A robin
piped a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of
beginning buds.
A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam
indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward
sensations, drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and
had a short powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were
steady, light blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the
forlorn trousers, the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick
shoulders, and incongruous hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly
position: he was a tramp.
He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly
down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and
orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company
of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction,
for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly
acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This, now,
probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of
temporary rest.
Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path
trod in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow
beyond. His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the
ground, a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at
their back were grouped four or five small huts.
Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence,
he extended his legs to the low blaze.
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