Immediately, without even the excuse that some evil mind in the Gang had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was high and strong and provided with sharp pickets; and the professor was short and dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the fence. But he had another errand.

He walked to the house of Professor Frazer. He stood on the walk before it. His shoulders straightened, his heels snapped together, and he raised his arm in a formal salute.

He had saluted the gentleness of Henry Frazer. He had saluted his own soul. He cried: "I will stick by him, as long as the Turk or any of 'em. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me—not the whole caboodle of them. I——Oh, I don't think they can scare me...."



CHAPTER XI

The students of Plato were required to attend chapel every morning. President S. Alcott Wood earnestly gave out two hymns, and between them informed the Almighty of the more important news events of the past twenty-four hours, with a worried advisory manner which indicated that he felt something should be done about them at once.

President Wood was an honest, anxious body, something like a small, learned, Scotch linen-draper. He was given to being worried and advisory and to sitting up till midnight in his unventilated library, grinding at the task of putting new wrong meanings into perfectly obvious statements in the Bible. He was a series of circles—round head with smooth gray hair that hung in a bang over his round forehead; round face with round red cheeks; absurdly heavy gray mustache that almost made a circle about his puerile mouth; round button of a nose; round heavy shoulders; round little stomach in a gray sack-suit; round dumplings of feet in congress shoes that were never quite fresh-blacked or quite dusty. A harassed, honorable, studious, ignorant, humorless, joke-popping, genuinely conscientious thumb of a man. His prayers were long and intimate.

After the second hymn he would announce the coming social events—class prayer-meetings and lantern-slide lectures by missionaries. During the prayer and hymns most of the students hastily prepared for first-hour classes, with lists of dates inside their hymn-books; or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis Journal or Tribune. But when the announcements began all Plato College sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment with pedantic sarcasm on student peccadillos, on cards and V-neck gowns and the unforgivable crime of smoking.

* * * * *

As he crawled to the bare, unsympathetic chapel, the morning after spying on the faculty-room, Carl looked restlessly to the open fields, sniffed at the scent of burning leaves, watched a thin stream of blackbirds in the windy sky. He sat on the edge of a pew, nervously jiggling his crossed legs.

During the prayer and hymns a spontaneously born rumor that there would be something sensational in President Wood's announcements went through the student body. The president, as he gave out the hymns, did not look at the students, but sadly smoothed the neat green cloth on the reading-stand. His prayer, timid, sincere, was for guidance to comprehend the will of the Lord.

Carl felt sorry for him. "Poor man 's fussed. Ought to be! I'd be, too, if I tried to stop a ten-inch gun like Frazer.... He's singing hard.... Announcements, now.... What's he waiting for? Jiminy! I wish he'd spring it and get it over.... Suppose he said something about last night—me——"

President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed:

"My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning, but I have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope——"

Carl was agonizing: "He does know it's me! He'll ball me out and fire me publicly!... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat (infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something definite if I could just have overheard 'em."

President Wood was mincing on:

"——and so, my friends, I hope that in devotion to the ideals of the Baptist Church we shall strive ever onward and upward in even our smallest daily concerns, per aspera ad astra, not in a spirit of materialism and modern unrest, but in a spirit of duty.

"I need not tell you that there has been a great deal of rumor about the so-called 'faculty dissensions.' But let me earnestly beseech you to give me your closest attention when I assure you that there have been no faculty dissensions. It is true that we have found certain teachings rather out of harmony with the ideals of Plato College. The Word of God in the Bible was good enough for our fathers who fought to defend this great land, and the Bible is still good enough for us, I guess—and I cannot find anything in the Bible about such doctrines as socialism and anarchism and evolution. Probably most of you have been fortunate enough to not have wasted any time on this theory called 'evolution.' If you don't know anything about it you have not lost anything. Absurd as it may seem, evolution says that we are all descended from monkeys! In spite of the fact that the Bible teaches us that we are the children of God. If you prefer to be the children of monkeys rather than of God, well, all I can say is, I don't! [Laughter.]

"But the old fellow Satan is always busy going to and fro even in colleges, and in the unrestrained, overgrown, secularized colleges of the East they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago, though it is a Baptist institution, they teach this same silly twaddle of evolution, and I cannot advise any of you to go there for graduate work. But these scientific fellows that are too wise for the Bible fall into the pits they themselves have digged, sooner or later, and they have been so smart in discovering new things about evolution that they have contradicted almost everything that Darwin, who was the high priest of this abominable cult, first taught, and they have turned the whole theory into a hodge-podge of contradictions from which even they themselves are now turning in disgust. Indeed, I am told that Darwin's own son has come out and admitted that there is nothing to this evolution. Well, we could have told him that all along, and told his father, and saved all their time, for now they are all coming right back to the Bible. We could have told them in the first place that the Word of God definitely explains the origin of man, and that anybody who tried to find out whether we were descended from monkeys was just about as wise as the man who tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

Carl was settled down in his pew, safe.

President Wood was in his stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in the fire of common sense and sound religion. And here is the point of my disquisition:

"On this selfsame evolution, this bombast of the self-pushing scientists, are founded all such un-Christian and un-American doctrines as socialism and anarchism and the lusts of feminism, with all their followers, such as Shaw and the fellow who tried to shoot Mr. Frick, and all the other atheists of the stripe that think so well of themselves that they are quite willing to overthrow the grand old institutions that our forefathers founded on the Constitution; and they want to set up instead—oh, they're quite willing to tell us how to run the government! They want to set up a state in which all of us who are honest enough to do a day's work shall support the lazy rascals who aren't. Yet they are very clever men. They can pull the wool over your eyes and persuade you—if you let them—that a universal willingness to let the other fellow do the work while you paint pictures of flowers and write novels about the abominations of Babylon is going to evolute a superior race! Well, when you think they are clever, this Shaw and this fellow Wells and all of them that copy Robert G. Ingersoll, just remember that the cleverest fellow of them all is the old Satan, and that he's been advocating just such lazy doctrines ever since he stirred up rebellion and discontent in the Garden of Eden!

"If these things are so, then the teachings of Professor Henry Frazer, however sincere he is, are not in accordance with the stand which we have taken here at Plato. My friends, I want you all to understand me. Certain young students of Plato appear to have felt that the faculty have not appreciated Professor Frazer. One of these students, I presume it was one of them, went so far as to attempt to spy on faculty meeting last night. Who that man is I have means of finding out at any time. But I do not wish to. For I cannot believe that he realized how dishonest was such sneaking.

"I wish to assure the malcontents that I yield to no one in my admiration of Professor Frazer's eloquence and learning in certain subjects. Only, we have not found his doctrines quite consistent with what we are trying to do. They may be a lot more smart and new-fangled than what we have out here in Minnesota, and we may be a lot of old fogies, but we are not narrow, and we wish to give him just as much right of free speech—we wish—there is—uh—no slightest—uh—desire, in fact, to impose any authority on any one. But against any perversive doctrine we must in all honesty take a firm stand.

"We carefully explained this to Professor Frazer, and permit me to inform those young men who have taken it upon themselves to be his champions, that they would do well to follow his example! For he quite agrees with us as to the need of keeping the Plato College doctrine consistent. In fact, he offered his resignation, which we reluctantly accepted, very, very reluctantly. It will take effect the first of the month, and, owing to illness in his family, he will not be giving any lectures before then. Students in his classes, by the way, are requested to report to the dean for other assignments.... And so you see how little there is to the cowardly rumors about 'faculty dissensions'!"

"Liar, liar! Dear God, they've smothered that kind, straight Frazer," Carl was groaning.

"Now, my friends, I trust you understand our position, and—uh——"

President Wood drew a breath, slapped the reading-stand, and piped, angrily:

"We have every desire to permit complete freedom of thought and speech among the students of Plato, but on my word, when it comes to a pass where a few students can cause this whole great institution to forget its real tasks and devote all its time to quarreling about a fad like socialism, then it's time to call a halt!

"If there are any students here who, now that I have explained that Professor Frazer leaves us of his own free will, still persist in their stubborn desire to create trouble, and still feel that the faculty have not treated Professor Frazer properly, or that we have endeavored to coerce him, then let them stand up, right here and now, in chapel. I mean it! Let them stop this cowardly running to and fro and secret gossip. Let them stand right up before us, in token of protest, here—and—now! or otherwise hold their peace!"

