Lyacus Whittle--Globe Trotter

by Hugh Pendexter

Lyacus Whittle
Globe Trotter

By Hugh Pendexter

How the longing to travel came to the Hobb's Corner grocer, and the trip around the world he planned at the rate of two cents a mile

 

DOC STYPHEN and Ote Hubbard glanced: warily at the clock and then yawned as though the hour were extremely late and they were commensurately weary. For twenty years this pantomime had been indulged in nightly, excepting Sundays, in Lyacus Whittle's store. The store-keeper's old cronies knew that Mrs. Whittle was scheduled to appear in the back door at eight forty-five o'clock. Five minutes later she would empty the contents of the cash-drawer into her apron, and nine of the clock, sharp, would find the lights out and Lyacus meekly following his spouse up-stairs.

“Good night, Lyacus,” sighed Doc, who had halted in the very heart of a pleasing narrative.

“Evening to you, old neighbor,” saluted Mr. Hubbard, rising reluctantly from his chair.

This form of parting never varied, and Lyacus, speaking by rule, replied: “Good night, fellers. Wish you'd stay longer.”

It was at the conclusion of this ceremony and just as Mrs. Whittle stepped through the door, on time to a tick, that the unusual happened. Contrary to all precedent some one entered by the front door. Doc and Mr. Hubbard shivered in nervous joy. As no villager would presume to face Mrs. Whittle in the store after nine o'clock the newcomer must be a stranger. This portended a bit of drama, and the two men summoned enough hardihood to halt in the shadows behind the whip-rack.

“She'll send him a-flukin', Ote,” hoarsely whispered Doc.

“She's tuning up now,” warned Mr. Hubbard, for Mrs. Whittle, stalking to the cash-drawer, was ominously reminding, “No more sales to-night, sir.”

Despite this ultimatum the stranger lounged within the lamp's meager rays, where he held Lyacus's perturbed gaze closely. He was rough of dress, hard of face, and considerably soiled, yet his ragged hat was worn with a rakish grace that bespoke confidence, wide experience, and complete ease.

“No more sales—” Mrs. Whittle was beginning from the gloomy penumbra of the cheese-box and sugar-scoop, when the stranger peered boldly in her direction and paralyzed his hearers by obtruding,

“Say, dame, wot kind of a guy does yous tink I be?” Then to the stony-faced Lyacus, “Say, Bo, t'run out a nickel's wurt of cheese, an' don't weigh yer flail wid it, neither.”

And as Lyacus mechanically cut off a mighty wedge of cheese the stranger critically selected a handful of crackers, appropriated a thirty-five-cent can of sardines accompanied by an opener, and seating himself on a goods-box good-naturedly condescended to tear out a few life pages. He had been kicked from a fast freight, the next train passed at ten o'clock; he would wait in the store till it was due.

And he did. For the first time in its history Whittle's store burned a lamp until after nine o'clock. What was equally unprecedented, Mrs. Whittle offered no objections. To Lyacus the situation was intoxicatingly delicious. He was actually listening to an all-world traveler, a man so familiar with metropolises as to give each a nickname. Once started, he rambled on rapidly, pleased, perhaps, with the unsophistication of his audience, or possibly enamored with the prospects of more sardines. His recital reached from coast to coast and nimbly jumped from ocean to ocean. He was at home everywhere. “An' here comes der choo-choo. Good night, ol' hoss.” And with one wave of his grimy hand that included several boxes of sardines he was gone.

Thus it was that a lust for wider things, a hunger for travel, filtered into Hobb's Corner and found lodgment in Lyacus Whittle's breast. For the first time he recognized the true nature of the vague yearning which had irritated his inner self for years: he was tainted with the greed for seeing places.

A week passed before he was sufficiently courageous to whisper this discovery to his friends. The effect was tremendous. Doc examined his pulse, while Mr. Hubbard insisted on listening to his lungs.

“If he was only a drinking man I could figger it all out,” regretted Doc.

But Lyacus persisted in declaring that he was a rover by nature. “Wait t'll I git my books on travel,” he darkly said.

Shortly after this hint Doc Styphen began to receive much unusual mail. There were pamphlets, folders, time-tables, books of assorted tours, advertising all zones and peoples. It transpired that Lyacus had secretly written many American consular agents as well as transportation companies and had indulged in the amiable forgery of signing his friend's name.

