women were in sight here and there at back doors, pinning freshly washed
garments on lines, beating dust from rugs, or, seen through the windows,
were bustling about the forenoon tasks set for patient household slaves
in gingham.

At one back door, his back comfortably set against a folded
clothes-reel, was a greasily fat tramp, gobbling a hand-out lunch which
a housewife had given to him.

Under a little hill where the road dipped at the edge of the hamlet here
sounded clink of steel on rock, suggesting that men labored there with
trowel and drill. There was complaining creaking of cordage--the arm of
a derrick sliced a slow arc across the blue sky of June.

The fat tramp held up his empty plate and whined a request and the hand
of a woman emerged from a close-by window and placed something in the
dish.

Farr slowed his steps and looked at the tramp, and a woman in a yard
near by stared over the top of a sheet which she was pinning on the line
and scowled at the new arrival.

"I wonder if I'm considered as the Damon of that Pythias?" Farr asked
himself, smiling into her frown. "But Damon is nomad spelled backward! I
wish I dared to ask her for a piece of that pie cooling on the sill."

Just then, over the clink of metal under the hill, above wail of
straining pulley, rose the screech of a man in agony, the raucous male
squall whose timbre is more hideous than the death-cry of swine.