So well trained to the authority of schoolmasters were the students of Plato, including Carl Ericson, that they sat as uncomfortable as though they were individually accused by the plump pedant who was weakly glaring at them, his round, childish hand clutching the sloping edge of the oak reading-stand, his sack-coat wrinkled at the shoulders and sagging back from his low linen collar. Carl sighted back at Frazer's pew, hoping that he would miraculously be there to confront the dictator. The pew was empty as before. There was no one to protest against the ousting of Frazer for saying what he believed true.

Then Carl was agitated to find that Carl Ericson, a back-yard boy, was going to rise and disturb all these learned people. He was frightened again. But he stood up, faced the president, affectedly folded his arms, hastily unfolded them and put his hands in his pockets, one foot before the other, one shoulder humped a little higher than the other.

The whole audience was staring at him. He did not dare peep at them, but he could hear their murmur of amazement. Now that he was up he rather enjoyed defying them.

"Well, young man, so you are going to let us know how to run Plato," teetered the president. "I'm sure everybody will feel much obliged to you."

Carl did not move. He was aware of Genie Linderbeck rising, to his left. No one else was up, but, with Genie's frail adherence, Carl suddenly desired to rouse every one to stand for Frazer and freedom. He glanced over at the one man whom he could always trust to follow him—the Turk. A tiny movement of Carl's lips, a covert up-toss of his head, warned the Turk to rise now.

The Turk moved, started to rise, slowly, as though under force. He looked rather shamefaced. He uncrossed his legs and put his hands on the pew, on either side of his legs.

"Shame!" trembled a girl's voice in the junior section.

"Sit down!" two or three voices of men softly snarled, with a rustle of mob-muttering.

The Turk hastily crossed his legs and slumped down in his seat. Carl frowned at him imploringly, then angrily. He felt spiritually naked to ask support so publicly, but he had to get the Turk up. The Turk shook his head beseechingly. Carl could fancy him grunting, "Aw, thunder! I'd like to stand up, but I don't want to be a goat."

Another man rose. "I'll be darned!" thought Carl. It was the one man who would be expected not to support the heretic Frazer—it was Carl's rustic ex-room-mate, Plain Smith. Genie was leaning against the pew in front of him, but Plain Smith bulked more immovable than Carl.

No one joined the three. All through the chapel was an undertone of amazed comment and a constant low hissing of, "Sssssit down!"

The president, facing them, looked strained. It occurred to Carl that S. Alcott Wood had his side of the question. He argued about the matter, feeling detached from his stolidly defiant body. Then he cursed the president for keeping them there. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to cry out....

President Wood was speaking. "Is there any one else? Stand up, if there is. No one else? Very well, young men, I trust that you are now satisfied with your heroism, which we have all greatly appreciated, I am sure. [Laughter.] Chapel dismissed."

Instantly a swirl of men surrounded Carl, questioning: "What j' do it for? Why didn't you keep still?"

He pushed out through them. He sat blind through the first-hour quiz in physics, with the whole class watching him. The thought of the Turk's failure to rise kept unhappy vigil in his mind. The same sequence of reflections ran around like midnight mice in the wall:

"Just when I needed him.... After all his talk.... And us so chummy, sitting up all hours last night. And then the Turk throws me down.... When he'd said so many times he just wanted the chance to show how strong he was for Frazer.... Damn coward! I'll go room with Genie. By gosh——Oh, I got to be fair to the Turk. I don't suppose he could have done much real good standing up. Course it does make you feel kind of a poor nut, doing it. Genie looked——Yes, by the Jim Hill! there you are. Poor little scrawny Genie—oh yes, sure, it was up to him to stand up. He wasn't afraid. And the Turk, the big stiff, he was afraid to.... Just when I needed him. After all our talk about Frazer, sitting up all hours——"

Through the black whirlpool in his head pierced an irritated, "Mr. Ericson, I said! Have you gone to sleep? I understood you were excellent at standing up! What is your explanation of the phenomenon?" The professor of physics and mathematics—the same who had pursued Carl on the ledge—was speaking to him.

Carl mumbled, sullenly, "Not prepared." The class sniggered. He devoted a moment to hating them, as pariahs hate, then through his mind went whirling again, "Just wait till I see the Turk!"



CHAPTER XII

A notice from the president's office, commanding Carl's instant presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the waiting-room of the offices of the president and dean. He was an incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round, woolly President Wood.

Plain Albert Smith was leaving the waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was nothing gallant about his appearance—his blue-flannel shirt dusty with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But Carl's salute was a salute to the new king.

"How d'you mean 'good-by,' Al?"

"I've just resigned from Plato, Carl."

"How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here?"

"No. Just resigned," said Plain Smith. "One time when I was school-teaching I had a set-to with a school committee of farmers about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three R's were enough. I won out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried to be honest the way he seen it. I don't agree with Frazer about these socialists and all—fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself, first of all, and let the walking-delegates go to work, too. But I think he's honest, all right, and, well, I stood up, and that means losing my scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey on to the U. of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but a cousin of mine owns a big shoe-store and maybe I can get a job with him.... Boy, you were plucky to get up.... Glad we've got each other, finally. I feel as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you."

To the dean's assistant, in the waiting-room, Carl grandly stated: "Ericson, 1908. I'm to see the president."

"It's been arranged you're to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's engaged just now."

Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the transference to the dean, who was no anxious old lamb like S. Alcott Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clipped mustache, a gold eye-glass chain over one ear, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious appreciation of music, and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the University of Chicago, and aggressively proud of it. He had "earned his way through college," which all tradition and all fiction pronounce the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save one's own children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball and the Y. M. C. A., than to suggest that working one's way through college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and reading one's way through.

Diffidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact about the dean; he had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous readiness for taking charge of everything in sight, by acquiring during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too much for private tutoring, and bullying his classmates into patronizing the laundry whose agent he was.... The dean stuck his little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup, and liked to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world.

The half-hour of waiting gave Carl a feeling of the power of the authorities. And he kept seeing Plain Smith in his cousin's shoe-store, trying to "fit" women's shoes with his large red hands. When he was ordered to "step into the dean's office, now," he stumbled in, pulling at his soft felt hat.

With his back to Carl, the dean was writing at a roll-top desk. The burnished top of his narrow, slightly bald head seemed efficient and formidable. Not glancing up, the dean snapped, "Sit down, young man."

Carl sat down. He crumpled his hat again. He stared at a framed photograph, and moved his feet about, trying to keep them quiet.

More waiting.

The dean inspected Carl, over his shoulder. He still held his pen. The fingers of his left hand tapped his desk-tablet. He turned in his swivel-chair deliberately, as though he was now ready to settle everything permanently.

"Well, young man, are you prepared to apologize to the president and faculty?"

"Apologize? What for? The president said those that wanted to protest——"

"Now we won't have any blustering, if you please, Ericson. I haven't the slightest doubt that you are prepared to give an exhibition of martyrdom. That is why I asked the privilege of taking care of you, instead of permitting you to distress President Wood any further. We will drop all this posing, if you don't mind. I assure you that it doesn't make——"

"I——"

"——the slightest impression on me, Ericson. Let's get right down to business. You know perfectly well that you have stirred up all the trouble you——"

"I——"

"——could in regard to Mr. Frazer. And I think, I really think, that we shall either have to have your written apology and your promise to think a little more before you talk, hereafter, or else we shall have to request your resignation from college. I am sorry that we apparently can't run this college to suit you, Ericson, but as we can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait now; let's not have any melodrama! You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it was ver-ee dramatically done, oh yes, indeed, ver-ee dramatic. See here. I know you, and I know your type, my young friend, and I haven't——"

"Look here. Why do I get picked out as the goat, the one to apologize? Because I stood up first? When Prexy said to?"

"Oh, not at all. Say it's because you quite shamelessly made motions at others while you stood there, and did your best to disaffect men who hadn't the least desire to join in your trouble-making.... Now I'm very busy, young man, and I think this is all the time I shall waste on you. I shall expect to find your written——"

"Say, honest, dean," Carl suddenly laughed, "may I say just one thing before I get thrown out?"

"Certainly. We have every desire to deal justly with you, and to always give—always to give you every opportunity——"

"Well, I just wanted to say, in case I resign and don't see you again, that I admire you for your nerve. I wish I could get over feeling like a sophomore talking to a dean, and then I could tell you I hadn't supposed there was anybody could talk to me the way you have and get away with it. I'd always thought I'd punch their head off, and here you've had me completely buffaloed. It's wonderful! Honestly, it never struck me till just this second that there isn't any law that compels me to sit here and take all this. You had me completely hypnotized."

