Curiosity caused the travellers to follow the proprietor of Hotel de Log. He led them some distance down the track, and then struck across an open field to a piece of scrub timber, traversed by a brook. A short walk in this patch of woodland revealed the hotel.
A giant sycamore had bowed its aged head to some western tornado, and lay at length upon the ground, parallel with the brook, and about a rod from its brawling waters. Along the brook side of the tree were stretched, upon beds of boughs and leaves a dozen or more men, while two others stirred up the embers of a fire, near them. There were countless empty tin cans—fire scorched and battered—empty bottles of every degree of gentility, from the aristocratic, thick bellied champagne bottle, down to the plebeian blue glass pop, and an iron pot or two, while rags, bones, and scraps of cold victuals, littered the ground; and in the log stuck a piece of broken looking-glass with a fragment of horn comb behind it.
"Gentlemen," said their guide with a courteous wave of the cow bell, "allow me; The Hotel de Log! Make yourselves to home."
CHAPTER XV.
THE HOTEL DE LOG.
Ben and the Evangelist broke out in a roar of laughter, that caused one of the sleepers to awake and murmur a protest, and the proprietor of the "Hotel" to request them to suppress their hilarity lest they disturb some of the sleepers on the ground floor.
So our travellers bottled up their mirth and proceeded to make themselves at home, by taking a sleep that their exhausted natures loudly demanded. Having secured apartments near the fire, they scraped away such articles as encumbered the ground, and gathering together some leaves and branches for beds, were soon lost in a sound slumber.
The proprietor of the Hotel de Log was quite a character. He was a professional tramp and journeyman painter, who, being of a sociable turn of mind, had found congenial pastime in establishing and maintaining this popular resort. Originally he had camped on the spot alone, lame with a foot sore from the effects of travel. Passing tramps had been attracted to his camp-fire, and in their stories of the foot path and tales of adventures he had found the true pleasure that his nature craved. From tramp to tramp, along the line of track, the word had passed where good camping ground was to be found, and the Hotel de Log never lacked guests. Hotel keeping became a mania with the painter-tramp. He secured an old cow bell and regularly visited all freight trains—those being the vehicles generally patronized by his customers—and invited members of the fraternity who were intending to stop off down to his mansion on the sunny side of the grey sycamore. He was a harmless, good-natured little fellow, and liked by the respectable community residing in the vicinity; for, to an extent, he controlled the disorderly vagabond element that gathered about him. The citizens gave him such scraps of food as they could spare, and his boarders went out on "cadjing" pilgrimages, and returned well ladened. He was generous to a fault, and had a kind, gentle hand for the wounded and afflicted among his guests. The one great luxury of his life, was the occasional indulgence in a quiet, solemn drunk, during which he would sit nodding by the brook, and holding pleasant converse with its laughing waters.
Who knows but the little man was filling the very spot the Creator had moulded him for. If nothing is made in vain, why should this little painter-tramp have been?
Heaven only knows where he now is. But it is safe to venture the suggestion that if his cow bell is rusting in the grass grown court yard of his hotel, and the thrush sings undisturbed upon its walls of sycamore, there are other bells in distant lands that will welcome the poor little painter to a mansion paved with gold and glittering with precious stones. A mansion like his quaint Hotel de Log—not made by human hands.