“Well, slide out. Guess it’s time for you to eat anyway. But I’ll let you ride out the division for a dollar.”
“Sorry, but I haven’t a dollar. Thanks, though.”
“Four bits, then.”
“Simply haven’t a cent.”
“Well, then unload—and beat it!”
The tramp sat down in the door, dangled his feet, and dropped lightly to the ground.
“So long!” he said, and strode away beside the train, his hands in his trouser pockets.
“Humph!” snorted the brakeman, and gave the door a vicious shove that forced a protesting scream from the track and rollers.
The little town was six thousand five hundred feet above the sea, in the high Sierras. The breath of pines came to the vagabond’s nostrils as he trudged along. A dynamic trout stream plunged over and around huge boulders on its frenzied race to the blue Pacific, two hundred miles away. The rare air of the high altitude, to which the traveler was unaccustomed, sent the blood pounding through his veins; and despite the beginning of hunger pangs his spirits were elated and his step elastic as he walked on toward the village.
Before he reached even its outskirts he saw five men—tramps like himself, no doubt—in camp beside the rushing stream. The odor of cooking came to his sensitive nostrils. He had only to climb down a twenty-foot fill, crawl through the right-of-way fence, and try his luck. He had fed dozens of fellow wanderers, while his money lasted, since he had left the State of Kansas. He had been penniless, now, only since the day before. He realized that he might not be welcome in this hobo camp, for he had long since learned that the so-called tramp fraternity is a figment of the imagination. But the mountain air had made him desperately hungry—his money had fed many of the class down there in camp—it was time for at least a part of his bread cast upon the waters to drift into an eddy and start floating back.