"You know I might retort truthfully and say I am not accustomed to have students address me in quite this manner. I'm glad, however, to find that you are sensible enough not to make an amusing show of yourself by imagining that you are making a noble fight for freedom. By decision of the president and myself I am compelled to give you this one chance only. Unless I find your apology in my letter-box here by five this evening I shall have to suspend you or bring you up before the faculty for dismissal. But, my boy, I feel that perhaps, for all your mistaken notions, you do have a certain amount of courage, and I want to say a word——"

The dean did say a word; in fact he said a large number of admirable words, regarding the effect of Carl's possible dismissal on his friends, his family, and, with an almost tearful climax, on his mother.

"Now go and think it over; pray over it, unselfishly, my boy, and let me hear from you before five."

Only——

The reason why Carl did visualize his mother, the reason why the Ericson kitchen became so clear to him that he saw his tired-faced mother reaching up to wind the alarm-clock that stood beside the ball of odd string on the shelf above the water-pail, the reason why he felt caved-in at the stomach, was that he knew he was going to leave Plato, and did not know where in the world he was going.

* * * * *

A time of quick action; of bursting the bonds even of friendship. He walked quietly into Genie Linderbeck's neat room, with its rose-hued comforter on a narrow brass bed, passe-partouted Copley prints, and a small oak table with immaculate green desk-blotter, and said good-by.... His hidden apprehension, the cold, empty feeling of his stomach, the nervous intensity of his motions, told him that he was already on the long trail that leads to fortune and Bowery lodging-houses and death and happiness. Even while he was warning himself that he must not go, that he owed it to his "folks" to apologize and stay, he was stumbling into the bank and drawing out his ninety-two dollars. It seemed a great sum. While waiting for it he did sums on the back of a deposit-slip:

92.00 out of bank 2.27 in pocket about .10 at room ———————————- tot. 94.37

Owe Tailor 1.45 " Turk .25 To Mpls. 3.05 To Chi. probably 15 to 18.00 To N. Y. 20 to 30.00 To Europe (steerage) 40.00 —————————————— Total (about) 92.75——would take me to Europe!

"Golly! I could go to Europe, to Europe! now, if I wanted to, and have maybe two plunks over, for grub on the railroad. But I'd have to allow something for tips, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as forty dollars for steerage. Ought to allow——Oh, thunder! I've got enough to make a mighty good start seeing the world, anyway."

On the street a boy was selling extras of the Plato Weekly Times, with the heading:

PRESIDENT CRUSHES STUDENT REBELLION

Plato Demonstration for Anarchist Handled Without Gloves

Carl read that he and two other students, "who are alleged to have been concerned in several student pranks," had attempted to break up a chapel meeting, but had been put to shame by the famous administrator, S. Alcott Wood. He had never seen his name in the press, except some three times in the local items of the Joralemon Dynamite. It looked so intimidatingly public that he tried to forget it was there. He chuckled when he thought of Plain Smith and Genie Linderbeck as "concerned in student pranks." But he was growing angry. He considered staying and fighting his opponents to the end. Then he told himself that he must leave Plato, after having announced to Genie that he was going.... He had made all of his decision except the actual deciding.

He omitted his noonday dinner and tramped into the country, trying to plan how and where he would go. As evening came, cloudy and chill in a low wooded tract miles north of Plato, with dead boughs keening and the uneasy air threatening a rain that never quite came, the loneliness of the land seemed to befog all the possibilities of the future.... He wanted the lamp-lit security of his room, with the Turk and the Gang in red sweaters, singing ragtime; with the Frazer affair a bad dream that was forgotten. The world outside Plato would all be like these lowering woods and dreary swamps.

He turned. He could find solace only in making his mind a blank. Sullen, dull, he watched the sunset, watched the bellying cumulus clouds mimic the Grand Canyon. He had to see the Grand Canyon! He would!... He had turned the corner. His clammy heart was warming. He was slowly coming to understand that he was actually free to take youth's freedom.

He saw the vision of the America through which he might follow the trail like the pioneers whose spiritual descendant he was. How noble was the panorama that thrilled this one-generation American can be understood only by those who have smelled our brown soil; not by the condescending gods from abroad who come hither to gather money by lecturing on our evil habit of money-gathering, and return to Europe to report that America is a land of Irish politicians, Jewish theatrical managers, and mining millionaires who invariably say, "I swan to calculate"; all of them huddled in unfriendly hotels or in hovels set on hopeless prairie. Not such the America that lifted Carl's chin in wonder——

Cities of tall towers; tawny deserts of the Southwest and the flawless sky of cornflower blue over sage-brush and painted butte; silent forests of the Northwest; golden China dragons of San Francisco; old orchards of New England; the oily Gulf of Mexico where tramp steamers puff down to Rio; a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. Names alluring to the American he repeated—Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, the Little Big Horn, Baton Rouge, the Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne, Monongahela, Androscoggin; canyon and bayou; sycamore and mesquite; Broadway and El Camino Real....

He hurled along into Plato. He went to Mrs. Henkel's for supper. He smiled at the questions dumped upon him, and evaded answering. He took Mae Thurston aside and told her that he was leaving Plato. He wanted to call on Professor Frazer. He did not dare. From a pleasant gentleman drinking tea Frazer had changed to a prophet whom he revered.

Carl darted into his room. The Turk was waiting for him. Carl cut short the Turk's apologies for not having supported Frazer, with the dreadful curt pleasantness of an alienated friend, and, as he began packing his clothes in two old suit-cases, insisted, "It's all right—was your biz whether you stood up in chapel or not." He hunted diligently through the back of the closet for a non-existent shoe, in order to get away from the shamefaced melancholy which covered the Turk when Carl presented him with all his books, his skees, and his pet hockey-stick. He prolonged the search because it had occurred to him that, as it was now eleven o'clock, and the train north left at midnight, the Minneapolis train at 2 A.M., it might be well to decide where he was going when he went away. Well, Minneapolis and Chicago. Beyond that—he'd wait and see. Anywhere—he could go anywhere in all the world, now....

He popped out of the closet cheerfully.

While the Turk mooned, Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared. Frankly he wrote to his mother—his mammy he wistfully called her. To his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature, business-like, ready for anything. "I'll pull out in half an hour now," he chuckled.

"Gosh!" sighed the Turk. "I feel as if I was responsible for everything. Oh, say, here's a letter I forgot to give you. Came this afternoon."

The letter was from Gertie.

DEAR CARL,—I hear that you are standing for that Frazer just as much as ever and really Carl I think you might consider other people's feelings a little and not be so selfish——

Without finishing it, Carl tore up the letter in a fury. Then, "Poor kid; guess she means well," he thought, and made an imaginary bow to her in farewell.

There was a certain amount of the milk of human-kindness in the frozen husk he had for a time become. But he must be blamed for icily rejecting the Turk's blundering attempts to make peace. He courteously—courtesy, between these two!—declined the Turk's offer to help him carry his suit-cases to the station. That was like a slap.

"Good-by. Hang on tight," he said, as he stooped to the heavy suit-cases and marched out of the door without looking back.

By some providence he was saved from the crime of chilly self-righteousness. On the darkness of the stairs he felt all at once how responsive a chum the Turk had been. He dropped the suit-cases, not caring how they fell, rushed back into the room, and found the Turk still staring at the door. He cried:

"Old man, I was——Say, you yahoo, are you going to make me carry both my valises to the depot?"

They rushed off together, laughing, promising to write to each other.

The Minneapolis train pulled out, with Carl trying to appear commonplace. None of the sleepy passengers saw that the Golden Fleece was draped about him or that under his arm he bore the harp of Ulysses. He was merely a young man taking a train at a way-station.



Part II

THE ADVENTURE OF ADVENTURING



CHAPTER XIII

There are to-day in the mind of Carl Ericson many confused recollections of the purposeless wanderings which followed his leaving Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He had missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obviated that her sons might rise to a place in society, to eighteen hundred dollars a year and the possession of evening clothes and a knowledge of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day of his roving.

The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of the city:

Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a sound reason for talking. He changed the Joralemon Dynamite's phrase, "accept a position" to "get a job"—and he got a job, as packer in a department store big as the whole of Joralemon. Since the street throngs had already come to seem no more personal and separable than the bricks in the buildings, he was not so much impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble in at lunch-time to stare at them and marvel, "You can't beat it!"

From eight till twelve-thirty and from one till six or seven, during nearly two months, Carl stood in a long, brick-walled, stuffy room, inundated by floods of things to pack, wondering why he had ever left Plato to become the slave of a Swede foreman. The Great World, as he saw it through a tiny hole in one of the opaque wire-glass windows, consisted of three bars of a rusty fire-escape-landing against a yellow brick wall, with a smudge of black on the wall below the landing.

