United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With Milt for guide, Claire discovered a Christianity that was not of candles and shifting lights and insinuating music, nor of carpets and large pews and sound oratory, but of hoboes blinking in rows, and girls in gospel bonnets, and little silver and crimson placards of Bible texts.
Here we met several hoboes who had already been pinched that morning, and every little while the door was unlocked and two or three more were thrust in on us. At last, when we totalled sixteen, we were led upstairs into the court-room.
But the strongest incentive of all was the hoboes, who as they passed by aboard of freight trains, with their feet dangling out of open box car doors or hanging to the mail and express cars of passenger trains, waved friendly greetings to the lads, which they interpreted as a beckoning to the city.
Some hoboes like to be caught by the watch-dogs especially in winter-time. Of course, such hoboes select communities where the jails are "good," wherein no work is performed and the food is substantial. Also, there have been, and most probably still are, constables who divide their fees with the hoboes they arrest. Such a constable does not have to hunt.
There was no place for women or children until the camp in the canyon should be built, so it was a crowd of wandering "rough-necks" who built the road. A few were friends of Iron Skull, who followed him from job to job. The rest were tramp workmen, men who had toiled all over the world. They were not hoboes. They were journeyman laborers.
Bridge finished rolling a brown paper cigarette before he spoke. "Your words are pure and unadulterated wisdom, my friend," he said. "The chances are scarcely even that two gringo hoboes would last the week out afoot and broke in Viva Mexico; but it has been many years since I followed the dictates of wisdom. Therefore I am going with you." Billy grinned. He could not conceal his pleasure.
I've got twelve hundred friends in Arizona that's worth a dollar apiece a year; but this danged job only pays seventy-five a month I'd be losing three hundred a year." "Huh, huh," grunted Big Boy, picking up some folded tarts, "your mind seems to be took up with hoboes." "Them's my wife's pay-streak biscuits," grinned Bunker Hill, "or at least, that's what I call 'em.
Their conversation was interrupted by one of the grown hoboes, who, acting as cook, called all hands to "dinner". This dinner, which was another mulligan, was placed in the center of the table in the same pot in which it had been cooked, and each member of the gang, just as if they were still camping about a hobo fire in the woods, by means of a small wooden paddle pulled as much of the mulligan as he desired, onto a tin plate, that had never been touched by dishwater, but had only been scraped since the day it arrived at the rooms.
They came to a stone church with a porch easily reached from the street, a large and airy stone porch, just suited, Morton declared, "to a couple of hoboes like us. If a bobby butts in, why, we'll just slide under them seats. Then the bobby can go soak his head." Mr. Wrenn had never so far defied society as to steal a place for sleeping.
"No wonder Americans prefer to live abroad," he remarked loftily to a convenient reporter, who was preparing copy with his eager eyes. "We won't live here, will we!" Adelle chorused to her husband. "Not much!" "To treat decent people like this, just because they have a few clothes and things. What do they take us for hoboes?" Archie continued.
Word Of The Day