“The little woman might suspect something,” he explained and apologized as he relieved the amazed Doc of a picture of some scantily appareled natives living a life of ease at the edge of a purple sea, while freshly laundered tourists plucked all the fruit on the page.

Once the tide of seductive information began pouring in there was no stopping it. It seemed that every personally conducted tour on earth was pining for Lyacus Whittle's company, while railroads and steamship lines could not get along without him. Some sent blanks for him to fill out; some wrote chatty letters and invited inquiries. Some gravely took him by the arm, figuratively, and led him into a confidential corner and seriously discussed the advantages of the Nile over the Danube. These confidences and kindly attentions began to wear on Lyacus.

“These people really expect me to take a trip,” he lamented. “Danged if it ain't gitting serious. Seems almost as if I'd promised 'em I'd go somewhere. I'm ashamed to look the conductor of the up passenger-train in the face.”

“By Judas, you've got to do it!” cried Mr. Hubbard, slapping his knee. “Here you've made these companies spend Lawd knows how much in postage. They've trusted you and believed in you, and you've got to do it.”

“Do what?” gasped Doc, his face flushing to a purple in the tensity of his expectations.

“Travel!” cried Mr. Hubbard. “If you don't you're just as bad as a man would be who came in here and made you spend four dollars' worth of time showing goods and then laughed and said he was only fooling and went out without buying nothing.”

“Something in that,” shivered Lyacus, beginning to feel faint over the suggestion.

“But the cost,” whispered Doc, his eyes mechanically focusing on the cash-drawer.

“That is the keynote,” sighed Lyacus. “My little woman is the saver of the family, and she keeps me rather short, you know.”

Mr. Hubbard glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, and then timorously whispered: “Begin to-day and hold out on her. Keep back some of the till-money.”

“I've kept back ten cents of the egg-money already,” confessed Lyacus in a fluttering voice. “Something seemed to tell me to begin saving.”

“But where'll you go?” asked Doc, now thoroughly in sympathy with the conspiracy.

“I—I don't know,” faltered Lyacus, tremulously patting some time-tables. “They've all been so kind to me I hate to pick one line and disapp'int the rest on 'em.”

Mr. Hubbard struggled violently with a new thought for several seconds, and then exploded: “The only square thing to do is to go the whole hog. “Treat 'em all alike. Jest kite clear round the world.”

“Oh, Lawd!” choked Lyacus. “I dassent think of it! Don't!”

Doc's cheeks puffed out until they threatened his eyes, and when he could control himself he slowly said: “Ote is right. If you do that no railroad or steamboat can point the finger of scorn at you and say you deceived 'em. The only question is the cost.”

“They'd probably tax me considerable,” mused Lyacus, his brow damp now with suppressed excitement.

“Huh!” snorted Doc triumphantly. “I have it. I seen by a paper how the law fixes the cost of travel at two cents a mile.”

“For going anywhere and everywhere?” eagerly asked Lyacus.

“I don't jest remember what it said, but of course that's it,” replied Doc. “Two cents a mile everywhere. It wouldn't be fair to charge one price here and another in, well, say England.”

“And if they did charge different prices folks would travel where. it was cheapest,” reminded Mr. Hubbard sagely. “The law must mean everywhere.”

“It sounds reasonable,” admitted Lyacus.

“And now, listen to me, men,” cried Doc, after figuring desperately on the top of a cracker-barrel; “if my boy's g'ography ain't a liar it's twenty-five thousand miles around the earth. Great Scott! A man could skim all the way round for five hundred dollars.”

“And that is measuring on the bulge,” reminded Mr. Hubbard, preliminary to interposing a demurrer. “You've picked the fattest place on the globe. I want Ly to do it in good style, but being short of ready money, why not slip up north away from the equator a bit, where the earth is smaller?”

“Two cents a mile,” excitedly muttered Lyacus, furtively examining his wallet. “H'm! I've got just fifty dollars and ten cents.”

“Gimme a map,” Doc sternly commanded, rising long enough to tip over an oil-can. “Gimme one I can figger out twenty-five hundred and five miles on.”