Within two days he was calling the packing-room a prison. The ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping-paper, the stamp of feet on the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him, the yellow-stained, cracked, gray wash-bowl that served for thirty men, such was his food for dreams.

Because his muscles were made of country earth and air he distanced the packers from the slums, however. He became incredibly swift at nailing boxes and crates and smashing the heavy wrapping-paper into shape about odd bundles. The foreman promised to make Carl his assistant. But on the cold December Saturday when his elevation was due he glanced out of a window, and farewell all ambition as a packer.

The window belonged to the Florida Bakery and Lunch Room, where Carl was chastely lunching. There was dirty sawdust on the floor, six pine tables painted red and adorned with catsup-bottles whose mouths were clotted with dried catsup, and a long counter scattered with bread and white cakes and petrified rolls. Behind the counter a snuffling, ill-natured fat woman in slippers handed bags of crullers to shrill-voiced children who came in with pennies. The tables were packed with over-worked and underpaid men, to whom lunch was merely a means of keeping themselves from feeling inconveniently empty—a state to which the leadlike viands of the Florida Lunch Room were a certain prevention.

Carl was gulping down salty beef stew and bitter coffee served in handleless cups half an inch thick. Beside him, elbow jogging elbow, was a surly-faced man in overalls. The old German waiters shuffled about and bawled, "Zwei bif stew, ein cheese-cake." Dishes clattered incessantly. The sicky-sweet scent of old pastry, of coffee-rings with stony raisins and buns smeared with dried cocoanut fibers, seemed to permeate even the bitter coffee.

Carl got down most of his beef stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big, leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty, rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman, she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of winter, and skipped away.

"Bet she'd be a peach to know.... Fat chance I'd have to meet her, wrapping up baby-carriages for the North Shore commuters all day! All day!... Well, guess I'm going to honorably discharge myself!"

He left the job that afternoon.

His satiny Norse cheeks shone as he raced home through a rising blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lunch Room, where he had allowed himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration.

But when he lolled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling which made a rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and desert instead of department-store packages, his happiness wilted in face of the fact that he had only $10.42, with $8.00 due him from the store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the $3.00 he owed the landlady from $18.42, but the result persisted in being only $15.42. He could not make $15.42 appear a reasonable sum with which to start life anew.

He had to search for a new job that evening. Only—he was so tired; it was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the wall, picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him things to eat: juicy steaks and French-fried potatoes and gallons of ale (a repast which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the African jungles, but which seemed peculiarly well chosen, after a lunch-room dinner of watery corned-beef hash, burnt German-fried potatoes, and indigestible hot mince-pie). His thoughts drifted off to Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in these loose days. He considered the manoeuvers for a new job. He desired one which would permit him to go to theaters with the girl in white furs whom he had seen that noon—the unknown fairy of his discontent.

It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously. Though he did not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall bedroom, yet never did he regard himself as a collegian Haroun-al-Raschid on an amusing masquerade, pretending to be no better than the men with whom he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?

But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.

Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the iron bed, painfully drew on his shoes, after inspecting the hole in the sole of the left shoe and the ripped seam at the back of the right. He pulled tight the paper-thin overcoat which he had bought at a second-hand dealer's shop, and dared a Chicago blizzard, with needles of snow thundering by on a sixty-mile gale. Through a street of unutterably drab stores and saloons he plowed to the Unallied Taxicab Company's garage. He felt lonely, cold, but he observed with ceaseless interest the new people, different people, who sloped by him in the dun web of the blizzard. The American marveled at a recently immigrated Slav's astrachan cap.

He had hung about the Unallied garage on evenings when he was too poor to go to vaudeville. He had become decidedly friendly with the night washer, a youngster from Minneapolis. Trotting up to the washer, who was digging caked snow from the shoes of a car, he blurted:

"Say, Coogan, I've beat my job at ——'s. How's chances for getting a taxi to drive? You know I know the game."

"You? Driving a taxi?" stammered the washer. "Why, say, there was a guy that was a road-tester for the Blix Company and he's got a cousin that knows Bathhouse John, and that guy with all his pull has been trying to get on drivin' here for the last six months and ain't landed it, so you see about how much chance you got!"

"Gosh! it don't look much like I had much chance, for a fact."

"Tell you what I'll do, though. Why don't you get on at some automobile factory, and then you could ring in as a chauffeur, soon 's you got some recommends you could take to the Y. M. C. A. employment bureau." The washer gouged at a clot of ice with his heel, swore profusely, and went on: "Here. You go over to the Lodestar Motor Company's office, over on La Salle, Monday, and ask for Bill Coogan, on the sales end. He's me cousin, and you tell him to give you a card to the foreman out at the works, and I guess maybe you'll get a job, all right."

Tuesday morning, after a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, and made full member of exactly such a gang as he had known at Plato, after he had laughed away the straw boss who tried to make him go ask for a left-handed monkey-wrench. He roomed at a machinists' boarding-house, and enjoyed the furious discussions over religion and the question of air versus water cooling far more than he had ever enjoyed the polite jesting at Mrs. Henkel's.

He became friendly with the foreman of the repair-shop, and was promised a "chance." While the driver who made the road-tests of the cars was ill Carl was called on as a substitute. The older workmen warned him that no one could begin road-testing so early and hold the job. But Carl happened to drive the vice-president of the firm. He discussed bass-fishing in Minnesota with the vice-president, and he was retained as road-tester, getting his chauffeur's license. Two months later, when he was helping in the overhauling of a car in the repair-shop, he heard a full-bodied man with a smart English overcoat and a supercilious red face ask curtly of the shop foreman where he could get a "crack shuffer, right away, one that can give the traffic cops something to do for their money."

The foreman always stopped to scratch his chin when he had to think. This process gave Carl time to look up from his repairs and blandly remark: "That's me. Want to try me?"

Half an hour later Carl was engaged at twenty-five dollars a week as the Ruddy One's driver. Before Monday noon he had convinced the Ruddy One that he was no servant, but a mechanical expert. He drove the Ruddy One to his Investments and Securities office in the morning, and back at five; to restaurants in the evening. Not infrequently, with the wind whooping about corners, he slept peacefully in the car till two in the morning, outside a cafe. And he was perfectly happy. He was at last seeing the Great World. As he manoeuvered along State Street he rejoiced in the complications of the traffic and tooted his horn unnecessarily. As he waited before tall buildings, at noon, he gazed up at them with a superior air of boredom—because he was so boyishly proud of being a part of all this titanic life that he was afraid he might show it. He gloried in every new road, in driving along the Lake Shore, where the horizon was bounded not by unimaginative land, but by restless water.

Then the Ruddy One's favorite roads began to be familiar to Carl, too familiar, and he so hated his sot of an employer that he caught himself muttering, while driving, "Thank the Lord I sit in front and don't have to see that chunk of raw beefsteak he calls a neck."

While he waited for the fifth time before a certain expensive but not exclusive roadhouse, with the bouncing giggles of girls inside spoiling the spring night, he studied the background as once he had studied his father's woodshed. He was not, unfortunately, shocked by wine and women. But he was bored by box-trees. There was a smugly clipped box-tree on either side of the carriage entrance, the leaves like cheap green lacquer in the glare of the arc-light, which brought out all the artificiality of the gray-and-black cinder drive. He felt that five pilgrimages to even the best of box-trees were enough. It would be perfectly unreasonable for a free man to come here to stare at box-trees a sixth time. "All right," he growled. "I guess my-wandering-boy-to-night is going to beat it again."

While he drove to the garage he pondered: "Is it worth twenty-five plunks to me to be able to beat it to-night instead of waiting four days till pay-day? Nope. I'm a poor man."

But at 5 A.M. he was hanging about the railroad-yards at Hammond, recalling the lessons of youth in "flipping trains"; and at seven he was standing on the bumpers between two freight-cars, clinging to the brake-rod, looking out to the open meadows of Indiana, laughing to see farm-houses ringed with apple-blossoms and sweet with April morning. The cinders stormed by him. As he swung with the cars, on curves, he saw the treacherous wheels grinding beneath him. But to the chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck of the trucks he hummed, "Never turn back, never tur' back, never tur' back."



CHAPTER XIV

A young hobo named Carl Ericson crawled from the rods of an N. & W. freight-car at Roanoke, Virginia, on a May day, with spring at full tide and the Judas-trees a singing pink on the slopes of the Blue Ridge.

"Hm!" grunted the young hobo. "I like these mountains. Guess I'll stay here awhile.... Virginia! Plantations and Civil War history and Richmond and everything, and me here!"

