“Ain’t this new style of tramp funny?  Now instead of coming round to the back door and asking for a hand-out like any self-respecting tramp had ought to, they march up to the front door, and they’re somebody with two or three names that’s walking round the world on a wager they made with one of the Vanderbilt boys or John D. Rockefeller.  They’ve walked thirty-eight hundred miles already and got the papers to prove it—­a letter from the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, a picture post card of themselves on the courthouse steps at Denver, and they’ve bet forty thousand dollars they could start out without a cent and come back in twenty-two months with money in their pocket—­and ain’t it a good joke?—­with everybody along the way entering into the spirit of it and passing them quarters and such, and thank you very much for your two bits for the picture post card—­and they got another showing ’em in front of the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt Lake City, if you’d like that, too—­and thank you again—­and now they’ll be off once more to the open road and the wild, free life.  Not!  Yes, two or three good firm Nots.  Having milked the town they’ll be right down to the dee-po with their silver changed to bills, waiting for No. 6 to come along, and ho! for the open railroad and another town that will skin pretty.  I guess I’ve seen eight or ten of them boys in the last five years, with their letters from mayors.

“But this here Wilfred Lennox had a new graft.  He was the first I’d give up to for mere poetry.  He didn’t have a single letter from a mayor, nor even a picture card of himself standing with his hat off in front of Pike’s Peak—­nothing but poetry.  But, as I said, he was there with a talk about pining for the open road and despising the cramped haunts of men, and he had appealing eyes and all this flowing hair and necktie.  So I says to myself:  ‘All right, Wilfred, you win!’ and put my purse back in my bag and thought no more of it.

“Yet not so was it to be.  Wilfred, working the best he could to make a living doing nothing, pretty soon got to the office of Alonzo Price, Choice Improved Real Estate and Price’s Addition.  Lon was out for the moment, but who should be there waiting for him but his wife, Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price, recognized leader of our literary and artistic set.  Or I think they call it a ‘group’ or a ‘coterie’ or something.  Setting at Lon’s desk she was, toying petulantly with horrid old pens and blotters, and probably bestowing glances of disrelish from time to time round the grimy office where her scrubby little husband toiled his days away in unromantic squalor.