Pelle the Conqueror, vol 4 | Page 2

Road some one called to him. He turned
round in sudden, intense joy, but then his head dropped and he went on
without answering. It was only a tramp, who was standing half out of a
ditch in a field a little way off, beckoning to him. He came running
over the ploughed field, crying hoarsely: "Wait a little, can't you? Here
have I been waiting for company all day, so you might as well wait a
little!"

He was a broad-shouldered, rather puffy-looking fellow, with a flat
back and the nape of his neck broad and straight and running right up
into his cap without forming any projection for the back of his head,
making one involuntarily think of the scaffold. The bone of his nose
had sunk into his purple face, giving a bull-dog mixture of brutality and
stupid curiosity to its expression.
"How long have you been in?" he asked, as he joined him, breathless.
There was a malicious look in his eyes.
"I went in when Pontius Pilate was a little boy, so you can reckon it out
for yourself," said Pelle shortly.
"My goodness! That was a good spell! And what were you copped
for?"
"Oh, there happened to be an empty place, so they took me and put me
in --so that it shouldn't stand empty, you know!"
The tramp scowled at him. "You're laying it on a little too thick! You
won't get any one to believe that!" he said uncertainly. Suddenly he put
himself in front of Pelle, and pushed his bull-like forehead close to the
other's face. "Now, I'll just tell you something, my boy!" he said. "I
don't want to touch any one the first day I'm out, but you'd better take
yourself and your confounded uppishness somewhere else; for I've
been lying here waiting for company all day."
"I didn't mean to offend any one," said Pelle absently. He looked as if
he had not come back to earth, and appeared to have no intention of
doing anything.
"Oh, didn't you! That's fortunate for you, or I might have taken a
color-print of your doleful face, however unwillingly. By the way,
mother said I was to give you her love."
"Are you Ferdinand?" asked Pelle, raising his head.
"Oh, don't pretend!" said Ferdinand. "Being in gaol seems to have
made a swell of you!"
"I didn't recognize you," said Pelle earnestly, suddenly recalled to the
world around him.
"Oh, all right--if you say so. It must be the fault of my nose. I got it
bashed in the evening after I'd buried mother. I was to give you her
love, by the way."
"Thank you!" said Pelle heartily. Old memories from the "Ark" filled
his mind and sent his blood coursing through his veins once more. "Is it

long since your mother died?" he asked sympathetically.
Ferdinand nodded. "It was a good thing, however," he said, "for now
there's no one I need go and have a bad conscience about. I'd made up
my mind that she deserved to have things comfortable in her old age,
and I was awfully careful; but all the same I was caught for a little
robbery and got eight months. That was just after you got in--but of
course you know that."
"No! How could I know it?"
"Well, I telegraphed it over to you. I was just opposite you, in Wing A,
and when I'd reckoned out your cell, I bespoke the whole line one
evening, and knocked a message through to you. But there was a
sanctimonious parson at the corner of your passage, one of those moral
folk--oh, you didn't even know that, then? Well, I'd always suspected
him of not passing my message on, though a chap like that's had an
awful lot of learning put into him. Then when I came out I said to
myself that there must be an end to all this, for mother'd taken it very
much to heart, and was failing. I managed to get into one of the streets
where honest thieves live, and went about as a colporteur, and it all
went very well. It would have been horribly mean if she'd died of
hunger. And we had a jolly good time for six months, but then she
slipped away all the same, and I can just tell you that I've never been in
such low spirits as the day they put her underground in the cemetery.
Well, I said to myself, there lies mother smelling the weeds from
underneath, so you can just as well give it all up, for there's nothing
more to trouble about now. And I went up to the office and asked for a
settlement, and they cheated me of fifty subscribers, the rogues!
"Of course I went