The Return of the Mucker, Edgar Rice Burroughs [best affordable ebook reader txt] 📗

“‘WE KEPT a-rambling all the time. I rustled grub, he rustled rhyme,’” quoted Billy Byrne, sitting up and stretching himself.

His companion roused and came to one elbow. The sun was topping the scant wood behind them, glinting on the surface of the little creek. A robin hopped about the sward quite close to them, and from the branch of a tree a hundred yards away came the sweet piping of a song bird. Farther off were the distance-subdued noises of an awakening farm. The lowing of cows, the crowing of a rooster, the yelping of a happy dog just released from a night of captivity.

Bridge yawned and stretched. Billy rose to his feet and shook himself.

“This is the life,” said Bridge. “Where you going?”

“To rustle grub,” replied Billy. “That’s my part o’ the sketch.”

The other laughed. “Go to it,” he said. “I hate it. That’s the part that has come nearest making me turn respectable than any other. I hate to ask for a hand-out.”

Billy shrugged. He’d done worse things than that in his life, and off he trudged, whistling. He felt happier than he had for many a day. He never had guessed that the country in the morning could be so beautiful.

Behind him his companion collected the material for a fire, washed himself in the creek, and set the tin can, filled with water, at the edge of the kindling, and waited. There was nothing to cook, so it was useless to light the fire. As he sat there, thinking, his mind reverted to the red mark upon Billy’s wrist, and he made a wry face.

Billy approached the farmhouse from which the sounds of awakening still emanated. The farmer saw him coming, and ceasing his activities about the barnyard, leaned across a gate and eyed him, none too hospitably.

“I wanna get something to eat,” explained Billy.

“Got any money to pay for it with?” asked the farmer quickly.

“No,” said Billy; “but me partner an’ me are hungry, an’ we gotta eat.”

The farmer extended a gnarled forefinger and pointed toward the rear of the house. Billy looked in the direction thus indicated and espied a woodpile. He grinned good naturedly.

Without a word he crossed to the corded wood, picked up an ax which was stuck in a chopping block, and, shedding his coat, went to work. The farmer resumed his chores. Half an hour later he stopped on his way in to breakfast and eyed the growing pile that lay beside Billy.

“You don’t hev to chop all the wood in the county to get a meal from Jed Watson,” he said.

“I wanna get enough for me partner, too,” explained Billy.

“Well, yew’ve chopped enough fer two meals, son,” replied the farmer, and turning toward the kitchen door, he called: “Here, Maw, fix this boy up with suthin’ t’eat—enough fer a couple of meals fer two on ‘em.”

As Billy walked away toward his camp, his arms laden with milk, butter, eggs, a loaf of bread and some cold meat, he grinned rather contentedly.

“A year or so ago,” he mused, “I’d a stuck ‘em up fer this, an’ thought I was smart. Funny how a feller’ll change—an’ all fer a skirt. A skirt that belongs to somebody else now, too. Hell! what’s the difference, anyhow? She’d be glad if she knew, an’ it makes me feel better to act like she’d want. That old farmer guy, now. Who’d ever have taken him fer havin’ a heart at all? Wen I seen him first I thought he’d like to sic the dog on me, an’ there he comes along an’ tells ‘Maw’ to pass me a hand-out like this! Gee! it’s a funny world. She used to say that most everybody was decent if you went at ‘em right, an’ I guess she knew. She knew most everything, anyway. Lord, I wish she’d been born on Grand Ave., or I on Riverside Drive!”

As Billy walked up to his waiting companion, who had touched a match to the firewood as he sighted the numerous packages in the forager’s arms, he was repeating, over and over, as though the words held him in the thrall of fascination: “There ain’t no sweet Penelope somewhere that’s longing much for me.”

Bridge eyed the packages as Billy deposited them carefully and one at a time upon the grass beside the fire. The milk was in a clean little graniteware pail, the eggs had been placed in a paper bag, while the other articles were wrapped in pieces of newspaper.

As the opening of each revealed its contents, fresh, clean, and inviting, Bridge closed one eye and cocked the other up at Billy.

“Did he die hard?” he inquired.

“Did who die hard?” demanded the other.

“Why the dog, of course.”

“He ain’t dead as I know of,” replied Billy.

“You don’t mean to say, my friend, that they let you get away with all this without sicing the dog on you,” said Bridge.

Billy laughed and explained, and the other was relieved— the red mark around Billy’s wrist persisted in remaining uppermost in Bridge’s mind.

When they had eaten they lay back upon the grass and smoked some more of Bridge’s tobacco.

“Well,” inquired Bridge, “what’s doing now?”

“Let’s be hikin’,” said Billy.

Bridge rose and stretched. “‘My feet are tired and need a change. Come on! It’s up to you!’” he quoted.

Billy gathered together the food they had not yet eaten, and made two equal-sized packages of it. He handed one to Bridge.

“We’ll divide the pack,” he explained, “and here, drink the rest o’ this milk, I want the pail.”

“What are you going to do with the pail?” asked Bridge.

“Return it,” said Billy. “‘Maw’ just loaned it to me.”

Bridge elevated his eyebrows a trifle. He had been mistaken, after all. At the farmhouse the farmer’s wife greeted them kindly, thanked Billy for returning her pail—which, if the truth were known, she had not expected to see again—and gave them each a handful of thick, light, golden-brown cookies, the tops of which were encrusted with sugar.

As they walked away Bridge sighed. “Nothing on earth like a good woman,” he said.

“‘Maw,’ or ‘Penelope’?” asked Billy.

“Either, or both,” replied Bridge. “I have no Penelope, but I did have a mighty fine ‘maw’.”

Billy made no reply. He was thinking of the slovenly, blear-eyed woman who had brought him into the world. The memory was far from pleasant. He tried to shake it off.

“‘Bridge,’” he said, quite suddenly, and apropos of nothing, in an effort to change the subject. “That’s an odd name. I’ve heard of Bridges and Bridger; but I never heard Bridge before.”

“Just a name a fellow gave me once up on the Yukon,” explained Bridge. “I used to use a few words he’d never heard before, so he called me ‘The Unabridged,’ which was too long. The fellows shortened it to ‘Bridge’ and it stuck. It has always stuck, and now I haven’t any other. I even think of myself, now, as Bridge. Funny, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” agreed Billy, and that was the end of it. He never thought of asking his companion’s true name, any more than Bridge would have questioned him as to his, or of his past. The ethics of the roadside fire and the empty tomato tin do not countenance such impertinences.

For several days the two continued their leisurely way toward Kansas City. Once they rode a few miles on a freight train, but for the most part they were content to plod joyously along the dusty highways. Billy continued to “rustle grub,” while Bridge relieved the monotony by an occasional burst of poetry.

“You know so much of that stuff,” said Billy as they were smoking by their camp fire one evening, “that I’d think you’d be able to make some up yourself.”

“I’ve tried,” admitted Bridge; “but there always seems to be something lacking in my stuff—it don’t get under your belt— the divine afflatus is not there. I may start out all right, but I always end up where I didn’t expect to go, and where nobody wants to be.”