A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

He was an American of Irish stock; his name was Farrell; he was two-and-twenty, a little more than six feet high, and as straight as an arrow. We met on the line of the Rock Island Railway just west of Morris, Ill.

But first, I should like to explain that in the course of eighteen months’ experience as a wandering wage-earner, drifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, this was the only day that I spent in company with a tramp.

It was in the character of a workingman and not as a tramp, that I began, in the summer of 1891, a casual experiment, by which I hoped to gain some personal acquaintance with the conditions of life of unskilled laborers in America. Having no skill, I could count on employment only in the rudest forms of labor, and I maintained consistently the character of a laborer—a very indifferent one, I am bound to own—yet finding it possible everywhere to live by the work of my hands.

I did tramp, it is true, walking in all some twenty-five hundred miles of the distance from Connecticut to California; but I did it from set purpose, discovering that in this way I could get a better knowledge of the people and the country and of opportunities for work, than if I should spend my savings in car-fare from place to place. It cost me nothing to walk, and I not infrequently covered two hundred miles in the course of a week, but it generally proved that, in actual cash from the savings of my last job, I was out quite as much as I should have been had I ridden the distance. This was because it was often necessary to pay for food and lodging by the way, an odd job not always being procurable, and the people being far readier to give a meal than to take the trouble of providing work in payment for it. I could little blame them, and I soon began to make use of the wayside inns, trusting for contact with people more to chance acquaintance and the admirable opportunities that came with every event of employment, when my savings were gone.

Tramp is a misnomer, I fancy, as descriptive of the mode of motion of the members of the professionally idle class which in our vernacular we call hoboes. The tramp rarely tramps; he “beats his way” on the railroads.

Everyone knows of the very thorough-going and valuable work that Mr. Josiah Flynt has done in learning the vagrant world, not only of America, but of England, and widely over the Continent as well, and the light that he has let in upon the habits of life and of thought of the fraternity, and its common speech and symbols, and whence its recruits come, and why, and how it occupies a world midway between lawlessness and honest toil, lacking the criminal wit for the one and the will power for the other.

That the hobo, in going from place to place, makes little use of the highways, I can freely testify, so far as my limited experience goes. His name was legion among the unemployed in Chicago, and he flocked about railway centres, but he was a rare bird along the country roads where work was plentiful.

It is easy to recount individually all that I met: a lusty Yankee beggar who hailed me as a brother one blistering July day, not far from the Connecticut border, when I was making for Garrisons; a cynical wraith, who rose, seemingly, from the dust of the road, in the warm twilight of a September evening, in eastern Pennsylvania and scoffed at my hope of finding work in Sweet Valley; a threadbare, white-haired German with a truly fine reserve and courtesy, who so far warmed to me, when we met in the frosty air of late November, on the bare, level stretch of a country road between Cleveland and Sandusky, as to tell me that he had walked from Texas, and was on his way to the home of friends near Boston; then Farrell, in central Illinois; and finally, a blear-eyed, shaggy knave, trudging the sleepers of the Union Pacific in western Nebraska, his rags bound together and bound on with strings, and a rollicking quality in his cracked voice, who must have had difficulty in avoiding work among the short-handed gangs of navvies along the line.

All this is by way of fruitless explanation that I myself was not a tramp, but a workman, living by day’s labor; a fruitless explanation, because a reputation once established is difficult to dislodge. I have grown accustomed to references to my “tramp days,” even among those who knew my purpose best, and I had no sooner returned to my university than I found that to its members I was already known as “Weary,” in which alliterative appellation I saw the frankest allusion to a supposed identification with the “Weary Willies” of our “comic” prints. And having incurred the name, I may as well lay bare the one day that I tramped with a tramp.

I am not without misgivings in speaking of Farrell as a tramp. He had held a steady job some weeks before, and our day together ended as we shall see; but if I was a hobo, so was he, and although clearly not of the strictest sect, and perhaps of no true sect at all, yet let us grant that, for the time, we both were tramps.

The line of a railway was an unusual course, for I much preferred the country roads as offering better walking, and far more hope of meeting the people that I wished to know. Heavy rains, however, had made the roads almost impassable on foot, and I was walking the sleepers from necessity.

The spring of 1892 had been uncommonly wet. The rains set in about the time that I quit work with a gang of roadmakers on the Exposition grounds. So incessant were they that it grew difficult to leave Chicago on foot, and when, in the middle of May, I did set out, I got only as far as Joliet, when I had to seek employment again.

