They edged around the corner of the station and gingerly stepped off into an ocean of slush, deaf to the yells of the bus-driver who hopefully represented that he would take them practically anywhere in the world for fifty cents.
They were an odd couple. Father had no need of an overcoat, now. He was wearing three shirts, two waistcoats, two pairs of trousers, and three pairs of socks, to say nothing of certain pages of an evening newspaper cunningly distributed through his garments, crackly but warm. He waddled chubbily and somewhat stiffly, but he outfaced the winter wind as he had not done for many weeks. In this outfit he could never have gone the rounds of offices looking for work, but in the open he had the appearance of a hardy woodsman—or at least the father of a woodsman. He wore defiantly the romantic wreck of that plaid cap which he had bought for Cape Cod, which his daughter had sequestered at Saserkopee, and which he had stolen back from her. Also he had a secret joy in the fact that his shirt—that is, his outer and most visible shirt—was a coarse garment of blue flannel, a very virile and knightly tabard with large white buttons, which Mother had never let him wear in public. It was such a noble habiliment as a fireman might have worn, or a longshoreman, or Dan’l Boone.
Mother was almost equally bulky, with an unassayed number of garments, but over them all she wore a still respectable Raglan town coat.
They both carried bundles, and in Father’s right hand was a red pasteboard case which protected the mouth-organ. This, as they modestly trotted through the village, he tried to conceal in the palm of his hand, and he glared at a totally innocent passer-by whom he suspected of wanting to hear the mouth-organ.
Mother didn’t know of his mental struggles. She was thinking more about her feet. She looked up with mild astonishment when, as they left the town by the highroad southward, Father burst out, “I’ll play if I want to, but I can’t stand the gawping gumps here.”
“Why, Father!” she said, trustingly.
The noontime sun came out. To conceal from his stomach the fact that it was hungry, Father grew boyishly enthusiastic about going Southward. “Gee!” he burbled, “we’ll hit down toward Florida—palms and alligators and—and everything—Land of Flowers! What’s this hotel?—the Royal Points de Anna? Play the mouth-organ there. Make a hit. Then we’ll strike New Orleans and jump to San Francisco.... Gee! it’s a long way between houses along here!”
They approached a farm-yard. Father was tremendously urging himself to play the mouth-organ there, to skip and be nimble, and gain a minstrel’s meed. Meaning lunch.
Frowning with intentness, he stopped before the house. Mother meekly halted beside him. She had not lost quite all of the training in self-dependence she had got from a business life, these last weeks, but she looked to him for leadership in the new existence.
Father swung his shapeless pack from his shoulders, set it down on the ground, reluctantly drew his mouth-organ from its case. He became aware that a large, astonished woman was staring from the kitchen window. He stared back. The mouth-organ was left suspended in air. Hastily he stuck it in his pocket and, as though hypnotized, moved toward the kitchen door. He had to give the woman some explanation for encamping in her yard.... Why! She might have thought that he had intended to make a fool of himself by playing the mouth-organ there!