A frowzy old hobo poked a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. "Hello, Slim. How's tricks?"

"Pretty good. What's the best section to batter for a poke-out, Billy?"

"To the right, over that way, and straight out."

"Much 'bliged," said Slim—erstwhile Ericson. "Say, j' know of any jobs in this——"

"Any whats?"

"Jobs."

"Jobs? You looking for——Say, you beat it. Gwan. Chase yourself. Gwan now; don't stand there. You ain't no decent 'bo. You're another of those Unfortunate Workmen that's spoiling the profesh." The veteran stared at Carl reprovingly, yet with a little sadness, too, at the thought of how bitterly he had been deceived in this young comrade, and his uncombed head slowly vanished amid the lumber.

Carl grinned and started up-town. He walked into four restaurants. At noon, in white jacket, he was bustling about as waiter in the dining-room of the Waskahominie Hotel, which had "white service" as a feature.

Within two days he was boon companion of a guest of the Waskahominie—Parker Heye, an actor famous from Cape Charles to Shockeysville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in the Great Riley Tent Show, Presenting a Popular Repertoire of Famous Melodramas under Canvas, Rain or Shine, Admittance Twenty-five Cents, Section Reserved for Colored People, the Best Show under Canvas, This Week Only.

When Parker Heye returned from the theater Carl sat with him in a room which had calico-like wall-paper, a sunken bed with a comforter out of which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked water-pitcher on a staggering wash-stand, and a beautiful new cuspidor of white china hand-painted with pink moss-roses tied with narrow blue ribbon.

Carl listened credulously to Heye's confidences as to how jealous was Riley, the actor-manager, of Heye's art, how Heye had "knocked them all down" in a stock company at Newport News, and what E. H. Sothern had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines Club.

"Say," rasped Heye, "you're a smart young fellow, good-looking, ejucated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down to Riley. The second juvenile 's going to leave on Saturday, and there ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk."

"Golly! that 'd be great!" cried Carl, who, like every human being since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor.

"Well, I'll see what I can do for you," said Heye, at parting, alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he was in his stocking-feet and coat-less, though the back of his neck was a scraggle of hair, Parker Heye was preferable to the three Swiss waiters snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half open, opposite the half-open door of the room where negro chambermaids tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat, and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat among proletarians, going back to His Own People—of the Great Riley Tent Show.

* * * * *

As second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only twelve dollars a week, but Mr. Riley made him promises rich as the Orient beryl, and permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing-room tent, behind the stage. There also Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol-stove. The canvas creaked all night; negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive heads under the edge of the canvas. But it was worth it—to travel on again; to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal; to climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and laurel and rhododendron; tramping up past the log cabins plastered with mud, where pickaninnies stared shyly, past glens shining with dogwood, and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob, gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He talked to bearded Dunkards and their sunbonneted wives; and when he found a Confederate veteran he listened to the tale of the defense of Richmond, delighted to find that the Boys in Gray were not merely names in the history-books.

Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her weary snow-bleached life might know the Southern sun. And the first five dollars he saved he sent to her.

But as soon as Carl became an actor Parker Heye grew jealous of him, and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up, among the cheap actors jammed in the men's dressing-room, before a pine board set on two saw-horses, under the light of a flaring kerosene-torch. Carl came to hate Heye and his splotched face, his pale, large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his black string tie that was invariably askew, his slovenly blue suit, his foppishly shaped tan button shoes with "bulldog" toes. Heye invariably jeered: "Don't make up so heavy.... Well, put a little rouge on your lips. What d'you think you are? A blooming red-lipped Venus?... Try to learn to walk across the stage as if you had one leg that wasn't wood, anyway.... It's customary to go to sleep when you're playing a listening role, but don't snore!... Oh, you're a swell actor! Think of me swallering your story about having been t' college!... Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool.... Why you ever wanted to be an actor——!"

The Great Riley agreed with all that Heye said, and marveled with Heye that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing-room a hay-dusty hell. But he enjoyed acting in "The Widow's Penny," "Alabama Nell," "The Moonshiner's Daughter," and "The Crook's Revenge" far more than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely remembered Plato. Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays. It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried, "They ain't going to steal mah gal!" Carl was damp at the eyes, and swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking.

"The Crook's Revenge" was his favorite, for he was cast as a young millionaire and wore evening clothes (second-hand). He held off a mob of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a gambling-den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the ingenue, Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse, with one hand, leveled a revolver with the other, and made fearless jests the while, to the infinite excitement of the audience, especially of the hyah-hyah-hyahing negroes, whose faces, under the flicker of lowered calcium-carbide lights, made a segregated strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eye-balls.

When the people were before him, respectful to art under canvas, Carl could love them; but even the tiniest ragged-breeched darky was bold in his curiosity about the strolling players when they appeared outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into a drug-store for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one-lunged runabout. The staring so flustered him that even the pride of coming from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry drops and flats—the patch of green spattered with dirty white which variously simulated a daisy-field, a mountainside, and that part of Central Park directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence of the millionaire counterfeiter, who, you remember, always comes out into the street to plot with his confederates. Carl hated with peculiar heartiness the anemic, palely varnished, folding garden bench, which figured now as a seat in the moonshiner's den, and now, with a cotton leopard-skin draped over it, as a fauteuil in the luxurious drawing-room of Mrs. Van Antwerp. The garden bench was, however, associated with his learning to make stage love to Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse.

It was difficult to appear unconscious of fifty small boys all smacking their lips in unison, while he kissed the air one centimeter in front of Miss L'Ewysse's lips. But he learned the art. Indeed, he began to lessen that centimeter of safety.

Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse (christened Lena Ludwig, and heir presumptive to one of the best delicatessens in Newport News) reveled in love-making on and off. Carl was attracted by her constantly, uncomfortably. She smiled at him in the wings, smoothed her fluffy blond hair at him, and told him in confidence that she was a high-school graduate, that she was used to much, oh, much better companies, and was playing under canvas for a lark. She bubbled: "Ach, Louie, say, ain't it hot! Honest, Mr. Ericson, I don't see how you stand it like you do.... Say, honest, that was swell business you pulled in the third act last night.... Say, I know what let's do—let's get up a swell act and get on the Peanut Circuit. We'd hit Broadway with a noise like seventeen marine bands.... Say, honest, Mr. Ericson, you do awful well for——I bet you ain't no amachoor. I bet you been on before."

He devoured it.

One night, finding that Miss Evelyn made no comment on his holding her hand, he lured her out of the tent during a long wait, trembled, and kissed her. Her fingers gripped his shoulders agitatedly, plucked at his sleeve as she kissed him back. She murmured, "Oh, you hadn't ought to do that." But afterward she would kiss him every time they were alone, and she told him with confidential giggles of Parker Heye's awkward attempts to win her. Heye's most secret notes she read, till Carl seriously informed her that she was violating a trust. Miss Evelyn immediately saw the light and promised she would "never, never, never do anythin' like that again, and, honest, she hadn't realized she was doing anythin' dishon'able, but Heye is such an old pest"; which was an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing the tears away.

All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of the adventurer, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned him that this was no amour for him; that he must not make love where he did not love; that this good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to tamper with and too absurd to love. Only——And again his breath would draw in with swift exultation as he recalled how elastic were her shoulders to stroke.

It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia, touring the Eastern Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was always filled with a stale scent of people.

At the town of Nankiwoc the hotel was not all it might have been. Evelyn L'Ewysse announced that she was "good and sick of eating a vaudeville dinner with the grub acts stuck around your plate in a lot of birds' bath-tubs—little mess of turnips and a dab of spinach and a fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night on a bed like a gridiron, no—thank—you! And believe me, if I see that old rube hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat-rack again—he keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead-pencil and a cigar some drummer gave him—if I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the S. P. C. A.!"

With Mrs. Lubley, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperon of the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen, and sleep in the dressing-room tent, over half of which was devoted to the women of the company.

Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no farther, but every night as Eve and he parted, to sleep with only a canvas partition between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after midnight.

A hot June night. The whole company had been invited to a dance at the U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon—lively old lady with experience on the burlesque circuit—was gaily going. Carl and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them to decide that.

They sat outside the silent tent, on a wardrobe trunk. What manner of night it was, whether starlit or sullen, Carl did not know; he was aware only that it was oppressive, and that Eve was in his arms in the darkness. He kissed her moist, hot neck. He babbled incoherently of the show people, but every word he said meant that he was palpitating because her soft body was against his. He knew—and he was sure that she knew—that when they discussed Heye's string tie and pretended to laugh, they were agitatedly voicing their intoxication.

