“That’s all right, young feller,” said the other, cheerily.  “Find seats on that log yonder.  I ain’t got much in my larder today, but what there is will fill a mighty big vacuum in my interior, let me tell you.  This here is coffee in the first can—–­mebbe not just what you boys is accustomed to at your breakfast tables, but good enough for me when it’s piping hot.  I don’t take any frills with wine either, in the way of cream and sugar, leaving all that for those that sit at white tablecloths and have silver as well as china dishes.  In this other can I’ve got some soup.  Never mind where I got it; some ladies, bless their hearts, are pretty kind; and I always make it a point to carry several empty tomater cans with me wherever I go.  Besides that, in this newspaper here I’ve got some bread, and two fine pieces of bologna sausage that I bought in a village I came through.  So altogether I’m expecting to have a right swell feast pretty soon.”

Thad looked interested in these things.  He even peeped into the two cans, and decided that wherever the tramp got that coffee it certainly could be no “slops,” for it had the real odor.  The warmed-over soup, too, smelled very appetizing, Thad admitted.  On the whole, he concluded that tramps were able to make out very well, when they knew the ropes of the game, and how to beg at back doors.

Hugh, on the other hand, was more interested in the man himself than in his limited possessions.  He saw that the other was past middle age, for his face was covered with a bristly beard of a week’s growth, verging on gray.  His cheeks were well filled out, and his blue eyes had what Hugh determined was a humorous gleam about them, as though the man might be rather fond of a joke.

He was the picture of what a regular tramp should be, there could be no getting around that, Hugh determined.  He rather believed that, like most of his kind, this fellow also had a history back of him, which would perhaps hardly bear exploiting.  Doubtless there were pages turned down in his career, things that he himself seldom liked to remember, giving himself up to a life of freedom from care, and content to take things each day as they came along, under the belief that there were always sympathetic women folks to be found who would not refuse a poor wanderer a meal, or a nickel to help him along his way.

Apparently he had been just about ready to sit down and make way with his meal at the time the boys arrived on the scene; for he now took both tin carts from their resting places over the red embers of his fire, and opening the package produced the bread and the bologna.  This latter looked big enough to serve a whole family of six; but then a tramp’s appetite is patterned very much on the order of a growing boy’s, and knows no limit.

Having spread his intended food around him as he squatted there, the hobo gave the boys a queer look.

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t ask you to join me, youngsters,” he went on to say.  “I’d do the same in a jiffy if the supply wasn’t limited; besides, I don’t know just what sort of a reception I’m going to meet with in your town.”