The tramp paused for a minute in his semi-lazy, semi-animated discourse, and Tom, feeling that some remark was expected from him, said feebly, “You’re quite a moralizer.”
The tramp did not hear him. “I tell you,” he said, extending a dirty hand, “we’re the biggest, grandest, foolishest people on earth. We’re the nation of the future. We’ll govern the earth, and at the same time fail in governing ourselves. Look at the lynchings we have. The United States has the highest murder rate of any civilized country in the world. The average American will be a decent, moral, pay-his-bills sort of man, and yet he’ll have more tolerance for personal violence than a Turk has.”
“You’re a queer man,” said Bonny, musingly.
“We’ve got to have more law and order,” pursued the tramp. “The mothers have got to make their little ones eat their mush, or porridge, as they say over the line in Canada—not fling it out the window to the dogs. I tell you that’s where it begins, just where every good and bad thing begins—in the cradle. The average mother has too much respect for the squallings of her Young America. Let her spank him once in awhile, and keep him out of sight of the eagle.”
“Do you suppose,” said Bonny, solemnly, “that if you had been well spanked you would not be lying here?”
“Suppose,” repeated the tramp, leaning back, “I don’t suppose anything about it. I know it. If my mother and father had made me mind them, and kept me in nights, and trained me into decent, self-respecting manhood, I’d be standing beside you to-night, young sirs, beside you—beyond you—for I guess from your bearing you are only young men of average ability, and I tell you I was a power, when I’d study and let the drink alone.”
“You must have had a strange mother,” remarked Bonny.
The tramp suddenly raised himself again, and his sunburnt face grew redder. “For the love of Heaven,” he said, extending one ragged arm, “don’t say a word against her. The thought of her is the only thing that moves me. She loved me, and, unclean, characterless wretch that I am, she would love me yet if she were still alive.”
The man’s head sank on his arm, but not quickly enough. Tom and Bonny had both seen glistening in his eyes, not the one jewel they were jestingly in search of, but two priceless jewels that were not pearls, but diamonds.
“Come on, Bonny,” said Tom, roughly, as he drew him from the shed.