His voice unsteady, Carl said: "Jiminy! it's so hot, Eve! I'm going to take off this darn shirt and collar and put on a soft shirt. S-say, w-why don't you put on a kimono or something? Be so much cooler."

"Oh, I don't know as I ought to——" She was frightened, awed at Bacchic madness. "D-do you think it would be all right?"

"Why not? Guess anybody's got a right to get cool—night like this. Besides, they won't be back till 4 P.M. And you got to get cool. Come on."

And he knew—and he was sure that she knew—that all he said was pretense. But she rose and said, nebulously, as she stood before him, ruffling his hair: "Well, I would like to get cool. If you think it's all right——I'll put on something cooler, anyway."

She went. Carl could hear a rustling in the women's end of the dressing-room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to an outing-shirt, open at the throat. He ran out, not to miss a moment with her.... She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a small voice in him, a voice born of snow-fields colored with sunset and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazer's house, which insisted: "Go slow! Stop!" A louder voice throbbed like the pulsing of the artery in his neck, "She's coming!"

Through the darkness her light garment swished against the long grass. He sprang up. Then he was holding her, bending her head back. He exulted to find that his gripping hand was barred from the smoothness of her side only by thin silk that glided and warmed under his fingers. She sat on his knees and snuggled her loosened hair tinglingly against his bare chest. He felt that she was waiting for him to go on.

Suddenly he could not, would not, go on.

"Dearest, we mustn't!" he mourned.

"O Carl!" she sobbed, and stopped his words with clinging lips.

He found himself waiting till she should finish the kiss that he might put an end to this.

Perhaps he was checked by provincial prejudices about chivalry. But perhaps he had learned a little self-control. In any case, he had stopped for a second to think, and the wine of love was gone flat. He wished she would release him. Also, her hair was tickling his ear. He waited, patiently, till she should finish the kiss.

Her lips drew violently from his, and she accused, "You don't want to kiss me!"

"Look here; I want to kiss you, all right—Lord——" For a second his arms tightened; then he went on, cold: "But we'll both be good and sorry if we go too far. It isn't just a cowardly caution. It's——Oh, you know."

"Oh yes, yes, yes, we mustn't go too far, Carl. But can't we just sit like this? O sweetheart, I am so tired! I want somebody to care for me a little. That isn't wicked, is it? I want you to take me in your arms and hold me close, close, and comfort me. I want so much to be comforted. We needn't go any further, need we?"

"Oh now, good Lord! Eve, look here: don't you know we can't go on and not go farther? I'm having a hard enough time——" He sprang up, shakily lighting a cigarette. He stroked her hair and begged: "Please go, Eve. I guess I haven't got very good control over myself. Please. You make me——"

"Oh yes, yes, sure! Blame it on me! Sure! I made you let me put on a kimono! I'm leading your pure white shriveled peanut of a soul into temptation!... Don't you ever dare speak to me again! Oh, you—you——"

She flounced away.

Carl caught her, in two steps. "See here, child," he said, gravely, "if you go off like this we'll both be miserable.... You remember how happy we were driving out to the old plantation at Powhasset?"

"O Gawd! won't you men never say anything original? Remember it? Of course I remember it! What do you suppose I wore that little branch of laurel you picked for me, wore it here, here, at my breast, and I thought you'd care if I hid it here where there wasn't any grease paint, and you don't—you don't care—and we picnicked, and I sang all the time I put up those sandwiches and hid the grape-fruit in the basket to surprise you——"

"O darling Eve, I don't know how to say how sorry I am, so terribly sorry I've started things going! It is my fault. But can't you see I've got to stop it before it's too late, just for that reason? Let's be chums again."

She shook her head. Her hand crept to his, slid over it, drew it up to her breast. She was swaying nearer to him. He pulled his hand free and fled to his tent.

Perhaps his fiercest gibe at himself was that he had had to play the role of virgin Galahad rejecting love, which is praised in books and ridiculed in clubs. He mocked at his sincere desire to be fair to Eve. And between mockeries he strained to hear her moving beyond the canvas partition. He was glad when the bandsmen came larruping home from the dance.

Next day she went out of her way to be chilly to him. He did not woo her friendship. He had resigned from the Great Riley Show, and he was going—going anywhere, so long as he kept going.



CHAPTER XV

He had been a jolly mechanic again, in denim overalls and jumper and a defiant black skull-cap with long, shiny vizor; the tender of the motor-boat fleet at an Ontario summer hotel. One day he had looked up, sweating and greasy, to see Howard Griffin, of Plato, parading past in white flannels. He had muttered: "I don't want Them to know I've just been bumming around. I'll go some place else. And I'll do something worth while." Now he was on the train for New York, meditating impersonally on his uselessness, considering how free of moss his rolling had kept him. He could think of no particularly masterful plan for accumulating moss. If he had not bought a ticket through to New York he would have turned back, to seek a position in one of the great automobile factories that now, this early autumn of 1906, were beginning to distinguish Detroit. Well, he had enough money to last for one week in New York. He would work in an automobile agency there; later he would go to Detroit, and within a few years be president of a motor company, rich enough to experiment with motor-boats and to laugh at Howard Griffin or any other Platonian.

So he sketched his conquering entrance into New York. Unfortunately it was in the evening, and, having fallen asleep at Poughkeepsie, he did not awake till a brakeman shook his shoulder at the Grand Central Station. He had heard of the old Grand Union Hotel, and drowsily, with the stuffy nose and sandy eyes and unclean feeling about the teeth that overpower one who sleeps in a smoking-car, he staggered across to the hotel and spent his first conquering night in filling a dollar room with vulgar sounds of over-weary slumber.

But in the morning, when he stared along Forty-second Street; when he breakfasted at a Childs' restaurant, like a gigantic tiled bath-room, and realized that the buckwheat cakes were New York buckwheats; when he sighted the noble Times Building and struck out for Broadway (the magic name that promised marble palaces, even if it provided two-story shacks); when he bustled into a carburetor agency and demanded a job—then he found the gateway of wonder.

But he did not find a job.

Eight nights after his arrival he quietly paid his bill at the hotel; tipped a curly-headed bell-boy; checked his baggage, which consisted of a shirt, a razor, and an illustrated catalogue of automobile accessories; put his tooth-brush in his pocket; bought an evening paper in order to feel luxurious; and walked down to the Charity Organization Society, with ten cents in his pocket.

In the Joint Application Bureau, filled with desks and filing-cabinets, where poor men cease to be men and become Cases, Carl waited on a long bench till it was his turn to tell his troubles to a keen, kindly, gray-bearded man behind a roll-top desk. He asked for work. Work was, it seemed, the one thing the society could not give. He received a ticket to the Municipal Lodging House.

This was not the hygienic hostelry of to-day, but a barracks on First Avenue. Carl had a chunk of bread with too much soda in it, and coffee with too little coffee in it, from a contemptuous personage in a white jacket, who, though his cuffs were grimy, showed plainly that he was too good to wait on bums. Carl leaned his elbows on the long scrubbed table and chewed the bread of charity sullenly, resolving to catch a freight next day and get out of town.

He slept in a narrow bunk near a man with consumption. The room reeked of disinfectants and charity.

* * * * *

The East Side of New York. A whirlwind of noise and smell and hovering shadows. The jargon of Jewish matrons in brown shawls and orthodox wigs, chaffering for cabbages and black cotton stockings and gray woolen undershirts with excitable push-cart proprietors who had beards so prophetic that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette amid the reverend mane. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher meat, and hallways as damnably rotten of floor as they were profitable to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-story tenements that made a prison wall of dulled yellow, bristling with bedding-piled fire-escapes and the curious heads of frowzy women. A potpourri of Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-pointed gilt stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway-seeds, shops for renting wedding finery that looked as if it could never fit any one, second-hand furniture-shops with folding iron beds, a filthy baby holding a baby slightly younger and filthier, mangy cats slinking from pile to pile of rubbish, and a withered geranium in a tin can whose label was hanging loose and showed rust-stains amid the dry paste on its back. Everywhere crowds of voluble Jews in dark clothes, and noisily playing children that catapulted into your legs. The lunger-blocks in which we train the victims of Russian tyranny to appreciate our freedom. A whirlwind of alien ugliness and foul smells and incessant roar and the deathless ambition of young Jews to know Ibsen and syndicalism. It swamped the courage of hungry Carl as he roamed through Rivington Street and Essex and Hester, vainly seeking jobs from shopkeepers too poor to be able to bathe.

