th that there piece of poetry you
see; pushes into stores and offices and hands the piece out, and like as
not they crowd a dime or two bits onto him and send him along. That's
what I done. I was waiting in Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale's office for a
little painless dentistry, and I took Wilfred's poem and passed him a
two-bit piece, and Doc Martingale does the same, and Wilfred blew on to
the next office. A dashing and romantic figure he was, though kind of
fat and pasty for a man that was walking from coast to coast, but a
smooth talker with beautiful features and about nine hundred dollars'
worth of hair and a soft hat and one of these flowing neckties. Red it
was.

"So I looked over his piece of poetry--about the open road for his
untamed spirit and him being stifled in the cramped haunts of men--and
of course I get his number. All right about the urge of the wild to her
wayward child, but here he was spending a lot of time in the cramped
haunts of men taking their small change away from 'em and not seeming to
stifle one bit.

"Ain't this new style of tramp funny? Now instead of coming round to the
back door and asking for a hand-out like any self-respecting tramp had
ought to, they march up to the front door, and they're somebody with two
or three names that's walking round the world on a wager they made with
one of the Vanderbilt boys or John D. Rockefeller. They've walked
thirty-eight hundred miles already and got the papers to prove it--a
letter from the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the mayor of
Davenport, Iowa, a picture post card of themselves on the courthouse
steps at Denver, and they've bet forty thousand dollars they could start
out without a cent and come back in twenty-two months with money in
their pocket--and ain't it a good joke?--with everybody along the way
entering into the spirit of it and passing them quarters and such, and
thank you very much for your two bits for the picture post card--and
they got another showing 'em in front of the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt
Lake City, if you'd like that, too--and thank you again--and now they'll
be off once more to the open road and the wild, free life. Not! Yes, two
or three good firm Nots. Having milked the town they'll be right down to
the dee-po with their silver changed to bills, waiting for No. 6 to come
along, and ho! for the open railroad and another town that will skin
pretty. I guess I've seen eight or ten of them boys in the last five
year