JOSHUA, worn out from loss of sleep the night before, curled up beside the fire on the ground. He resented The Whimperer’s matter-of-fact assumption of jockership over him, but he was too tired to protest. If the John Yegg was willing to stay awake and watch for the coming of the freight Joshua was content, for the present, to allow him to general his Western flight.
He fell asleep almost immediately. Then for a long time the strange man who had forced his companionship upon the boy sat watching him with his inscrutable eyes. Finally, deciding that his charge actually was asleep, he rose softly and shuffled off through the willows into the night.
He fell into a sandy path and followed it for some distance. Then he halted, and a soft whistle, repeated several times, came from his pitted lips.
Presently there was an answer, and before long a shadow fell across an open space in the trees, and the guarded question came:
“Is dat youse, Whimp?”
“Yeah,” replied The Whimperer. “Don’t make no noise. He’s sleepin’.”
Felix Wolfgang, the youth who now slipped to the side of the old tramp, was the name of the boy known to Joshua Cole in the House of Refuge as Number Twenty-three forty-four. Wolfgang had reached his twenty-first birthday while Joshua was still studying astronomy under Beaver Clegg, and had been released. He was of Norwegian descent, and had gone to the institution from the slums of Joshua’s birthplace.
He had proved one of the most incorrigible inmates of the school, and had been released only because it was not allowed to keep a boy beyond the age of maturity. Felix had returned to his old haunts, had become a gang leader, and had hoboed all over the United States before Joshua came out. Many times he had been arrested, and once the penitentiary had threatened to take him within its gray walls.
He was tall and lean, with sandy hair, and as freckled as a painter’s ladder. His expression of face was that of the swaggering gangster, cruel and insolent. He used the argot of gangs and thieves and tramps, and was all in all a tough young rascal on the eve of becoming a conscienceless criminal.
“Well, wot’s doin’?” he asked The Whimperer in a husky whisper. This huskiness of voice was habitually assumed for effect, but now it was huskier still for the sake of secrecy.