Part 13

He began to try on the frock-coat, paying scant attention to the other's monologue. The coat was a ludicrous misfit; it would not meet over the bulging belly; its tails dragged on the fat man's heels.

“If I happened to stand handy by when a Kansas cyclone ripped the insides out of a clothing-store only the boys' sizes would drop in the same county with me,” grumbled the tramp, working his arms out of the sleeves.

“The coat was plainly built for a gentleman,” stated the man at the fire. “Therefore it is of no value to you.”

Boston Fat surveyed the stranger with a vicious glint in his little eyes, as a pig might stare at a man who had struck it across the snout.

“Good afternoon, perfesser,” he sneered.

“Why 'professor,' my frayed and frowsled Falstaff?”

“There you go with it--showing yourself up out of your own mouth! Words a yard long--words that would break a decent man's teeth! You're one of these college dudes out on the road getting stuff to write into a book. I've heard about your kind. And that kind is getting too thick and plenty and you're putting slush all over the real profesh. Quit it and go back to college. Don't use me for your book.”

This was reciprocation of derogatory sentiment with a vengeance!

The man at the fire sat back on his haunches. He finished chewing his mouthful, regarding the tramp with a languid stare that traveled from crown of his head to tip of his battered shoe.

“The only thing about a book that you would be good for,” he said, “would be for use in a volume of this sort.” He tapped the book in his palm. “Your anatomy could supply the binding. It is bound in pigskin.”

The tramp squealed an oath in the falsetto voice that the weak and the flabby possess and took one step forward. The man at the fire came to his feet and stood erect. He was tall, and the brown eyes talked for him better than threats or bluster. The vagrant shifted his gaze from those eyes and backed away.

“If I hadn't been penned in a pie-belt jail all winter up North, and all the strength starved out of me,” he whined, “you wouldn't call me a pig and get away with it.”

“A person who forces himself into the presence of a gentleman who is dining mustn't expect compliments,” stated the stranger.

“You ain't a tramp--not a real one,” snarled Boston Fat.

Farr's eyes glistened; he smiled; he continued to play on this ignoramus his satiric pranks of mystifying language:

“More of your lack of acuteness, my fat friend. Because I do not patter the flash lingo with you, you appear to take me for a college professor in disguise. You are not a real tramp. You are a bum, a loafer, a yeg. You never traveled more than two hundred miles away from Hoboken--the capital city of hoboes. Have you ever hit the sage-brush trail, hiked the milk-and-honey route from Ogden through the Mormon country, decked the Overland Express, beaten the blind baggage on the Millionaires' Flier? Hey?”

The sullen vagrant blinked stupidly.

“Or have you made the prairie run on the truss of a Wagner freight, or thrown a stone at the Fox Train crew, or beaten the face off the Katy Shack when he tried to pitch you off a gondola-car?”

“I don't know what you're chewing about,” sneered the fat man.

“Probably not, for you are not a true man of the road. You disgrace the name of nomad, you sully an ancient profession. I'll venture to say you don't know who Ishmael was.”

“Who said I did?”

“Not I, because I'm not a flatterer. I am going to follow the example of the man who cast pearls before swine--I'm going to cast you a pearl from one of my own poems. You may listen. It will pass your ears, that's all. You cannot contaminate it by taking it in, so I repeat it for my own entertainment, to refresh my memory:

“Of the morrow we take no heed, no care infests the day; Some hand-out gump and a train to jump, a grip on the rods, and away! To the game of grab for gold we give no thought or care. We own with you the arch of blue--our share of God's fresh air. One coin to clear the law, a section of rubber hose. To soften the chafe of a freight-car's truss, our portion of cast-off clothes, And the big wide world is ours--a title made good by right-- By mankind's deed to the nomad breed with the taint of the Ishmaelite. Some from the wastes of the sage-brush, some from the orange land, Some from God's own country, dusty and tattered and tanned. Why are we? It's idle to tell you--you'd never understand. To and fro We come and go. Old Father Ishmael's band.”

He leaned back and laughed in the tramp's puzzled face.

“Well, what's the answer?” scoffed Boston Fat.

The other man talked on, humor in his eyes, plainly enjoying this verbal skylarking.

“I'm afraid I cannot waste time and breath on you in an attempt to answer the riddle of the ages, to explain the wanderlust that sent forth the tribes from the Aryan bowl of the birth of the races, my corpulent bean-pot. Your blank eyes and your flattened skull suggest a discouraging incapacity for information.”

“I don't know what you're gabbing abut. But there's one thing I do know. I'll tip 'em off at the next insane-asylum I come to that I met you headed north.” The tramp gathered the articles of clothing from the bushes and got down on his knees and began to fold them.