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Show WRITING TO MOTHER COLLINS was a bum. He roamed about the country on foot or abaft the roads of a wind-jamming freight car, summer and winter, a restless spirit whose sole desire was to get food enough to keep him alive and beer as often as possible. He never stayed in one place long enough for people to inquire why he hadn't a regular job because engraven on his soul was a solemn pledge: "Never Work." If he had ever condescended to do a little manual labor, no matter how spasmodic, he would have elevated himself to the status of a tramp. A tramp will work, if there is no other way out. But a bum never. He will sooner throw himself under- a Mogul engine, and sue the railroad company j for damages. I The lowest, the most good-for-noth-j ing among us, say the psychologists, have some capability, some personal I power, to do a certain thing better I than the average of our fellows. Col- lins could hold the attention of a camp-I camp-I fire gathering of twenty derelicts' for I hours at a time with his yarning. He I was known as the -best yarn-spinner I among the disorganized cohorts of 1 Coxie's army from the Battery to the Golden Gate. They called him affectionately affec-tionately "The Ace-High Liar." His yarns, he swore, were honest experiences experi-ences from his own life, but as a matter mat-ter of fact, as all his pals knew, they were 75 per cent. Collins' purple imagination. imag-ination. But they listened to him, and so passed many an hour otherwise weary and profitless. He could take them with him over the broad, cracked face of the earth. He could make them believe they were Alaskan gold hunters, explorers in the Uganda, English Eng-lish tars, seal hunters in the Bering Sea, plantation proprietors in Hawaii, Mexican arms smugglers anything that came into his round red head. In another stratum Collins might have been a successful writer of "red-blooded" "red-blooded" fiction or thrilling scenarios for the movies. He had been the hero of a thousand unfllraed reels. He was a Lafcadlo Hearn for description, a Jack London of narrative, a veritable Dickens for pathos. Nor is this saying very much. Most every man has known some unheralded genius like Collins, blissfully ignorant of his own possibilities and therefore three times blessed. One raw night toward the end of November Collins and a pal were hugging hug-ging a radiator in the lobby of the Salvation Army hotel in Minneapolis. Where they had come from I don't know. But they were there. And it 1 was good to feel the hot pipes pressed against their shivering bodies. They were cold and hungry and miserable; the joy of life liad fled from tfieir souls. Under their breath they cursed each other, God and the weather. The other occupants of the room were peacefully reading or pretending to read. But Collins and his companion were in no mood for reading. Their seared, yellow eyes roamed about the room. They craved whisky, raw whisky. whis-ky. It would ease their troubles and give them a temporary feeling of well-being. well-being. But they were flat broke, they couldn't borrow, and the days of begging beg-ging had been fruitless. Their eyes continued to roam squlntingly, maliciously. malici-ously. They hated the fatuous air of comfort exhaled by the rest of the room. "Hell!" muttered Collins. His pal did not answer. Collins turned to look at him. A single tear was trickling down his unshaven cheek. He was a young man almost half Collins' age. His gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and Collins-, following fol-lowing its direction, encountered a placard in large letters: "When Did You Write Your Mother Last?" "Got the homesick bug, eh?" The other furtively drew his hand across his cheek. "Forget it!" he said hoarsely. "I don't blame ya, after what we've had handed us the last two days." There was rough kindness in Collins' tone. "Forget it! repeated the kid. After a moment he added sullenly, "Guess I'll read. Nothin' else for a guy to do in this damned hole." He shuffled over to a table and sat down. Collins hugged the radiator several sever-al minutes longer. Then he turned up his coat collar and Jeft the room. He had decided to make another try at pan-handling the price of a drinfr. When he came back his palwas hunched over the table with a pencil and a scrawled sheet of paper. Collins Col-lins sat down opposite. A genial glow tingled inside him. His errand had been successful. "Obeyin' orders?" he asked jovially, raising an eyebrow toward the placard. pla-card. The kid ignored him. He was writing feverishly. Collins sat still, regarding the placard with half-shut, musing eyes. "When Did You Write Your Mother Last?" he murmured. His lips twisted in a bitter smile. He put his arms on the table and pillowed his head