Down the boardwalk, to meet us, hobbled a strange figure. Supporting a great copper bell, which he swung with a short stroke of his stumpy right arm, was a stodgy man dressed in a tight, faded, sailor’s suit, a straw hat on his bald head, fringed with red hair, and a florid face that at present was all open mouth and teeth and tongue. He was the town crier.
In front of the deserted House of the Five Pines he stopped and, holding a printed dodger high in the air, read off it, in stentorian tones, “Hi Yi, Gu Jay, Be Boom Bee Boy!”
“Whatever in the world is he trying to say?” I gasped.
“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Nobody ever knows. You can’t understand him.”
“But what does he do that for?”
“Why,” smiled Ruth, “that’s the way we get the news around. If there is a meeting in the town hall, you give the town crier a dollar, and he goes up and down the boardwalk and rings his bell.”
“But if no one can understand him?”
“Oh, they ask each other afterward. The man who sends the crier out always knows. He tells some one, who tells the next, so that often the news travels faster than the crier does and you know what it is beforehand.”
“It’s well you do!”
“Yes,” Ruth agreed, “because for the most part he gives out the notices in front of a vacant lot. And if you ask him to repeat, he is furious with you. I’ll show you. O Dave,” she called after him, “what is the news?”