Harry Baggs came walking slowly over the hills in the blue May dusk. He could now see below him the clustered roofs and tall slim stack of a town. His instinct was to avoid it, but he had tramped all day, his blurred energies were hardly capable of a detour, and he decided to settle near by for the night. About him the country rose and fell, clothed in emerald wheat and pale young corn, while trees filled the hollows with the shadowy purple of their darkening boughs. A robin piped a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of beginning buds. A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward sensations, drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and had a short powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were steady, light blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the forlorn trousers, the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick shoulders, and incongruous hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly position: he was a tramp. He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction, for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This, now, probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of temporary rest. Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path trod in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow beyond. His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the ground, a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at their back were grouped four or five small huts. Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence, he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of a stupid and conventional parody of a tramp. Another, sitting with clasped knees beyond the fire, interrupted a monotonous whining recital to question Harry Baggs. “Where'd you come from?” “Somewhere by Lancaster.” “Ever been here before?” And, when Baggs had said no: “Thought I hadn't seen you. Most of us here come back in the spring. It's a comfortable dump when it don't rain cold.” He was uncommonly communicative. “The Nursery's here for them that want work; and if not nobody's to ask you reasons.” A third, in a grimy light overcoat, with a short bristling red mustache and morose countenance, said harshly: “Got any money?” “Maybe two bits.”