on them. The stillness of the room was broken by three soft sounds the click of the battered clock on the wall, the heavy .breathing .breath-ing of the readers, and the tap, tap, ter an infinite search he brought forth Five minutes passed. Collins felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. "You can't sleep here," said the room clerk. "Eh?" said Collins;. "I wasn't asleep." The clerk started back to his desk. Collins got to his feet and followed him. "How much for paper and an envelope?" "Two cents." Collins produced the coins. He went back to the table and sat down. After Af-ter an infinite search he brought forth a stump of a pencil from somewhere in the depths of his being. He began to write. Slowly, haltingly, with a prodigious offort the words came. His copious speaking vocabulary, adapted (Continued to Pago 12.) HL WRITING TO MOTHER V (Continued from page 9.) m to the demands of a hundred varying H tales of his roving life, suddenly M seemed to have vanished before the m task of composing a simple letter. It H' was years since he had written any- H thing but his name. But gradually, Hi slowly, the page began to fill with H crazily-fashioned words looking like so H many hen tracks. H After a time Collins glancing up H ( found the kid's eyes on him. H "Who the hell you writin' to?" B. "Who the hell's askin'?" BJ Deliberately the kid leaned over and Hlff ' read the superscription "Dearest Hf Mother." Collins jerked the letter H away. . "If you weren't my pal I'd H bean you for that." H The kid was shaking with silent H laughter. "Writin' to yer ma! For- H get it. Yer dippy." B "Who're you writin' to?" Bi What's it to yuh?" ) ' "Don't kid me, cully. You're writin Hf to yourn. There ain't no law 'gainst HJ my doin' the same." BJ "Forget it!" said the kid. "You H never had no maw. Tole me yerself H you was brung up in an orphan pen." H j Collins failed to answer. lie was H i suddenly busy with his writing. It H j ( was true, Collins had never known H a mother. But that fact had never H j bothered him, and it did not bother H 1 now. For his fervid imagination vas H i aglow visualizing a perfect mother H ; his mother, to whom he was pouring H out his heart in a badly scrawled let- H ter abasing himself before her love, H which he was sure had followed him B, over his long, starved years of wandering; wan-dering; castigating himsen m the light ot her certain iorgivenesn. He blessed her m words, wrung from the depths ot his soul, that he had never revealed to any man; begged her still to cherish her faith, that he knew had many times been sorely tried, for soon he was coming home. Home to her. 'The kid had long ago finished his letter and gone to his bunk when Collins wrote: "Affecshunitly, your son," and tucked the letter away in his coat. It was only a few days later that Collins attempting to jump the bumpers bump-ers of a moving frieght, missed his footing on the ice-sheated metal and fell. He was badly crushed and died before he was found. The kid and he had since quarreled and parted company. But he earned a fronit-page story the next day in a great metropolitan metropoli-tan daily. A shrewd reporter had come into possession of his precious letter, and it appeared in full, verbatim, under un-der the title, "Tramp Dies With Un-mailed Un-mailed Letter to Mother." And many eyes in the great city blinked for a moment with suspicious moisture when they read. And several wanderers wan-derers on the face of the earth recalled re-called with a start the long time it had been since they had written their mothers. Some of these, with the story still before them, half unconsciously reached for their check-books. And that evening before the type metal which had stamped the story on their awakened memories had been melted to be shaped again into the next day's murder, grand ball, or clothing advertisement, adver-tisement, a little fund had been raised to save what remained of Collins from the potters' field. So it came to pass, on the following afternoon, a forlorn little undertaking "parlor" was made sadly gay with with flowers from nameless givers, while 'Spieler" Hanks,, Utile leathern-lunged leathern-lunged street evangelist, said a few words above Collins' coffin In a voice strangely modulated. When the kid many miles down the line read the account of this unusual occasion in a tattered, battered, week-old edition, borrowed from a brakie, he drew his hand across his tobacco-stained mouth and grunted in amazement. "For de love o' Mike! Dat guy couldn't quit klddin' even when he croaked. A whole town full o' weepin' nuts is just fallin' all over demselves paying respects to dat good-for-nothin' old hobo. Oh, Collins! Oh, boy!" And he slapped his leg and went off into a paroxysm of laughter. Addison Addi-son Lewis in Reedy's Mirror. |