From the Housetops

by George Barr McCutcheon

Now, it should be remembered that Braden Thorpe had very little means of his own, a small income from his mother's estate being all that he possessed. He had been dependent upon his grandfather up to the day he died. Years had been spent in preparing him for the personal achievements that were to make him famous and rich by his own hand. Splendid ability and unquestioned earning power were the result of Templeton Thorpe's faith in the last of his race. But nothing was to come of it. His ability remained but his earning power was gone. He was like a splendid engine from which the motive power has been shut off.

For weeks after leaving New York he had seen the world blackly through eyes that grasped no perspective. But he was young, he was made of the flesh that fights, and the spirit that will not down. He looked up from the black view that had held his attention so long, and smiled. It was not a gay smile but one in which there was defiant humour. After all, why shouldn't he smile? These villagers smiled cheerfully, and what had they in their narrow lives to cause them to see the world brightly? He was no worse off than they. If they could be content to live outside the world, why shouldn't he be as they? He was big and strong and young. The fellows who went out to sea in the fishing boats were no stronger, no better than he. He could do the things that they were doing, and they sang while they went to and from their work.

It was the reviving spirit in him that opened his eyes to the lowly joys surrounding him. He found himself thinking with surprising interest that he could do what these men were doing and do it well, and after all what more can be expected of a man than that he should do some one thing well? He did not realise at the time that this small, mean ambition to surpass these bold fishermen was nothing less than the resurrection of dead hopes.

And so, when Simmy Dodge walked in upon him one day, expecting to find a beaten, discouraged skulker, he was confronted by a sun-browned, bare-armed, bright-eyed warrior whose smile was that of the man who never laughs,—the grim smile of him who thinks.

The lines in his face had deepened under the influence of sun and wind; there was a new, almost unnatural ruggedness about the man Simmy had seen less than two months before. The cheeks had the appearance of being sunken and there was an even firmer look to the strong chin and jaws than in the so recent past. Simmy looked at this new, hardy face and wondered whether two months in the rough world would do as much in proportion for his own self-despised countenance.

Thorpe had been up since five o'clock in the morning. For two weeks he had started off every morning at that hour with his landlord for the timberlands above the town, where they spent the day hewing out the sills and beams for a new boat-house. Unskilled at such labor, his duties were not those of the practised workman, but rather those of the "handy man" upon whom falls the most arduous tasks as a rule. Thorpe's sinews were strained to the utmost in handling the long, unwieldy trunks of the fallen trees; his hands were blistered and his legs bruised, but the splendid muscles were no longer sore, nor was he so fatigued at day's-end that he could have "dropped in his tracks" right joyfully,—as he had felt like doing in the first week of his toiling.

"Well, I'll be jiggered," said Simmy, still holding Thorpe's hand as he backed away from him the better to take in this new and strange creature in overalls. Thorpe and his grizzled host had just come down from the woods with a load of pine logs, and had found the trim, immaculate little New Yorker waiting for them at the breakwater, directed thither by the housewife in the winding lane that was called High Street. "By the way, is your name Thorpe?" he added quizzically.

"Yep," said the graduate of three great universities, gripping the little man's hand a trifle harder. "All that is left of me is named Thorpe, Simmy."

"Have you—hired out as a—Good Lord, Brady, you're not as hard up as all that, are you?" Simmy's face was bleak with concern.

"I'm doing it for the fun of the thing," said Thorpe. "Next week I'm going out with the boats. I say, Simmy, have you a cigarette about your person? I haven't had a—"