At the yards of the Illinois Steel Company I was taken on and assigned to a gang of laborers, mostly Hungarians. But my chief association of a week’s stay there is with a boarding-house, and especially its landlady.

She was a girlish matron, with a face that made you think of a child-wife, but she was a woman in capacity. Her baby was a year old, and generous Heaven was about to send another. Her boarders numbered seven when I was made welcome; and to help her in the care of a crippled husband and the child and guests, she had a little maid of about fifteen, while, to add to the income from our board, she took in all our washing, and did it herself with no outside help. She may have been twenty, but I should have guessed eighteen, and every man of us stood straight before her and did her bidding thankfully.

It was a proud moment, and one which made me feel more nearly on equal terms with the other men, when one evening she came to me and,

“John, you mind the baby this time while I finish getting supper,” she said, as she put the child in my arms.

On the sofa in the sitting-room we would lay the little wide-eyed, sunny creature whom we rarely heard cry, and who never showed fear at the touch of our rough hands, nor at the thundering laughter that answered to her smiles and her gurgling attempts at speech.

The mother waited at the table, and joined freely in our talk. She had a way of saying “By gosh!” that fairly broke your heart, and at times she would stand still and swear softly, while her deep blue eyes widened in innocent surprise.

They were haunting eyes, and they followed me far out on the rain-soaked roads of the valley of the Illinois. The walking was not bad at first. Over a rolling country the way wound past woodland and open fields, between banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but for the evident richness of soil, and the entire absence of rock, it might have been a New England valley with nothing to suggest the earlier monotony of undulating prairie.

But the walking became steadily worse, until by nightfall each step was a painful pulling of a foot out of the mire then planting it in the mire ahead, with Morris a good ten miles beyond. I was passing in the late twilight a farm-house that stood close to the road. In his shirt-sleeves, and seated in a tilted chair on the porch, was a young farmer with a group of lightly clad children about him. He accepted the explanation that I found the walking too heavy to admit of my reaching Morris that evening, and, readily giving me leave to sleep on his hay-mow, asked me in to have something to eat.

I was struck at first sight with a marked resemblance in him to my friend Fitz-Adams, the manager of the logging camp in Pennsylvania. All through our talk, while seated on the porch in the evening, there were reminders in his manner and turns of speech and ways of looking at things of that very efficient boss.

He was living in apparent poverty. The house was small and slightly built and meanly furnished. Indeed, there was an effect of squalor in its scant interior, and in the unkempt appearance of his wife and children. But the man impressed you with the resolute reserve of one who bides his time and knows what he is about. It appeared in his evident contentment, joined with a certain hopefulness that was very engaging. It is true that the spring was wet, so wet that he had not yet been able to plant his corn, and it was growing late for planting, but, even if the crop should fail completely, he had much corn in the best condition, he said, left over from the uncommonly large crop of the year before, which would be selling in the autumn at a better price. He was depressed by the persistent rains, but not discouraged, and, as for the region in which he had cast his lot, he clearly thought it one of the best for a man beginning the world as a farmer. With land at fifty dollars an acre, there was a good market near at hand, and money on the security of the land could be had at five per cent. It was best to buy, he said. Four thousand dollars would secure a farm of eighty acres, and two hundred dollars would pay the interest, whereas the rental might reach three hundred or even three hundred and fifty. Unmistakably he was poor, but he was certainly not of the complaining sort, and I thought that it did not require a long look into the future to see him in full possession of the land and the owner of a more comfortable home besides.

When the barn-yard fowls wakened me in the morning the sun was rising to a cloudless dawn. But, by the time that I took to the road, all the sky was overcast again, and progress was as difficult as on the night before. The stoneless soil was saturated, until it could absorb not another drop, and water formed a pool in every foot-print and ran in muddy streams in the wheel-tracks.

Two miles down the road was a railway. I reached it after an hour’s hard walk and followed it to the tow-path of a canal, which afforded comparatively firm footing over the remaining eight miles into Morris. It was now ten o’clock, and for the past hour a steady drizzle had been falling, which increased to a down-pour as I entered the town. There I remained sheltered until nearly noon, when the rain ceased and I renewed the journey. The roads I knew by experience to be almost impassable, so I found the line of the Rock Island Railway and started west in the hope of reaching Ottawa by night.