That honest workman, “Struck Dumb,” disappeared one afternoon, telling Crook that he heard of much building at Duluth.
Crook laughed when Mother admired Mr. Struck Dumb’s yearning for creative toil. “That guy,” Crook declared, “is an honest workman except that he ain’t honest and he won’t work. He’ll last about two days in Duluth, and then he’ll pike for Alberta or San Diego or some place. He’s got restless feet, same like me.”
The K. C. Kid and Reddy jigged and shouted songs all one evening, and were off for the north. At last no one but Father and Mother and Crook was left. And they, too, were star-eyed with expectation of new roads, new hills. They sat solemnly by the fire on their last evening. Mother was magnificent in a new cloak, to buy which Father had secretly been saving pennies out of the dimes that he had earned by working about the country.
Usually Crook McKusick was gravely cynical when he listened to Father’s cataract of excited plans, but he seemed wistful to-night, and he nodded his head as though, for once, he really did believe that Father and Mother would find some friendly village that would take them in.
Father was telling a story so ardently that he almost made himself believe it: Some day, Mother and he would be crawling along the road and discover a great estate. The owner, a whimsical man, a lonely and eccentric bachelor of the type that always brightens English novels, would invite them in, make Father his steward and Mother his lady housekeeper. There would be a mystery in the house—a walled-off room, a sound of voices at night in dark corridors where no voices could possibly be, a hidden tragedy, and at last Father and Mother would lift the burden from the place, and end their days in the rose-covered dower-house.... Not that Father was sure just what a dower-house was, but he was quite definite and positive about the rose-covering.
“How you run on,” Mother yawned.
“Aw, let him,” Crook cried, with sudden fierceness. “My Gawd! you two almost make me believe that there is such a thing as faith left in this dirty old world, that’s always seemed to me just the back of an eternal saloon. Maybe—maybe I’ll find my ambition again.... Well—g’ night.”
When with their pack and their outlooking smiles the Applebys prepared to start, next day, and turned to say good-by to Crook, he started, cried, “I will!” and added, “I’m coming with you, for a while!”
For two days Crook McKusick tramped with them, suiting his lean activity, his sardonic impatience, to their leisurely slowness. He called to the blackbirds, he found pasque-flowers for them, and in the sun-baked hollows between hillocks coaxed them to lie and dream.