Part 3

“Hello, partner! which way?”

“I’m going to Ottawa,” I said.

“How long will you hold Ottaway down?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m only passing through on my way to Davenport.”

That was enough for Farrell as evidence of my being a hobo, however raw a recruit; but there was a certain courtesy of the road which he wished to maintain, if he could, in the face of my awkward ignorance. I was conscious of an embarrassment which I could not understand.

“How far is it to Morris?” he asked next, and the opening should have been enough for any man, but I answered dully, with painful accuracy as to the distance that I had come.

Clearly nothing would penetrate such density but the frankest directness, so out he blurted:

“Well, partner, if you don’t mind, I’ll go with you.”

Light dawned upon me then, and I tried to make up in cordiality for a want of intuition. Embarrassment was gone at once, and with an ease, as of long acquaintance, Farrell began to tell me how that, on the day before, he had lost his partner and for twenty-four hours had been alone. The loneliness was a horror to him, from which he shrunk, even in the telling, and he expanded, in the companionship of a total stranger, like a flower in light and warmth.

Without a moment’s hesitation he abandoned the way toward Morris and turned back upon his former course, with a light-heartedness at having a partner that was highly flattering.

Here certainly was life reduced to simple terms. As we stood at meeting on the railway line, Farrell was as though he had no single human tie with a strong hold upon him. The clothes that covered him were his only possessions, and a toss of a coin might well determine toward which point of the compass he would go. The casual meeting with a new acquaintance was enough to give direction to an immediate plan and to change the face of nature.

There was trouble in his blue eyes when we met, the fluttering, anxious bewilderment that one sees in the eyes of a half-frightened child. It was an appeal for relief from intolerable loneliness; all his face brightened when we set off together. He had the natural erectness of carriage which gives a distinction of its own, and, apart from a small, weak mouth, slightly tobacco-stained, and an ill-defined chin, he was good to look at, with his straight nose and well set eyes and generous breadth of forehead, the thick brown hair turning gray about it and adding to his looks a good ten years above his actual two-and-twenty. A faded coat was upon his arm and he wore a flannel shirt that had once been navy blue, and ragged trousers, and a pair of boots, through rents in which his bare feet appeared. A needle was stuck through the front of his shirt, and the soiled white cotton with which it was threaded was wound around the cloth within the projecting ends.

However accustomed to “beating his way,” instead of going on foot, Farrell may have been, he was a good walker. Stretching far ahead was the level reach of the road-bed, with the converging lines of rails disappearing in the mist. Our muscles relaxed in the hot, unmoving air, until we struck the gait which becomes a mechanical swing with scarcely a sense of effort. Then Farrell was at his best. Snatches of strange song fell from him and remembered fragments of stage dialogue with little meaning and with no connection, but all expressing his care-free mood. It was contagious. Oh, but the world was wide and fair, and we were young and free, and vagabond and unashamed! Walt Whitman was our poet then, but I did not tell Farrell so; for the new, raw wine of life was in his veins, and he sang a song of his own.

A breeze sprang up from the west, and the heavy mists began to move, but from out the east great banks of clouds rose higher with the sound of distant thunder, which drew nearer, until spattering raindrops fell, fairly hissing on the hot rails. No shelter was at hand; when the storm broke it came with vindictive fury and drenched us in a few moments. We walked on with many looks behind to make sure of not being run down, for we could scarcely have heard the approach of a train in the almost unbroken peals of thunder that nearly drowned our shouts. Then the shower passed; the thunder grew distant and faint again, and from a clear sky the sun shone upon us with blistering heat, through air as still and heavy and as surcharged with electricity as before the storm.

Farrell had been quite indifferent to the rain, accepting it with a philosophic unconcern that was perfect. There was certainly little cause to complain, for in half an hour our clothing was dry; meantime the expression of his mood was changed. He had been friendly before, but impersonal; now he wished to get into closer touch.

“Where are you from, partner?” he asked.

“I worked last winter in Chicago,” I said.

“What at?”

“Trucking in a factory for awhile, then with a road-gang on the Fair Grounds. I had a job in Joliet, but I quit in a week,” I concluded. I was short, for I knew that this was merely introductory, and that Farrell was fencing for an opening.

“I’ve been on the road seven weeks now, looking for a job, and, in that time, I ain’t slept but two nights in a bed,” he began.

“Two nights in a bed out of forty-nine?” I asked.

“Yes. In that time I’ve beat my way out to Omaha and back to Lima and up and down; and one night a farmer near Tiffin, Ohio, give me a supper and let me sleep in a bed in his wagon-house, and one wet night in Chicago I had the price of a bunk in me jeans, and I says to meself, says I, ‘I’d sooner sleep dry to-night than get drunk.’”

It came then of itself, needing only an occasional prompting question, and the narrative was essentially true, I fancy; for, free from embellishment, it moved with the directness of reality.

Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emigrated from Ireland, Farrell was bred in an Illinois village, about fifty miles north of where we were walking at the time. His two sisters lived there still, he thought, but his mother had died when he was but a lad. His father was a day laborer at work in Peoria, so far as Farrell knew. He had not seen him for many years, and he kept up no contact with his people.

Much the most interesting part of the story to me was that which related to the past year. Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he hardly knew how, and was already a confirmed roadster, with an inordinate love for tobacco, and a well-developed taste for drink.

In the early summer he had drifted into Ottawa, the very town that we were nearing, and, being momentarily tired of the road, he sought and found a job in a tile factory. At this point his narrative grew deeply absorbing, because of the unconscious art of it in its simple adherence to life; but being unable to reproduce his words, I can only suggest their import.

It was a crisis in his history. The change began with an experience of a mechanics’ boarding-house. He was a vagabond by breeding, with no clearly defined ideas beyond food and drink, and immunity from work. He was awaking to manhood, and there began to dawn for him at the boarding-house a sense of home, and of something more in the motherly care of the housekeeper.

“Say, she was good to me,” was his own expression, “she done me proud. She used to mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never chewed the rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I swore off for good; and then I used to give her me wages to keep for me, and she’d allow me fifty cents a week above me board.”