Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.
I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my Cæsar.
Once or twice, sheriffs who were bent on arresting me because I had no visible means of support, let me go, because it awed them to find a tramp reading Shakespeare....
"It's a shame, a clever lad like you bein' a bum!"
Tramps, though anti-social in the larger aspects of society (as, for that matter, all special classes are, from millionaires down—or up), are more than usually companionable among themselves. I never lived and moved with a better-hearted group of people.
By "jungle" camp-fires—("the jungles," any tramp rendezvous located just outside the city limits, to be beyond police jurisdiction), in jails, on freights ... I found a feeling of sincere companionship ... a companionship that without ostentation and as a matter of course, shared the last cent the last meal ... when every cent was the last cent, every meal the last meal ... the rest depending on luck and Providence....
Tramps often travel in pairs. I picked up a "buddy" ... a short, thick-set man of young middle age, of Scandinavian descent ... so blond that his eyebrows were white in contrast with his face, which was ruddy with work in the sun. He, like me, was a "gaycat" or tramp who is not above occasional work (as the word meant then—now it means a cheap, no-account grafter). He had recently been working picking oranges ... previous to that, he had been employed in a Washington lumber camp.