CHAPTER XXIV
Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago
For two days we followed the Amonoosuc (which is a lovely stream), tramping along exquisite winding roads, loitering by sunny ripples or dreaming in the shadow of magnificent elms. It was all very, very beautiful to us of the level lands of Iowa and Dakota. These brooks rushing over their rocky beds, these stately trees and these bleak mountain-tops looming behind us, all glowed with the high splendor, of which we had dreamed.
At noon we called at a farm-house to get something to eat and at night we paid for lodging in a rude tavern beside the way, and so at last reached the railway and the Connecticut River. Here we gained our trunks (which had been sent round by express) and as the country seemed poor and the farms barren, we spent nearly all our money in riding down the railway fifty or sixty miles. At some small town (I forget the name), we again took to the winding roads, looking for a job.
Jobs, it turned out, were exceedingly hard to get. The haying was over, the oats mainly in shock, and the people on the highway suspicious and inhospitable. As we plodded along, our dimes melting away, hunger came, at last, to be a grim reality. We looked less and less like college boys and more and more like tramps, and the householders began to treat us with hostile contempt.
No doubt these farmers, much beset with tramps, had reasonable excuse for their inhospitable ways, but to us it was all bitter and uncalled for. I knew that cities were filled with robbers, brigands, burglars and pirates, but I had held (up to this time), the belief that the country, though rude and barren of luxury was nevertheless a place of plenty where no man need suffer hunger.
Frank, being younger and less hardy than I, became clean disheartened, and upon me fell the responsibility and burden of the campaign. I certainly was to blame for our predicament.
We came finally to the point of calling at every house where any crops lay ungathered, desperately in hope of securing something to do. At last there came a time when we no longer had money for a bed, and were forced to sleep wherever we could find covert. One night we couched on the floor of an old school-house, the next we crawled into an oat-shock and covered ourselves with straw. Let those who have never slept out on the ground through an August night say that it is impossible that one should be cold! During all the early warm part of the night a family of skunks rustled about us, and toward morning we both woke because of the chill.
On the third night we secured the blessed opportunity of nesting in a farmer's granary. All humor had gone out of our expedition. Each day the world grew blacker, and the men of the Connecticut Valley more cruel and relentless. We both came to understand (not to the full, but in a large measure) the bitter rebellion of the tramp. To plod on and on into the dusk, rejected of comfortable folk, to couch at last with pole-cats in a shock of grain is a liberal education in sociology.
On the fourth day we came upon an old farmer who had a few acres of badly tangled oats which he wished gathered and bound. He was a large, loose-jointed, good-natured sloven who looked at me with stinging, penetrating stare, while I explained that we were students on a vacation tramping and in need of money. He seemed not particularly interested till Frank said with tragic bitterness, "If we ever get back to Dakota we'll never even look this way again." This interested the man. He said, "Turn in and cut them oats," and we gladly buckled to our job.