"But," exclaimed Wasson, interrupting Smythe, "if I am not very much mistaken, here comes a gentleman who can!" And as the lawn gate swung to its place, with a clang of the latch, there appeared walking up the gravelled walk, a being, whose every square inch of superficial surface indicated a bona fide, unadulterated specimen of the genus vagabond.
A frock coat,—guiltless of buttons, (save the two in the rear, where they were of no earthly use)—with half a frock gone, and the remainder of the garment mottled like unto the celebrated garment that got Joseph in a hole, was fastened at the neck with a glittering horse-shoe nail. A pair of pants, fantastically fringed with ragged ends about their extremities, higher up bore the brands of many a camp-fire. Their original color had long since struck to the over-powering allied forces of wind and weather, mud and grease. In a landscape they might have looked a subdued maroon, etched with lampblack. Below the fantastic fringe work appeared a pair of feet encased in a boot and a shoe. The shoe had evidently seen better days, and seemed to shrink with humiliated pride from the forced companionship of the boot, which was a plebeian of the Stogie family. The shoe was long, narrow and pointed. The boot was coarse, thick and stubby. The toe of the boot had an air-hole in it, extending clean across the upper. The shoe was intact, and had a brass buckle the size of a door plate, which give it an air of fallen greatness. But the boot was in proud possession of a heel, while the shoe had none, equalizing matters. In glaring contrast to this tatterdemalion attire, the hat, that completed the picture, was a new straw affair, and looked like a bright, fresh, shingle roof, clapped on a very dilapidated, old building. The face beneath the hat was round and plump, very dirty, quite keen, frescoed with tobacco-juice and embossed with a short, stumpy beard. As the figure drew nigh the group on the lawn, boot, shoe, pants, coat and face seemed to blend into an animated object, while the bran new hat kept calling out, like a side-show man on a fair ground, "Here we are! Now you have us! An epitome of Hard Times! A parody on financial acumen! A caricature on the fat of the land! What aint rags is dirt, and what aint dirt is bugs! We're the remnant of other days! We're the breaking-up-of-a-hard-winter! We're a pariah, a scavenger, an outcast! That's what we are, and we want you to know it. Here's your prodigal for you! Kill your fatted calf of kitchen fag-ends and serve up the banquet on the back door step. Bring out the purple and fine linen of your ragbags. Here's your prodigal, and he's come back hungry!"
But though the hat said this, as plain as a hat could, the figure beneath the hat spoke quite differently. Having, with a faltering step and a pronounced limp in the shoe foot, approached the four gentlemen who were enjoying their after dinner cigars on the lawn, the figure with a keen, swift glance took an inventory of each person before him, and then pulling off the new hat—to the great joy of a lot of hair that appeared relieved from the constraints of good society—it said, in a mumbling voice:
"Gentlemen, this is the saddest moment of my life. I am no professional beggar, but the victim of misfortunes, and reduced from comfort to my present state of want by calamities over which I had no control. If you could give me some assistance it would be a great blessing to me, and a noble act for you; for I have not had a bite to eat for four days, and my clothes would drop off of me with starvation if they were not falling off from raggedness."
"Four days!" exclaimed all.
"Four days," solemnly reasserted the figure.
"And you still live!" said Hough.
"I still live," returned the figure, as solemnly as before, but with a shrewd, covert little glance at Hough accompanying the answer.
Wasson noticed the glance, and laughed. Cleveland looked up and the prodigal greeted him with a benignant smile. Smythe withdrew his hands from their repose in his pockets, and, with open mouth, gazed first at the patrician shoe, then at the plebeian boot, then at the subdued, maroon colored, landscape pants, then at the skirtless coat, and at last fastened his attention on the fascination of the brilliant, galvanized-iron, horse-shoe nail.
"Are—are you a—Tramp?"