Once he slept
for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was
awakened by a farmer's dog licking his face.
Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other
roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no
incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on
the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked
and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought
no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went
out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were,
almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to
get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems
and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of "Chi" and
"Cinci" and "Frisco," and were bent upon getting to one of these places.
They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked
swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging
before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey
cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana,
tried to rob him.
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