Lyacus found one used in advertising soap, and the three heads were soon bowed over it.

“Strike a straight line due west at two cents a mile and you'd land in Walla Walla, or mebbe a few miles beyond it,” gravely announced Doc, sticking a black-headed pin in the state of Washington.

“We was speaking of something with foreign in it,” mildly reminded Lyacus.

“But you've got to git a start,” defended Doc.

“Why not tag this blue streak down to the Barbados, some eighteen hundred and twenty nine miles, and have about seven hundred miles left to squander on interior?” eagerly suggested Mr. Hubbard.

“Don't you see, Ote, that ain't going round the world?” remonstrated Doc. “Besides, he'd lose too much ground in going up hill as he approached the equator.”

“The figgers was writ so plain and it was such easy figgering,” apologized Mr. Hubbard.

“Kindly remember, Ote, there's got to be some system to this. I ain't going to jump off into space and pay two cents a mile without knowing where I'm due to fetch up,” rebuked Lyacus.

Mr. Hubbard bowed humbly and meekly indicated a line extending eastward and suggested that that be followed.

“It's cable,” coldly informed Doc. “Here's our line, the red one. Huh! We've got twenty-five hundred and five miles and not a danged inch more.” And he laboriously studied the scale. Then he complained: “Dod rot it! We're just two hundred and forty-five miles shy of making the Azores.”

“Lost at sea that distance from land,” shuddered Mr. Hubbard.

“Wait a minute,” whispered Lyacus, his voice shaking; and he stole to the cash-drawer. As he returned his hand gave forth a clinking sound, and he said: “If she knew it she'd skin me, but I won't be left in mid-ocean for the need of no four dollars and ninety cents. Kindly stick that pin in the Azores.”

Gaining in new ambitions, Doc fondled another pin and sighed: “Oh, for twenty dollars! It would just take you to Gibraltar.”

While regretting the necessity of stopping at the Azores that night Lyacus eagerly assured them that if he swapped horses on the morrow he would retain the twenty dollars boot he was to receive and in that way make “Old Gib,” as he fondly styled it.

“Hooray!” softly shouted Doc, pounding the barrel. “Improve on that idea. Tell her you had to give twenty dollars boot, and I'll land you in Naples. It's good as done.” And another pin was employed to invade Italy.

“It—it makes me feel nervous the way we hustle along so fast,” murmured Lyacus, pressing his temples. “I don't remember seeing nothing of lay belle France. I'll be in the Orient before I know it. It's—it's almost like going round the world in a express package.”

Doc might have taken offense had not Mr. Hubbard afforded a diversion by groaning loudly and ejaculating: “Oh, Lawd! What fools we be!”

“What d'ye mean?” choked Lyacus, instinctively shielding Naples with his hand.

“Feed,” grimly replied Mr. Hubbard. “How 'n sin can you travel without eating?”

“The two cents a mile don't include my meals, then?” timidly asked Lyacus.

“Not 'less you're traveling in that express package you was bragging about,” moodily replied Doc. “Well, if we must, we must. S'pose we call it a dollar a day for grub?”

Lyacus opposed this as being extravagant, but was finally won over. Some data on the back of the map gave ten days as the mail time between New York and Rome. Lyacus reminded them that he was not a letter, but the others insisted that he must plan for a swift trip. Figuring that five hundred miles had been lost for the sake of food, that distance was measured off west of Naples. Mr. Hubbard slowly announced that it would bring the traveler within swimming distance of Balearic. Lyacus remarked that the island was so small he did not believe there would be room for him to land. This incited Doc to regret that the western route had not been adhered to. Lyacus replied that as the Pacific Ocean was the main obstacle he preferred to surmount it on his way home.

Doc eyed him sternly and then accused: “You're hankering to spend the night in Rome. All right; I'll lend you ten dollars.” The money was passed over, and Lyacus breathed in deep relief. A mild discussion of the City on Seven Hills was enjoyed.

Mrs. Whittle frowned that night on emptying the till. The receipts were far below normal. She remarked it to her husband, but he, hiding a pamphlet under the counter, declared he could give no explanation, not even if he were hurled from the Tarpeian rock. Nor did his Latinisms and bubbling temperament tend to cause her bent brows to relax as the evening wore thin.

