I SAT up in the smoking-car all night, straight as a cob, making myself as small as I could on one of the side seats nearest the door. I was not used to riding on a railroad train. At every stop, when men came in and looked at me in passing, my heart jumped. Things had been happening pretty fast in my case. In the upheaval of my feelings, I was not exactly sure just what special crime I had committed. I merely knew that I felt like a combination of coward, renegade, and malefactor.
The idea which stuck most painfully in my crop was the certain knowledge of what everybody in Levant would be saying—“He had to skip the town!”
That’s a mighty mean tag to be tied to a chap when it’s tied on by a country community; it never comes off. Even if he makes good in fine shape some old blatherskite is always ready to shift his chaw and drool, “Maybe he’s all right now—but ye have to remember that he had to skip the town!”
I had run away!
However, Ase Jepson let drop a remark once which sounded pretty good to me: “I’d never run from a bear-fight, because if you lick the bear there’s the pelt, the steak, the oil, and the reppytation. But who in blazes ever got any sensible satisfaction out of sticking to the job and licking a nestful of hornets?”
I got a little satisfaction out of thinking that I had run away from hornets, even if they would be sure to call me coward behind my back.
But what I knew of the world outside my home town could have been put in the eye of a mosquito without making the insect blink. I felt as helpless as a wooden shingle latching a furnace door in tophet. I had never seen Jodrey Vose. Either I had dreamed it or had heard that he was considered a pretty hard ticket in his early days. As a diver, a man who passed much of his time under water in the mysteries of the sea, he seemed to me like something unreal. I studied the superscription on the letter and felt as if I were carrying a line of introduction to a bullfrog.
And so I went bumping on toward somewhere, my thoughts heavy and my possessions mighty light; I hadn’t even a clean handkerchief.
If I had not so many bigger matters to hurry on to in this tale, I’d like to describe how I was all of two days locating the Trident Wrecking Company and Jodrey Vose, after I arrived in the city. The folks in Levant always seemed to think I was a cheeky youngster, and I guess I was, to a certain extent. I had plenty of temper and when I wanted a thing I always had to go and get it—it wasn’t handed to me. But in that big city I was more meeching than a scared pup in a boiler-factory.
I had no idea how large a real city was, anyway. Furthermore, all of a sudden, I found myself becoming very crafty, according to my own reckoning. I had decided that I was a fugitive from justice and that every policeman was on the watch for me. Therefore I avoided policemen, turning comers whenever I saw brass buttons. As I looked on everybody else in the hurrying multitude as a sharper, on the hunt for country picking, that left me without anybody to question. I had my nose in the air and must have sniffed the water-front after a time. At any rate, I found myself down there, dodging drays, tramping dirty alleys and as completely lost as a bug in a brush-pile.