Moon-Face and Other Stories | Page 9

this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English used
the terms interchangeably. But--and mark you, the leap paralyzes
one--crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or
ho-boy, becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known. In a
way one understands its being born of the contempt for wandering
players and musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the burn and the
brand! The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the
man without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and
logically, it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp.
Then, as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form,
and ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and
brick cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law
is wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn't it?"
And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded
man, this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself
at home in my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table,
outshone me with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending
money, smoked my best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs

with a cultivated and discriminating eye.
He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria's
"Economic Foundation of Society."
"I like to talk with you," he remarked. "You are not indifferently
schooled. You've read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it" (this with a sneer), "eminently fits you
for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments are
vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the
books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have
lived it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted
it, the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have
been biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary
for clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever
passage. Listen!"
And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text
with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved
and lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject,
introducing points the author had blundered past and objections he had
ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox and
reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth--in short, flashing
his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile dull and
heavy and lifeless.
It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda.
Now Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid
moods she was capable of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to
sit on the back stoop and devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken
chops. But that a tatterdemalion out of the night should invade the
sanctity of her kitchen-kingdom and delay dinner while she set a place
for him in the warmest corner, was a matter of such moment that the
Sunflower went to see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift
sympathy! Leith Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for fifteen
long minutes, whilst I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered
back with vague words and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would

never miss.
"Surely I shall never miss it," I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many
books--books that had spoiled more than one day's fishing sport.
"I should advise you, however," I added, "to mend the pockets first."
But the Sunflower's face clouded. "N--o," she said, "the black one."
"The black one!" This explosively, incredulously. "I wear it quite often.
I--I intended wearing it to-night."
"You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear," the
Sunflower hurried on. "Besides, it's shiny--"
"Shiny!"
"It--it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really
estimable. He is nice and refined, and I am sure he--"
"Has seen better days."
"Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are threadbare.
And you have many suits--"
"Five," I corrected, "counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
draggled pockets."
"And he has none, no home, nothing--"
"Not even a Sunflower,"--putting my arm around her,--"wherefore he is
deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear--nay, the best one,
the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there must be
compensation!"
"You ARE a dear!" And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked
back alluringly. "You