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Page 29
"Joan."
She looked her own question at him, and it was not necessary to voice
it.
"Mine is Ross Shanklin," he volunteered, for the first time in forgotten
years giving his real name.
"I suppose you've travelled a lot."
"I sure have, but not as much as I might have wanted to."
"Papa always wanted to travel, but he was too busy at the office. He
never could get much time. He went to Europe once with mamma. That was
before I was born. It takes money to travel."
Ross Shanklin did not know whether to agree with this statement or not.
"But it doesn't cost tramps much for expenses," she took the thought
away from him. "Is that why you tramp?"
He nodded and licked his lips.
"Mamma says it's too bad that men must tramp to look for work. But
there's lots of work now in the country. All the farmers in the valley
are trying to get men. Have you been working?"
He shook his head, angry with himself that he should feel shame at the
confession when his savage reasoning told him he was right in despising
work. But this was followed by another thought. This beautiful little
creature was some man's child. She was one of the rewards of work.
"I wish I had a little girl like you," he blurted out, stirred by a
sudden consciousness of passion for paternity. "I'd work my hands off.
I ... I'd do anything."
She considered his case with fitting gravity.
"Then you aren't married?"
"Nobody would have me."
"Yes they would, if...."
She did not turn up her nose, but she favoured his dirt and rags with a
look of disapprobation he could not mistake.
"Go on," he half-shouted. "Shoot it into me. If I was washed--if I wore
good clothes--if I was respectable--if I had a job and worked
regular--if I wasn't what I am."
To each statement she nodded.
"Well, I ain't that kind," he rushed on.
"I'm no good. I'm a tramp. I don't want to work, that's what. And I like
dirt."
Her face was eloquent with reproach as she said, "Then you were only
making believe when you wished you had a little girl like me?"
This left him speechless, for he knew, in all the deeps of his new-found
passion, that that was just what he did want.
With ready tact, noting his discomfort, she sought to change the
subject.
"What do you think of God?" she asked.
"I ain't never met him. What do you think about him?"
His reply was evidently angry, and she was frank in her disapproval.
"You are very strange," she said. "You get angry so easily. I never saw
anybody before that got angry about God, or work, or being clean."
"He never done anything for me," he muttered resentfully. He cast back
in quick review of the long years of toil in the convict camps and
mines. "And work never done anything for me neither."
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