On the morrow she was greatly disgruntled on learning the boot he had paid in a horse trade. He did not seem to sense her bitter criticism, but continued lost in abstraction until late afternoon, when he bought a quantity of butter from a farmer. A careless, voluble humor came over him now, and he whistled much in jumping a red and a black pin across Italy to Pescara. The red pin indicated a day's food and the black pin the hundred miles traveled.

“I believe you paid that man three dollars too much,” snapped Mrs. Whittle. “I can't make it come right.”

“Nonsense, my dear,” he replied. “Just picture the blue waters of the Adriatic, bathed in the glorious——”

In sharp-voiced irritation she left him. He did not heed her displeasure: the map was his master. The lust for completing its girdle with pins was ever upon him. Then when the girdle was completed he would take the path in the flesh. Ah, what sacrifices could he make to extend the snaky lines of red and black!

As if answering his silent query an ancient debtor now appeared and unexpectedly paid a bill of seven dollars. Whistling in shrill joy Lyacus nervously studied the scale and placed two pins in Alessio, Turkey, three hundred miles farther east.

“The boys will opine I'm hiking right along,” he gloated. “Oh, for fourteen dollars more and I'd be in Constantinople, plus my fodder.”

As anticipated, Mr. Hubbard and Doc were overjoyed that evening to learn of their comrade's noble progress. “By Judas, you'll be weighing anchor inside of a month at this clip!” cried Mr. Hubbard.

“Inside of two weeks if the store holds out,” warmly corrected Doc. “If we could only make a big killing and scoot through India on the jump!”

“If Herm Tuttle comes in to-morrer and pays what he owes me I'll be cracking my heels in Ispahan, Persia,” whispered Lyacus, his eyes gleaming. “I figger it twelve hundred miles and four dollars for grub—just twenty-eight dollars.”

“Lyacus!” called his wife from the back door. “You give the Whitten boy a dollar for the washing.”

She meant for him to pay from his pocket, and after doing so he groaned and attempted to measure fifty miles west of Alessio.

“It'll bring you in the surf,” warned Mr. Hubbard. “Why not go on half rations for a day and stick there?”

“We'll find the real pull will come in Tibet,” sighed Lyacus.

“Afghanistan,” shortly corrected Doc, scowling at the map.

“Once he strikes the Pacific he's got to go through with it,” reminded Mr. Hubbard.

“I won't count my bridges till they're hatched,” bravely declared Lyacus. The wisdom of this was evidenced almost immediately, when he was called upon to pay nine dollars and fifty cents lodge dues. As his wife disapproved of all secret societies and little knew he was a charter member of the Amalgamated Order of Blue Warriors, there was nothing to do but groan and retreat the pins to Bologna.

“It'll be a tussle to git me out of Europe,” lamented Lyacus, as they parted for the night. “And I'm gitting sick of Italy.”

His fears took on the nature of a careful prophecy, as it proved exceedingly difficult to leave the shadow of the Alps. Once, by a dare-devil bit of trading he jumped to Berat and bade fair to make Mt. Olympus, when a neighbor's note, bearing his endorsement, went to protest, and he was beaten back to Milan. Slowly and painfully he crawled down the peninsula, not daring to take the sea because of the smallness of his gains. Dime by dime, mile by mile, he fought his path to Otranto, where he paused and drew a deep breath for the leap across the strait to Corfu.

The strain now began to affect his usually cheery manner. He became silent and moody and curtly reminded his two friends it was no joke to be strapped in Europe. 'Let me pass the Bosporus and I'll chirk up,” he gruffly promised, filching fifty cents from the tobacco money. “Fourteen dollars would do it handsome.”

Next day he received fifteen dollars from a commission merchant, it being an unsuspected balance in an apple deal. It was such a peculiar thing for a commission merchant to do that the trio gasped in awe as Lyacus drove a pin through Constantinople's midriff. An hour later an insolvent horse dashed through the store window and did twenty-five dollars' worth of damage, and Lyacus renewed his song of sorrow on finding himself in a chalet on the edge of Switzerland.

“Lawd!” gasped Mr. Hubbard. “If Doc and me had only realized how hard it is to run one of these danged tours we'd 'a' kept out of it.”

