From the conversation that followed, Ben learned that one was a printer, another a carpenter, and the terpsichorean artist an iron and brass moulder by trade and a variety performer by profession. They had several times obtained work during the summer, but the love of a vagabond life was so strong within them, that job after job had been deserted for this roving. He also obtained a glimpse of a fact that became more palpable, the more he associated during his tramp, with this class of American gypsies. It was, that underlying the rambling propensities,—nay the very instigator of those propensities—was the vice of drunkenness. In their quieter moments expressions escaped the trio that demonstrated a hearty contempt for the life they were leading, and a haunting desire to return to the paths of honest industry, and the comforts of a settled home. But however strong this last feeling may have been, it was evidently overruled by the thirst after those hell-born stimulants with which man is allowed to destroy the peace and prosperity of his fellow man. As the printer remarked to Ben:
"I tell you, boss, there's not a ragged coat on a dirty back, or a pair of torn shoes on the bruised and blistered feet of the thousands of tramps that are rambling around the country like wild men, but whiskey is the first cause of it!"
"Then why don't they stop using it?" asked Cleveland.
"Give it up!" he exclaimed. "As well ask them to give up life. So long as the cursed stuff is made, so long will men drink it, and the government that licenses and protects it are responsible for the vagabonds it makes. They're holding conventions, and wanting to know what the devil they're to do with the tramps? Shut up the distilleries and in two years there will be no tramps! Many men can not give up the use of liquor when left to themselves. It is not a habit, it is a cur—."
"Oh cheese your preaching! Here—this killed me father and I'll have revenge on it!" and with a savage laugh the moulder thrust a bottle into the printer's hand.
The printer, who was a man of middle age, looked at the liquor askance a moment, and addressed it as follows:
"Oh, you father of all curses! Murderer, thief, ravisher! Stealer of men's brains! Caterer for the gallows! Feeder of the jails! Soaked in the tears of widows, mothers and orphans! Iconoclast, breaking the images of all we love! Defying God, and defacing his handiwork! Daubing blood on the face of humanity! Smearing crime on the garments of society! Barring the door to Heaven! Paving the way to Hell! Curse you! Curse you! Curse those that make you! Curse those in power that allow you to exist! Fragments of Hell hurled into Nineteenth Century! How I hate you!—How I love you!" and with trembling hand, and glittering eye, he drank deep of the bottle's contents.
The liquor was then passed around, but when it came to Ben he refused it. In that box car and from those homeless vagabonds he had learned a lesson that he promised himself should last him a lifetime. It was "Total abstinence." Absolutely total:—the only safeguard against the disease of drunkenness.
Singular enough his rough companions did not take his refusal to drink with them amiss. The moulder said: "It's the best thing you ever did in your life to let it alone," which the carpenter indorsed, by remarking: "If I'd done it years ago, I'd not be here now."
But the printer said—rather irrelevantly, and quite profanely: