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They seemed to be staring wildly toward the "donjon tower," as Alec persisted in calling the round structure at one end of the imitation castle. Louder and louder grew the racket. Billy laid a trembling hand on Hugh's arm as though seeking comfort from personal contact with the scout master. Presently the pair of hoboes appeared to have reached the limit of their endurance.
"The question is, do we want to stand for that couple of greasy hoboes keeping us company while we camp out here in the deserted castle? Everybody say his mind, and majority rules, you know." "Excuse me, if you please," muttered Arthur, with a shudder. "I'd sooner sleep in a pigpen than alongside such human animals as those unclean hoboes."
When the two hoboes had departed the others huddled again close to the stove until Bridge suggested that he and The Oskaloosa Kid retire to another room while the girl removed and dried her clothing; but she insisted that it was not wet enough to matter since she had been covered by a robe in the automobile until just a moment before she had been hurled out.
The day seldom passed when Bunker Hill's wife did not cook for three or four hoboes but when Old Bunk called a man in to breakfast he expected him to come. He stood for a minute, tall and rangy and grizzled, a desert squint in one eye; and then with a muttered oath he strode across the street. "Hey!" he called prodding the blankets with his boot and the hobo came alive with a jump.
He whistles, and the game comes right up to his hand. It is surprising, the money that is made out of stone-broke tramps. All through the South at least when I was hoboing are convict camps and plantations, where the time of convicted hoboes is bought by the farmers, and where the hoboes simply have to work.
The farmer, finding the name offensively rustic, roared into the corncrib that Kenny was a hobo without future hope of heaven. He and the corncrib, it seemed, knew the genus well. Indeed, he looked in the corncrib for hope-lorn hoboes with the same regularity that he looked in the hay for eggs. He added some infuriated statistics about early rising. "Come out of that!" he yelled.
I went down to the depot and caught the first blind out on a Pennsylvania Railroad express. After the train got good and under way and I noted the speed she was making, a misgiving smote me. This was a four-track railroad, and the engines took water on the fly. Hoboes had long since warned me never to ride the first blind on trains where the engines took water on the fly. And now let me explain.
He might have shot at me, but he'd have had to hit me to get me. He'd have never run after me, for two hoboes in the hand are worth more than one on the get-away. But like a dummy I stood still when he halted me. Our conversation was brief. "What hotel are you stopping at?" he queried. He had me.
Hinman and rubbed him down, then rolled him in dry blankets and laid him on another cot not far from the stove. "Come out, you other hoboes," called the boss tramp's voice. "Come and help us right the peddler's wagon and bring that and the horse up here." The other two tramps went reluctantly out into the storm. A bottle full of hot water, wrapped in a towel, was placed at the peddler's feet.
From noon until six o'clock my ante-room was invaded by a motley procession delicate boys of fifteen who wanted to go to the country, old men who thought they could do farm work, clerks and janitors out of employment, typical tramps and hoboes who diffused very naughty smells, and a few a very few who seemed to know what they could do and what they really wanted.
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