The Landloper Part 4

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 ill.u.s.tration 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 sh.e.l.l. 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 h.e.l.l 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 n.o.body 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 Suss.e.x shote, I do not!"

"d.a.m.nation! 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.