To be in the heart of a great country, fifteen hundred miles from the
Atlantic, and two thousand miles from the Pacific, to be forbidden the
public highway of the train, and to have one's objective point
India,--this is by no means an easy problem, even to the oriental mind.
And who could know what was going on in the being that crept away into
the storm, strong with the instinct of hiding and of cunning. He must
have balanced all things. To go westward, where the great steamers plied
toward the Orient, this would seem the natural course; and yet that way
lay interminable prairies and empty stretches, and again deserts and
piled mountains, without shelter and without food. It is easier to hide
among people than amid solitudes. On crowded city streets, we jostle
without seeing.
It was no great feat to transform the once Swami of the flowing robes
and lofty port into a hulking skulking negro tramp, like the sturdy
villains of ancient days, sleeping in woody nooks by day, and pursuing
his slow journey under the stars, answering the look of such human
beings as he met with suspicion, keeping to the hamlets where police
officers were scarce and knowledge of the criminal world scarcer, and
where solitary house-wives, whose men were in the field, could be
persuaded, half through charity and half through fear, to dole out food.
Ah, but it was a weary journey. The world, of whose littleness we boast
when we think of steam and electricity, grows very sizable again when a
man comes back to the elemental means of progress--his own two legs. As
for the smaller world in which he had been living--the world of luxury
and of worshiping disciples--he laughed silently to think what a mirage
it was and always had been.
Down the Mississippi he crept, sometimes peering from between the great
trees that flanked its steep banks, as the red Indians did long ago, to
see the boats of the white man go serenely up and down that mighty
swirling current, and stopping even in his self-absorption to feel a
little of the beauty when the great river spread itself into the
shimmering expanse of Lake Pipin, or to remember, at Winona, the
picturesque legend that he had heard of the deserted Chippewa maiden who
here threw herself from the overhanging rocks into the pitiless rush of
waters below, and left only her ghost and her sweet-sounding name to the
spot. He halted to inspect the great monolith, a hundred feet in height,
of Sugar Loaf.
He had an idea that in some little town to the south he might venture to
board a straggling cross-country train to Chicago; and, once in the
thick of men again, he believed himself safe. He had always been wary
enough to keep on his person a certain sum of money. Such as it was, it
might serve his purpose. It also tickled his sense of humor to think
that--shabby black wayfarer that he was--he had in his pocket a check
for five thousand dollars, that he could not cash, and a handful of
rubies that were enough to awaken the suspicions of the least
suspicious. But still, day after day and night after night, he plodded
patiently on his way down the water course, until at last, at Prairie du
Chien, two hundred miles from St. Etienne, he felt that he might comfort
his inner man with hot food, and his weary legs with a bed and a
pillow. He prowled along the streets of the country town looking for
some cheap lodging-house where such as he, a humble, cringing, dog-like
fellow, might find shelter. He looked through a dusty window and saw a
shaggy-bearded, roughly-dressed man shoveling food with a knife, and he
felt that he had found the right place.