what he
was doing, that he had traveled with a circus. His bundle contained a
filthy clown's suit, and his box held half a dozen rattlesnakes.

Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to get the chickens
for Sunday, she heard the whine of an accordion and saw a crowd before
one of the saloons. There she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely
attired in the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the
sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--and his eyes
wild and feverish. Pulling the accordion in and out seemed to be almost
too great an effort for him, and he panted to the tune of "Marching
through Georgia." After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp
exhibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now pass the hat,
and that when the onlookers had contributed the sum of one dollar, he
would eat "one of these living reptiles." The crowd began to cough and
murmur, and the saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested
the wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried him away to
the calaboose.

The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,--an old hut with a barred
window and a padlock on the door. The tramp was utterly filthy and there
was no way to give him a bath. The law made no provision to grub-stake
vagrants, so after the constable had detained the tramp for twentyfour
hours, he released him and told him to "get out of town, and get quick."
The fellow's rattlesnakes had been killed by the saloon keeper. He hid
in a box car in the freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the
next station, but he was found and put out. After that he was seen no
more. He had disappeared and left no trace except an ugly, stupid word,
chalked on the black paint of the seventy-five-foot standpipe which was
the reservoir for the Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another
tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to the English
officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a comment on life which the
defeated, along the hard roads of the world, sometimes bawl at the
victorious.

A week after the tramp excitement had passed over, the city water began
to smell and to taste. The Kronborgs had a well in their back yard and
did not use city water, but they heard the complaints of their
neighbors. At first people said that the town well was full of rotting
cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-station convinced the
mayor that the water left the well