There are all kinds of traveling men. This is not generally understood, but it is a fact. The impression has, somehow, obtained that a traveling man or "Drummer," or whatever we should call Dickens' "Bagman" in the western Hemisphere, is a person who is careless of the conventionalities, who relies upon a certain hardihood in thrusting himself anywhere into the place of immediate consequence or convenience. Never was a greater mistake in popular opinion. There are blatant commercial travelers, of course. There will be fools in any part of the world's work. It is a matter of fact, though, that the man whose business it is to influence mentally other men and women must, necessarily, have tact and understanding and that he must be often more quick of conception and more readily responsive to the proper demand of his fellow-creatures than one less extremely educated in certain ways of the vagrant world.
The man called upon was one of the greater type. He laughingly accepted the situation:
"Yes," he said, "I'll tell you a story, but it is so foolish that I can hardly expect you to believe it. It is merely the story of one man I knew and of how he got his wife. He did not get her in quite the ordinary way. I'll tell you all I know about him, and I've known him almost from boyhood. I'll tell you everything as it was."
EVAN CUMMINGS' COURTSHIP
I think Evan Cummings had the most remarkable personality of any traveling man I ever met, a personality which indicated itself especially in the closing incident of his love affair. He was a good-looking fellow, of Scotch descent, with all the tenacity of purpose of his race. He was a good man to meet upon the train. When we were gathered in the smoking compartment Evan was as full of spirits as the rest, but I noticed that, while taking an active part in the conversation, he never told any of the somewhat risque stories that the air of the smoking compartment too often breeds. Instead, he would tell uncanny tales of Scotland in the old days, tales of wizards and warlocks, and of the strange things to be seen at night on ancient battle-fields, and we always listened to him with interest. He was mightily fixed in his views and many a good-natured dispute we had with him over this or that. Eh, but he was stubborn!
Evan was a good man of business, though, and had a host of friends. Among these was the conductor of a train on which he often traveled and the friendship developed into such a degree of intimacy that one day the conductor, Luke Johnson, invited him out to dinner with him. Evan, having no particular business on hand that evening, accepted the invitation.
Johnson's house was in the suburbs, decidedly. It was on the very picket line of the army of houses of the ever-marching city, out on the prairie at least a couple of blocks distant from any other house. A plank sidewalk extended to it from the more settled district near and, with its barns and sheds and vine-covered front, it did not have a lonesome look. Inside Evan found the house quite as prepossessing as its exterior and he found something else there more prepossessing still.
Johnson's family consisted of himself, his wife, his child, little Gabriel, about four years old, and his sister-in-law, a Miss Salome Hinman. Evan found Mrs. Johnson a pleasant sort of a woman and found in Miss Hinman his undeniable affinity. Stolid as he usually was in the presence of femininity, he felt, in the very marrow of his bones, that he was a lost man. That he succumbed so quickly was not altogether to be wondered at. Miss Hinman was pretty, was very slender—what a school-girl writer would call willowy or lissom or, possibly, svelte—and was wildly devoted to her little nephew, of whom she had the chief care.
Well, Evan didn't waste any time. He contrived it so that he was in the city often and, as often, was at Johnson's house, making vigorous love to Miss Salome. Finally, he accepted a good city position with his firm and abandoned the road, just for the sake of being near his sweetheart, though he liked the road better. All would have gone well now, but for the young lady. He knew she cared for him, for she had admitted it, but she was a bit of a coquette and couldn't resist the temptation of playing a fish so firmly hooked. Urge as Evan might, he could not persuade her to fix a date for their marriage. She would not absolutely deny him, but she was elusive. He became desperate. Something must be done. It was.
One day just as Evan, brooding as he walked, neared the home of his sweetheart to renew his useless pleading, he noticed little Gabriel playing in the yard with a toy balloon the string of which was tied to a button-hole of his jacket and which tugged strenuously away at him. Evan sat down upon the horse-block in front of the house, watching the boy dreamily, and trying to devise a plan to bring Miss Salome to terms, when, all at once, his planning ceased as suddenly as the stopping of a clock. The boy and the balloon had given him an awful inspiration! He returned to town.