Opening of the book
FOR RUTHOPE
First Part
I
Tƒŧ DƗǵŕƒ
Heaving along from side to side, like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, familiarly known as Banjo, patrolled the magnificent length of the great breakwater of Marseilles, a banjo in his hand.
“It sure is some moh mahvelous job,” he noted mentally; “most wonderful bank in the ocean I evah did see.”
It was afternoon. Banjo had walked the long distance of the breakwater and was returning to the Joliette end. He wore a cheap pair of slippers, suitable to the climate, a kind much used by the very poor of Provence. They were an ugly drab-brown color, which, however, was mitigated by the crimson socks and the yellow scarf with its elaborate pattern of black, yellow, and red at both ends, that was knotted around his neck and hung down the front of his blue-jean shirt.
Suddenly he stood still in his tracks as out of the bottom of one of the many freight cars along the quay he saw black bodies dropping.
Banjo knew box cars. He had hoboed in America. But never had he come across a box car with a hole in the bottom. Had those black boys made it? He went down on the quay to see.
The fellows were brushing the hay off their clothes. There were four of them.
“Hello, there!” said Banjo.
“Hello, money!” replied the tallest of the four, who was just Banjo’s build.
“Good night, money. What I want to know is ef you-all made that theah hole in the bottom a that box car? I nevah yet seen no hole in the bottom of a box car, and I’ve rode some rails back home in the
States.”
“P’raps not. They’s things ovah heah diffarant from things ovah theah and they’s things ovah theah diffarant from things ovah heah.
Now the way things am setting with me, this heah hole-in-the-bottom box car is just the thing for us.”
Keep listening free
Readnara
