A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

I was charmed with my new acquaintances. There was no embarrassment in being with them, and nothing of restraint or gloom in their home. After supper I pumped the water for the stock, and helped with the milking. When the chores were done, I asked leave to go to bed. A heavy quilt and pillow were given to me, and, spreading them upon the hay, I slept the sleep of a child.

The cows had been milked in the morning and were about to be driven to pasture, when there arose a difficulty in separating from its mother a calf that was to be weaned. The calf had to be penned in the shed, while the old cow went afield with the others. To imprison it, however, proved no easy undertaking. With the agility of a half-back, it dodged us all over the cow-yard, encouraged by the calls of its mother, from the lane, and it evaded the shed-door with an obstinacy that was responsible for adding materially to the content of the old man’s next confession.

For some time his wife stood by, her bare feet in the grass, her arms akimbo, and her gray hair waving in the morning breeze, as, with unfeigned scorn, she watched our baffled manœuvres. She could not endure it long.

“I’ll catch the beast,” she shouted presently in richest brogue; and, true to her word, by a simple strategy, she surprised the little brute and had it by a hind leg before it suspected her nearness.

But capture was no weak surrender on the part of the calf. For its dear life it kicked, and the picture of the hardy old woman, shaken in every muscle under the desperate lunges of the calf, as, clinging with both hands to its leg, she called to us with lusty expletives, to help her before she was “killed entirely,” is one that lingers gleefully in memory. The old man winked at me his infinite appreciation of the scene, and between us we relieved his panting wife and soon housed the calf.

When my work was done, and I had said good-by to the family, whose hospitality I had so much enjoyed, I set out for Gowrie, which was twenty odd miles away. At Tara I found that, to avoid a long détour, I must take to the railway as far, at least, as Moorland, the next station on the line. Walking the track was sometimes a necessity, but always an unwelcome one. It is weary work to plod on and on, over an unwavering route, where an occasional passing train mocks one’s slow advance, and where, for miles the only touch of human nature is in a shanty of a section-boss, with ragged children playing about it, and a haggard woman plying her endless task, while a mongrel or two barks after one, far down the line.

At Moorland I resumed the highway, and held to it with uneventful march, until, within a mile or two of Gowrie, two men in a market-wagon overtook me and offered me a lift into the village.

To me the notable event of the day was a drive of several miles with a farmer, in the afternoon. He had been to the freight station in Gowrie, to get there a reaper, which had been ordered out from Chicago. The machine, in all the splendor of fresh paint, lay in the body of the wagon, while he sat alone on the high seat in front.

When, at his invitation, I climbed up beside him, I was delighted with the first impression of the man. In the prime of life and of very compact figure, his small dark eyes, that were the brighter for contrast with a swarthy complexion, moved with an alertness that denoted energy and force. Individuality was stamped upon him and showed itself in the trick of the eye, and in every tone of his voice.

He asked me where I was going, and said that he could take me five miles over the road toward Jefferson, “unless,” he added, “you’ll stop at my farm and work for me.”