Mormon country, decked
the Overland Express, beaten the blind baggage on the Millionaires'
Flier? Hey?"

The sullen vagrant blinked stupidly.

"Or have you made the prairie run on the truss of a Wagner freight, or
thrown a stone at the Fox Train crew, or beaten the face off the Katy
Shack when he tried to pitch you off a gondola-car?"

"I don't know what you're chewing about," sneered the fat man.

"Probably not, for you are not a true man of the road. You disgrace the
name of nomad, you sully an ancient profession. I'll venture to say you
don't know who Ishmael was."

"Who said I did?"

"Not I, because I'm not a flatterer. I am going to follow the example of
the man who cast pearls before swine--I'm going to cast you a pearl from
one of my own poems. You may listen. It will pass your ears, that's all.
You cannot contaminate it by taking it in, so I repeat it for my own
entertainment, to refresh my memory:

"Of the morrow we take no heed, no care infests the day;
Some hand-out gump and a train to jump, a grip on the rods, and
away!
To the game of grab for gold we give no thought or care.
We own with you the arch of blue--our share of God's fresh air.
One coin to clear the law, a section of rubber hose.
To soften the chafe of a freight-car's truss, our portion of
cast-off clothes,
And the big wide world is ours--a title made good by right--
By mankind's deed to the nomad breed with the taint of the
Ishmaelite.
Some from the wastes of the sage-brush, some from the orange land,
Some from God's own country, dusty and tattered and tanned.
Why are we? It's idle to tell you--you'd never understand.
To and fro
We come and go.
Old Father Ishmael's band."

He leaned back and laughed in the tramp's puzzled face.

"Well, what's the answer?" scoffed Boston Fat.

The other man talked on, humor in his eyes, plainly enjoying this verbal
skylarking.

"I'm afraid I cannot waste time and breath on you in an attempt to
answer the riddle of the ages, to explain the wanderlust that sent forth
the tribes from the Aryan bowl of the birth of the races, my
corpulent bean-pot. Your blank eyes and your flattened skull suggest a
discouraging incapacity for information."

"I don't know what you're gabbing abut. But there's one thing I do know.
I'll tip 'em off at the next insane-asylum I come to that I met you
headed north." The tramp gathered t