There was no
ferocity in the loathsome face; it was a vagrant swine that looked
from it, no worse in its present mood than greedy and sleepy.
"Bed?" demanded the captain, writing another blank. "Never been here
before, I suppose?" he continued with good-natured irony. "I don't
seem to remember you."
The captain laughed, and the tramp returned a husky "Thank you,
sir," and took himself off into the street.
Then the captain came to Lemuel's help. "You follow him," he said,
"and you'll come to a bed by and by."
He went out, and, since he could do no better, did as he was bid. He
had hardly ever seen a drunken man at Willoughby Pastures, where the
prohibition law was strictly enforced; there was no such person as a
thief in the whole community, and the tramps were gone long ago. Yet
here was he, famed at home for the rectitude of his life and the
loftiness of his aims, consorting with drunkards and thieves and
tramps, and warned against what he was doing by a policeman, as if
he was doing it of his own will. It was very strange business. If it
was all a punishment for taking that fellow's half-dollar, it was
pretty heavy punishment. He was not going to say that it was unjust,
but he would say it was hard. His spirit was now so bruised and
broken that he hardly knew what to think.
He followed the tramp as far off as he could and still keep him in
sight, and he sometimes thought he had lost him, in the streets that
climbed and crooked beyond the Common towards the quarter whither
they were going; but he reappeared, slouching and shambling rapidly
on, in the glare of some electric lights that stamped the ground
with shadows thick and black as if cut in velvet or burnt into the
surface.
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