"Good enough," said he, stretching himself, and rubbing his stiffened limbs; "good enough. Three days gone and I have made over four hundred and fifty miles. If I can keep up this rate of travel I will win my wager and have time to spare."
As he walked toward the heart of the city, he met several knights of the foot-path who had rolled out of lumber yards and from about the furnaces of iron mills. These informed him that Pittsburg was considered an excellent tramp town by the fraternity. Indeed the generous citizens had established a home for them on Duquesne Way, where they were both lodged and fed in gorgeous style. But, he was told, breakfast would be over before he could reach the "home," and as the tramps did not dine until six P.M., and guests were not allowed to remain in the salon during the day time, our traveller reflected that it would do him no good to visit the institution until hospitalities opened. As he still felt too weak for the road, he resolved to spend the day in fasting and viewing the iron industries for which the city is famous. He strolled around among these and chatting with the hands was told that the good town's glory was departing from out its hands. Years ago, before it became a great iron mart, the city had been the most extensive shipping point in the then "Great West." Steamboats crowded one another at its levees, and the manufacturers of the east were continually departing down the Ohio, for the southern and western countries, in vast quantities. Then came the era of rail roads and the rapid settlement of the far west, and Fort Duquesne, as a great shipping point, ceased to exist. But when this industry was wrested from it, the brave old town adopted another. The transportation center of vast coal fields and iron deposits, she soon became a manufacturing hive, unequalled on the continent, and for many years upheld the reputation of the Birmingham of America.
But there came a change.
Capital ripped open the bowels of Mother Earth, and stole the ores with which the good dame was pregnant, in other and newer localities, far away. Iron works shot up their tall chimnies all over the west; at Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, Joliet, Indianapolis, Terra Haute, St. Louis and elsewhere. As a consequence the good town found its second sceptre taken away, and the grip it had held upon the Great West, so long and well, Ben found had dwindled down to its coal fleets, which, with the vast natural resources of Pittsburg's water-ways, it is never likely to be deprived of. All this he heard, and much more. He learned that the city had a magnificent debt—that was a thing of beauty and apparently a joy forever. No one appeared to know just how much it was, but all agreed that it was ahead, per capita, of any other city in the Union—and this was a source of much honest pride. For though the city's commerce and manufactures might be stolen from it by western upstarts, they could not take its debt.
Ben discovered more real courtesy and kindness toward poverty in Pittsburg, than in any other town he visited during his tramp. The inhabitants were sociable, generous and unpretending.
While our friend was standing in the doorway of a mill, observing the men draw out the glowing, cherry-red bars from the rolls, and listening to the "bloom" snap and crackle, like a roll of musketry, in the jaws of the squeezer, he heard a little exclamation in a female voice. It was simply "Oh, my!" but it sent a thrill through every nerve in his body, for it was the voice of her he nightly met in his dreams. He dared not look up, but stood there, feeling her presence, and with the music of her voice ringing in his ears, waiting to hear her speak again.
But the "Oh, my!" was not repeated, as she of the grey, glorious eyes had only made the exclamation while passing in company with an elderly gentleman, and observing the glowing "bloom" pass into the squeezer. When Ben looked up, they were no where to be seen.
"Well," he muttered, "what is to be, will be. Tommy said they were going to St. Louis, and I may see her there. In my present condition it would do me but little good to meet her, anyway, I presume. I'm a tramp! Actually and professionally, a tramp, and I begin to look and feel like one. Should I lose my wager, I may adopt the business permanently," and he laughed not altogether well pleased with himself.
CHAPTER XI.
A MYSTERY.