“Please don't talk that way,” begged Lyacus.

“We won't desert you in Switzerland,” gloomily assured Doc, “but something big has got to be did to break this cussed spell. If you can git to Upper Burma I'll breathe easy. Ain't you got any jewelry you can sell?”

Lyacus shook out a sad negative, but was precluded from speaking by Mr. Hubbard's trembling voice whispering: “I have it! Burglars must break in and steal—h'm! lemme see. To Hongkong you need four thousand four hundred miles plus your fodder, or one hundred and ten dollars. From Hongkong to New York is ten thousand five hundred and ninety miles and thirty days for the trip, or two hundred and forty-one dollars and eighty cents. The burglars must steal three hundred and fifty-one dollars and eighty cents to a penny.”

“What burglars?” exclaimed Lyacus.

“The kind that will hand back the money next day,” murmured Mr. Hubbard archly.

“The insurance company will pay me two hundred and sixty-five dollars and forty cents next week for the loss of my barn,” muttered Lyacus.

 

“When'll you start?” nervously asked Mr. Hubbard, after the bold robbery of Whittle's store had ceased to be food for gossip.

“Early to-morrer, before she is awake,” sighed Lyacus. 'I'll pack my valise and leave it at Doc's to-night.”

“We shall miss ye like sin,” said Mr. Hubbard.

“Bring me home a sea-shell from the river Jordan,” requested Doc.

“I'd rather have a bottle of the water,” supplemented Mr. Hubbard. Lyacus, busy spanning the Pacific with a trestle of pins, nodded his head slowly.

 

The pale gray of early dawn was accusatory in its silence as Lyacus stole down-stairs, his shoes in his hand. He had only to procure his valise from Doc Styphen's porch and catch the early stage. Now that he was at the apex of his ambitions the old store somehow looked mighty inviting and home-like. He surveyed the old counter and ancient shelves lovingly; then he suddenly decided to leave a line for his wife. He had originally planned to write to her from New York, but now that did not seem enough. He was beginning to feel guilty at the deceit he had practised in stealing from himself to make out the passage money.

“Lyacus,” broke in a faint voice, and he turned from the counter and faced her.

“Lyacus,” she repeated, now speaking in a whimper and drawing nearer to him.

As for years she had been a stranger to any form of tenderness he stared stupidly at her white figure and almost forgot his perturbation at her appearance.

“I could not let you go to work until I had confessed,” she sobbed. “I could not let you begin another day till you knew all. When you got up to go to work—to work for me—I had to follow and tell you all. Brother John needed money to git him out of trouble, and I drew nearly six hundred dollars out of the bank and let him have it, and he has gone to Europe, and we'll probably never git the money back.” She stood mute and drooping as if waiting for a sentence.

Lyacus leaned numbly against the counter and gazed vacantly at the cheese-box. His gathering emotions were varied. Their joint bank-account was nearly exhausted; she had deceived him.

“He is in Italy now,” she dully continued, fearing the silence.

“Poor cuss,” murmured Lyacus. “Does he send you any picter cards? Tell him to send some of Constantinople.”

“You will forgive me?” she whispered.

He fully realized now that she was tensely human; she could deceive as well as he. This was not the Mrs. Whittle he had planned to leave for a while.

“My dear,” he mumbled, fumbling in his pockets and dislodging a pair of colored spectacles, to be worn in crossing the Alps, “I always felt your brother would cut up some day. Here's a little money I've been saving that will just about make up the deficit. Only don't do it again without telling me. We shouldn't have secrets from each other.”

 

As Doc Styphen and Mr. Hubbard cautiously peered in the door and beheld Lyacus cheerily dusting the counter their amazement increased.

“Git caught?” hoarsely whispered Mr. Hubbard, while Doc slyly held up the valise and then concealed it behind his broad back.

Lyacus pointed a lean finger at the map, where an army of red and black pins was bunched on Hobb's Corner, and explained: “Not caught, but just got back. Great trip. Stormy across the Pacific. I'll show some nice picters of Italy in a day or so. Come in to-night and we'll talk it over. Oh, by the way, fellers, beginning to-night we keep open till eleven o'clock.”