“Nothing will ever be good for me, aunty. I’m gone. This sweet civilization of ours has got me. The first reform school I went to reformed me, all right—formed me into a crook. I used to show signs of growing up to be fair to middling intelligent, once. But now—nothing to it. You people, though you’re twice as old as I am, you’re twice as young. You got a chance. Look here, Uncle Appleby, why don’t you go out for being one of these famous old pedestrians that get their mugs in the papers? Will you do what I tell you to, if I train you? I’ve trained quite some pugs before—before I quit.”
Mother acerbically declined to learn the art of physical culture. “Me at my time of life learning to do monkey-shines and bending and flapping my arms like a chicken with its head cut off.” But Father enthusiastically and immediately started in to become the rival of the gentlemen in jerseys who wear rubber heels in the advertisements and spend their old ages in vigorously walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, merely in order to walk back again.
While his fellow-hoboes about the fire jeered, Father bent over forty times, and raised himself on his toes sixty, and solemnly took breathing-exercises.
Next day he slowly trotted ninety times about the clearing, his chin up and his chest out, while Crook McKusick, excited at being a trainer again, snapped orders at him and talked about form.... A ludicrous figure, a little old man, his white locks flapping under a mushy cap as he galloped earnestly through the light snow. But his cheeks were one red glow, his eyes were bright, and in his laugh, when he finished, was infinite hope.
If it had been Mother who had first taken charge of the camp and converted it to respectability and digestible food, it was Father who really ran it, for he was the only person who could understand her and Crook McKusick and the sloppy Kid all at once.
Crook McKusick had long cultivated a careful habit of getting drunk once a week. But two weeks after the coming of the Applebys he began to omit his sprees, because Mother needed him to help her engineer variations of the perpetual mulligan, and Father needed him for his regular training.
To the training Crook added a course in psychology. As a hobo he was learned in that science. The little clerk, the comfortable banker, the writer of love-stories—such dull plodders have their habits all set out for them. But the hobo, who has to ride the rods amid flying gravel to-day, and has to coax food out of a nice old lady to-morrow, must have an expert working knowledge of psychology if he is to climb in his arduous profession.
Father and Mother had started out from New York on a desperate flight, with no aspirations beyond the hope that they might be able to make a living. It was the hobo, Crook McKusick, who taught Father that there was no reason why, with his outdoor life and his broadened experience, he should not be a leader among men wherever he went; be an Edward Pilkings and a Miss Mitchin, yea, even a Mrs. Lulu Hartwig, instead of a meek, obedient, little Seth Appleby. It was Crook who, out of his own experience in doing the unusual, taught Father that it was just as easy to be unusual, to live a life excitedly free, as to be a shop-bound clerk. Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at a time, keeping at it, forming the habit.... So, an outcast among outcasts, grubbily bunked in a camp of hoboes, talking to a filthy lean man with an evil hooked nose, Seth Appleby began to think for himself, to the end that he should be one of the class that rules and is unafraid.
The amiable boarders at Hoboes’ Home didn’t at all mind Mother’s darning their socks. They didn’t much mind having her order them to wash their faces at a hole through the ice in the near-by creek before coming to dinner. But it took her many days to get them used to going off to work for money and supplies. Yet every day half the camp grumblingly disappeared to shuck corn, mend fences, repair machinery, and they came back with flour, potatoes, meat, coffee, torn magazines, and shirts. Father regularly went out to work with them, and was the first to bring water, to cut wood. They all took a pride in the camp. They kept the bunk-house scrubbed, and inordinately admired the new mattresses, stuffed with fresh straw and covered with new calico, which Mother made for them. In the evenings the group about the camp-fire was not so very different from any other happy family—except that there was an unusually large proportion of bright eyes and tanned faces.
But when spring cleared the snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead—vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about the fire—there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in starting off for new adventures.