tall above the average of men, and he was very neat in his attire.

“I wish,” he mused, “that the men who could really appreciate a good outfit of clothing and could use the same properly were not so infernally touchy. As it is, cranky human nature drives me out on an expedition like this--and I'm afraid I am just as cranky as the rest of 'em, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this!”

The old gentleman hummed a song under his breath and slapped his reins against the flanks of the plodding horse to keep time. He came into a piece of woodland. He seemed to take cheery and fresh interest in this place. He poked his rubicund face out from the shadow of the chaise's canopy and peered to right and to left. There was a smile in his puckery eyes. When there were trees ahead of him, trees behind him, and trees all about he pulled his old horse to a standstill.

He listened, squinted quizzically through the glass of his chaise's rear curtain, and then climbed down. From a box at the rear of the vehicle he secured various articles of clothing and draped them over his arm. There was a frock-coat, not too badly worn, trousers in good repair, waistcoat, and a shirt. He also took out of the box a pair of shoes and a hat. With this load he went to the roadside and began to rig out a fence-post. When the garments were hung on it and the broad-brimmed, black, slouch-hat had been jauntily set on top of the post, anybody could see that the old gentleman was thus disposing of some of his own extra clothing. He was wearing a similar hat and a frock-coat, himself, and the decorated post took on a bizarre and slouchy resemblance to its decorator.

He went back to the chaise and found a nickel alarm-clock in the box. He wound this up carefully and propped it on a rail of the fence near the clothing.

Before he could escape from the vicinity of the exhibit and get into his chaise a wagon came rattling around the bend of the road. There were firkins and jars in the rear of this wagon and the driver was plainly a farmer-man.

He pulled up short and then saluted the old gentleman with a stab of forefinger at his hat-brim.

“Any trouble, Judge?” he inquired, affably.

“None at all,” replied the old gentleman, edging away from the fully garbed fence-post.

“Airing 'em out, hey?” A jab of the forefinger toward the garments.

“No, leaving them out.”

All at once the old gentleman appeared to remember something else. He took off his hat and produced a placard. He straightened it and stuck it into a crack in a fence-rail. Its legend was “Help Yourself.”

“You're giving them clothes away, are you, Judge Peterson?”

“I am leaving them here for any one who chooses to take them. Do you want first pick, Jolson?”

“Not me! I ain't taking charity hand-me-downs from any man, Judge. If it's a polite question, why are you giving away your duds this way?”

“I think you have just answered that question, Jolson. I offered you these clothes. Your nose went into the air. Other men have acted in the same way in the past when I have offered to give a fellow a good suit. I don't want to hurt other folks' feelings. I don't want to have my own feelings hurt. So, let any man help himself when no one is looking.”

“I'll take the alarm-clock, if you say so,” volunteered Jolson. “It'll help to rout me out of bed at milking-time.”

“No, you cannot have the clock, Jolson. I have tinkered it so that it will purr a little every half-hour. It will call attention to the clothes. You see, a good many men rush through life without looking to right or left, and so they miss a lot of opportunities.”

Jolson clucked to his horse and rattled away down the road, muttering sour remarks.

The old gentleman, with the air of a man who has satisfied his philanthropic ambitions, climbed into his chaise and followed the farmer.

The brisk breeze flirted the tails of the frock-coat and the trousers legs tried out a modest little gig as if some of the jocose spirit of the old gentleman had remained with the garments he had discarded.

There were several passers before another half-hour had elapsed.

The trousers kicked out quite hilariously when a young couple drove by in a buggy. The girl was pretty, and companionship with her might have suited even a judge's garments. But the young man and the girl were quite absorbed in each other, and the trousers kicked and the frock-coat flirted ineffectually.

A peddler's cart passed very slowly, but the driver did not look up from a paper filled with figures.

There were others to whom the judge's garments offered themselves mutely, but no one glanced that way and the clock was discreetly silent. The breeze died down and the trousers and the coat hung with a sort of homeless, homesick, and wistful air. One might have thought they were trying to conceal themselves when the next person appeared, so still were they. He was not an inviting person--not such a new lord and master as a judge's garments might be expected to welcome.

He was grossly fat and his own trousers were lashed about his bulging waist with a frayed belt; his coat was sun-faded, a greasy Scotch cap was pulled over to one side on his head with the peak hauled down upon his ear, and he scuffed along in boots that were disreputable. Surely, a most unseemly and unwholesome character to be wrapped in the habiliments of a judge! But just then, with that cursed inappropriateness of inanimate things, the clock jangled its alarm.

The tramp--there was no mistaking that gait and that general air of the vagrant--snapped himself about, located the noise, stared at the post, and then hurried to it. He made sure that there was no one in sight. He scooped all into his arms, climbed the fence and trotted into the woods. He kept looking behind him as if he feared pursuit. It was plain from his disturbed demeanor that he was much perplexed and was chased by the uncomfortable thought that he was stealing this property. He bestowed so much attention behind him that he paid but little attention to what was ahead of him, and so he ran down into a little bowl of a valley among the trees and stopped short there, for he had come upon a man.

It was the man who called himself Walker Farr.

The man was kneeling beside a tiny fire, toasting bread on the end of a beech twig. He held the twig in one hand and an open book in the other. He looked up without changing his position when the tramp came charging down the hillside.

He had wide-open, brown eyes, this man in the hollow. The eyes were not merely wide open on account of surprise at this irruption--one could see that they were naturally that way--keenly observant eyes. He had hair as brown as his eyes; his cap was on the ground beside him.

But the tramp was not taking account of the attractions of this stranger; he was more interested in searching for flaws.

He had been frightened at first sight of the man--for the tramp had the timidity of his kind; now he began to feel cheered. This stranger in the hollow had not been shaved recently, his clothing was unkempt, his shoes bore the marks of a long hike. He was cooking in the open--plain indication of the nomad.

“Well, I say, bo,” chaffed the tramp, shifting from fright to high spirit with the hysteria of weak natures. “I'm sure glad to see one of the good old sort. I didn't know what I was dropping in on when I fell down that hill. But it's all right, hey? I'm on the road. My name is Boston Fat, and my monacker is a bean-pot.”