He felt that he, not these matter-of-fact crowds, was alien. He was hungry and tired. There was nothing heroic to do—just go hungry. There was no place where he could sit down. The benches of the tiny hard-trodden parks were full.... If he could sit down, if he could rest one little hour, he would be able to go and find freight-yards, where there would be the clean clang of bells and rattle of trucks instead of gabbled Yiddish. Then he would ride out into the country, away from the brooding shadows of this town, where there were no separable faces, but only a fog of ceaselessly moving crowds....

Late that night he stood aimlessly talking to a hobo on a dirty corner of the Bowery, where the early September rain drizzled through the gaunt structure of the Elevated. He did not feel the hunger so much now, but he was meekly glad to learn from his new friend, the hobo, that in one more hour he could get food in the bread-line. He felt very boyish, and would have confided the fact that he was starving to any woman, to any one but this transcontinental hobo, the tramp royal, trained to scorn hunger. Because he was one of them he watched incuriously the procession of vagrants, in coats whose collars were turned up and fastened with safety-pins against the rain. The vagrants shuffled rapidly by, their shoulders hunched, their hands always in their trousers pockets, their shoe-heels always ground down and muddy.

And incuriously he watched a saloon-keeper, whose face was plastered over with a huge mustache, come out and hang a sign, "Porter wanted in A.M.," on the saloon door.

As he slouched away to join the bread-line, a black deuce in the world's discard, Carl was wondering how he could get that imperial appointment as porter in a Bowery saloon. He almost forgot it while waiting in the bread-line, so occupied was he in hating two collegians who watched the line with that open curiosity which nice, clean, respectable young men suppose the poor never notice. He restrained his desire to go over and quote Greek at them, because they were ignorant and not to blame for being sure that they were of clay superior to any one in a bread-line. And partly because he had forgotten his Greek.

He came back to the Bowery briskly, alone, with the manhood of a loaf of bread in him. He was going to get that job as porter. He planned his campaign as a politician plans to become a statesman. He slipped the sign, "Porter wanted in A.M.," from its nail and hid it beneath his coat. He tramped the block all night and, as suspicious characters always do to avoid seeming suspicious, he begged a match from a policeman who was keeping an eye on him. The policeman chatted with him about baseball and advised him to keep away from liquor and missions.

At 5 A.M. Carl was standing at the saloon door. When the bartender opened it Carl bounced in, slightly dizzy, conscious of the slime of mud on his fraying trouser-ends.

The saloon had an air of cheap crime and a floor covered with clotted sawdust. The bar was a slab of dark-brown wood, so worn that semicircles of slivers were showing. The nasty gutter was still filled with cigar-ends and puddles of beer and bits of free-lunch cheese.

"I want that job as porter," said Carl.

"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you wait and see who else comes to get it."

"Nobody else is going to come."

"How do you know they ain't?"

Carl drew the sign from beneath his coat and carefully laid it on the bar. "That's why."

"Well, you got nerve. You got the nerve of a Republican on Fourteenth Street, like the fellow says. You must want it. Well, all right, I guess you can have it if the boss don't kick."

Carl was accepted by the "boss," who gave him a quarter and told him to go out and get a "regular feed." He hummed over breakfast. He had been accepted again by all men when he had been accepted by the proprietor of a Bowery saloon. He was going to hold this job, no matter what happened. The rolling stone was going to gather moss.

For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world. He worked sixteen hours a day for eight dollars a week, cleaning cuspidors, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the more rotten portions off the free-lunch meat. As he slopped about with half-frozen, brittle rags, hoboes pushed him aside and spat on the floor he had just cleaned.

Of his eight dollars a week he saved four. He rented an airshaft bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop worker for one dollar and seventy-five cents a week. It was occupied daytimes by a cook in an all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Gilligan Association. The room was unheated, and every night during January Carl debated whether to go to bed with his shoes on or off.

The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotched-faced, passionate child of fifteen, with moist eyes and very low-cut waists of coarse voile (which she pronounced "voyle"). She would stop Carl in the dark "railroad" hallway and, chewing gum rapidly, chatter about the aisleman at Wanamacy's, and what a swell time there would be at the coming ball of the Thomas J. Monahan Literary and Social Club, tickets twenty-five cents for lady and gent, including hat-check. She let Carl know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the movies on Sunday afternoons, but he patted her head and talked to her like a big brother and kept himself from noticing that she had clinging hands and would be rather pretty, and he bought her a wholesome woman's magazine to read—not an entirely complete solution to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then.

Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender.

Every night when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he—son of Northern tamaracks and quiet books—went on with this horrible imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job at least, and that the one he held. And admonished himself that he was very well paid for a saloon porter.

If Carl had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so much less desirable than driving a car or wandering through the moonlight with Eve L'Ewysse in days wonderful and lost that, to endure it, to conquer it, he had to develop a control over temper and speech and body which was to stay with him in windy mornings of daring.

Within three months Carl had become assistant bar-keeper, and now he could save eight dollars a week. He bought a couple of motor magazines and went to one vaudeville show and kept his sub-landlord's daughter from running off with a cadet, wondering how soon she would do it in any case, and receiving a depressing insight into the efficiency of society for keeping in the mire most of the people born there.

Three months later, at the end of winter, he was ready to start for Panama.

He was going to Panama because he had read in a Sunday newspaper of the Canal's marvels of engineering and jungle.

He had avoided making friends. There was no one to give him farewell when he emerged from the muck. But he had one task to perform—to settle with the Saloon Snob.

Petey McGuff was the name of this creature. He was an oldish and wicked man, born on the Bowery. He had been a heavy-weight prize-fighter in the days of John L. Sullivan; then he had met John, and been, ever since, an honest crook who made an excellent living by conducting a boxing-school in which the real work was done by assistants. He resembled a hound with a neat black bow tie, and he drooled tobacco-juice down his big, raw-looking, moist, bristly, too-masculine chin. Every evening from eleven to midnight Petey McGuff sat at the round table in the mildewed corner at the end of the bar, drinking old-fashioned whisky cocktails made with Bourbon, playing Canfield, staring at the nude models pasted on the milky surface of an old mirror, and teasing Carl.

"Here, boy, come 'ere an' wipe off de whisky you spilled.... Come on, you tissy-cat. Get on de job.... You look like Sunday-school Harry. Mamma's little rosy-cheeked boy.... Some day I'm going to bust your beezer. Gawd! it makes me sick to sit here and look at dose goily-goily cheeks.... Come 'ere, Lizzie, an' wipe dis table again. On de jump, daughter."

Carl held himself in. Hundreds of times he snarled to himself: "I won't hit him! I will make good on this job, anyway." He created a grin which he could affix easily.

Now he was leaving. He had proven that he could hold a job; had answered the unspoken criticisms from Plato, from Chicago garages, from the Great Riley Show. For the first time since he had deserted college he had been able to write to his father, to answer the grim carpenter's unspoken criticisms of the son who had given up his chance for an "education." And proudly he had sent to his father a little check. He had a beautiful new fifteen-dollar suit of blue serge at home. In his pocket was his ticket—steerage by the P. R. R. line to Colon—and he would be off for bluewater next noon. His feet danced behind the bar as he filled schooners of beer and scraped off their foam with a celluloid ruler. He saw himself in Panama, with a clean man's job, talking to cosmopolitan engineers against a background of green-and-scarlet jungle. And, oh yes, he was going to beat Petey McGuff that evening, and get back much of the belligerent self-respect which he had been drawing off into schooners with the beer.

Old Petey rolled in at two minutes past eleven, warmed his hands at the gas-stove, poked disapprovingly at the pretzels on the free-lunch counter, and bawled at Carl: "Hey, keep away from dat cash-register! Wipe dem goilish tears away, will yuh, Agnes, and bring us a little health-destroyer and a couple matches."

Carl brought a whisky cocktail.

"Where's de matches, you tissy-cat?"

Carl wiped his hands on his apron and beamed: "Well, so the old soak is getting too fat and lazy to reach over on the bar and get his own! You'll last quick now!"

"Aw, is dat so!... For de love of Mike, d'yuh mean to tell me Lizzie is talking back? Whadda yuh know about dat! Whadda yuh know about dat! You'll get sick on us here, foist t'ing we know. Where was yuh hoited?"

Petey McGuff's smile was absolutely friendly. It made Carl hesitate, but it had become one of the principles of cosmic ethics that he had to thump Petey, and he growled: "I'll give you all the talking back you want, you big stiff. I'm getting through to-night. I'm going to Panama."

"No, straight, is dat straight?"

"That's what I said."

"Well, dat's fine, boy. I been watching yuh, and I sees y' wasn't cut out to be no saloon porter. I made a little bet with meself you was ejucated. Why, y'r cuffs ain't even doity—not very doity. Course you kinda need a shave, but dem little blond hairs don't show much. I seen you was a gentleman, even if de bums didn't. You're too good t' be a rum-peddler. Glad y're going, boy, mighty glad. Sit down. Tell us about it. We'll miss yuh here. I was just saying th' other night to Mike here dere ain't one feller in a hundred could 'a' stood de kiddin' from an old he-one like me and kep' his mout' shut and grinned and said nawthin' to nobody. Dat's w'at wins fights. But, say, boy, I'll miss yuh, I sure will. I get to be kind of lonely as de boys drop off—like boozers always does. Oh, hell, I won't spill me troubles like an old tissy-cat.... So you're going to Panama? I want yuh to sit down and tell me about it. Whachu taking, boy?"

"Just a cigar.... I'll miss you, too, Petey. Tell you what I'll do. I'll send you some post-cards from Panama."

Next noon as the S.S. Panama pulled out of her ice-lined dock Carl saw an old man shivering on the wharf and frantically waving good-by—Petey McGuff.



CHAPTER XVI

The S.S. Panama had passed Watling's Island and steamed into story-land. On the white-scrubbed deck aft of the wheel-house Carl sat with his friends of the steerage—sturdy men all, used to open places; old Ed, the rock-driller, long, Irish, huge-handed, irate, kindly; Harry, the young mechanic from Cleveland. Ed and an oiler were furiously debating about the food aboard:

"Aw, it's rotten, all of it."

"Look here, Ed, how about the chicken they give the steerage on Sunday?"

"Chicken? I didn't see no chicken. I see some sea-gull, though. No wonder they ain't no more sea-gulls following us. They shot 'em and cooked 'em on us."

"Say," mused Harry, "makes me think of when I was ship-building in Philly—no, it was when I was broke in K. C.—and a guy——"

Carl smiled in content, exulting in the talk of the men of the road, exulting in his new blue serge suit, his new silver-gray tie with no smell of the saloon about it, finger-nails that were growing pink again—and the sunset that made glorious his petty prides. A vast plane of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools where floated tree-branches so suffused with light that the glad heart blessed them. His first flying-fish leaped silvery from silver sea, and Carl cried, almost aloud, "This is what I've been wanting all my life!"

Aloud, to Harry: "Say, what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down through there some day." He spoke harshly. But the real Carl was robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics down the sky-line.

* * * * *

Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl peered through the "state-room" window to the swishing night sea, conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head, of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers overboard. The Panama was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced, "This is just what I've wanted, always."

* * * * *

They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colon. He is seeing Panama! First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C. C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.

At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland—a medley of Colon and Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front, but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery. Gambling-houses where it is considered humorous to play "Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night?" on the phonograph while wandering boys sit at poker; and less cleanly places, named after the various states. Negro wenches in yellow calico dancing to fiddled tunes older than voodoo; Indian planters coming sullenly in with pale-green bananas; memories of the Spanish Main and Morgan's raid, of pieces of eight and cutlasses ho! Capes of cocoanut palms running into a welter of surf; huts on piles streaked with moss, round whose bases land-crabs scuttle with a dry rattling that carries far in the hot, moist, still air, and suggests the corpses of disappeared men found half devoured.

Then, for contrast, the transplanted North, with its seriousness about the Service; the American avenues and cool breezes of Cristobal, where fat, bald chiefs of the I. C. C. drive pompously with political guests who, in 1907, are still incredulous about the success of the military socialism of the Canal, and where wives from Oklahoma or Boston, seated in Grand Rapids golden-oak rockers on the screened porches of bungalows, talk of hats, and children, and mail-orders, and cards, and The Colonel, and malarial fever, and Chautauqua, and the Culebra slide.

Colon! A kaleidoscope of crimson and green and dazzling white, warm-hued peoples and sizzling roofs, with echoes from the high endeavor of the Canal and whispers from the unknown Bush; drenched with sudden rain like escaping steam, or languid under the desert glare of the sky, where hangs a gyre of buzzards whose slow circles are stiller than death and calmer than wisdom.

"Lord!" sighs Carl Ericson from Joralemon, "this is what I've wanted ever since I was a kid."

* * * * *

At Pedro Miguel, which the Canal employees always called "Peter McGill," he found work, first as an unofficial time-keeper; presently, after examinations, as a stationery engineer on the roll of the I. C. C. Within a month he showed no signs of his Bowery experiences beyond a shallow hollow in his smooth cheeks. He lived in quarters like a college dormitory, communistic and jolly, littered with shoes and cube-cut tobacco and college banners; clean youngsters dropping in for an easy chat—and behind it all, the mystery of the Bush. His room-mate, a conductor on the P. R. R., was a globe-trotter, and through him Carl met the Adventurers, whom he had been questing ever since he had run away from Oscar Ericson's woodshed. There was a young engineer from Boston Tech., who swore every morning at 7.07 (when it rained boiling water as enthusiastically as though it had never done such a thing before) that he was going to Chihuahua, mining. There was Cock-eye Corbett, an ex-sailor, who was immoral and a Lancashireman, and knew more about blackbirding and copra and Kanakas, and the rum-holes from Nagasaki to Mombasa, than it is healthy for a civil servant to know.

Every Sunday a sad-faced man with ash-colored hair and bony fingers, who had been a lieutenant in the Peruvian navy, a teacher in St. John's College, China, and a sub-contractor for railroad construction in Montana, and who was now a minor clerk in the cool, lofty offices of the Materials and Supplies Department, came over from Colon, relaxed in a tilted-back chair, and fingered the Masonic charm on his horsehair watch-guard, while he talked with the P. R. R. conductor and the others about ruby-hunting and the Relief of Peking, and Where is Hector Macdonald? and Is John Orth dead? and Shall we try to climb Chimborazo? and Creussot guns and pig-sticking and Swahili tribal lore. These were a few of the topics regarding which he had inside information. The others drawled about various strange things which make a man discontented and bring him no good.

Carl was full member of the circle because of his tales of the Bowery and the Great Riley Show, and because he pretended to be rather an authority on motors for dirigibles, about which he read in Aeronautics at the Y. M. C. A. reading-room. It is true that at this time, early 1907, the Wrights were still working in obscurity, unknown even in their own Dayton, though they had a completely successful machine stowed away; and as yet Glenn Curtiss had merely developed a motor for Captain Baldwin's military dirigible. But Langley and Maxim had endeavored to launch power-driven, heavier-than-air machines; lively Santos Dumont had flipped about the Eiffel Tower in his dirigible, and actually raised himself from the ground in a ponderous aeroplane; and in May, 1907, a sculptor named Delagrange flew over six hundred feet in France. Various crank inventors were "solving the problem of flight" every day. Man was fluttering on the edge of his earthy nest, ready to plunge into the air. Carl was able to make technical-sounding predictions which caught the imaginations of the restless children.

* * * * *

The adventurers kept moving. The beach-combing ex-sailor said that he was starting for Valparaiso, started for San Domingo, and landed in Tahiti, whence he sent Carl one post-card, worded, "What price T. T.?" The engineer from Boston Tech. kept his oath about mining in Chihuahua. He got the appointment as assistant superintendent of the Tres Reyes mine—and he took Carl with him.

Carl reached Mexico and breathed the air of high-lying desert and hill. He found rare days, purposeless and wonderful as the voyages of ancient Norse Ericsens; days of learning Spanish and sitting quietly balancing a .32-20 Marlin, waiting for bandits to attack; the joy of repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him that the machinery desecrated the mountains' stern grandeur.

Stolen hours he gave to the building of box-kites with cambered wings, after rapturously learning, in the autumn of 1908, that in August a lanky American mechanic named Wilbur Wright had startled the world by flying an aeroplane many miles publicly in France; that before this, on July 4, 1908, another Yankee mechanic, Glenn Curtiss, had covered nearly a mile, for the Scientific American trophy, after a series of trials made in company with Alexander Graham Bell, J. A. D. McCurdy, "Casey" Baldwin, and Augustus Post.

He might have gone on until death, dealing with excitable greasers and hysterical machinery, but for the coming of a new mine superintendent—one of those Englishmen, stolid, red-mustached, pipe-smoking, eye-brow-lifting, who at first seem beefily dull, but prove to have known every one from George Moore to Marconi. He inspected Carl hundreds of times, then told him that the period had come when he ought to attack a city, conquer it, build up a reputation cumulatively; that he needed a contrast to Platonians and Bowery bums and tropical tramps, and even to his beloved engineers.