The Hack DriverSinclair Lewis · Footprints Without Feet, Chapter 8 · CBSE Class 10
A young lawyer is sent to serve a summons on Oliver Lutkins in the small town of New Mullion. At the station he meets Bill, a cheerful hack driver who offers to help find Lutkins. They spend the whole day looking — and Bill never stops smiling, because Bill is Lutkins.
Author
Sinclair Lewis
Book
Footprints Without Feet
Type
Comic short story
Central device
Dramatic irony
Summary — paragraph by paragraph
A young lawyer sent on an unpleasant errand
The narrator is a young lawyer newly employed by a law firm. His seniors give him the unpleasant task of serving summons — legal documents that require people to appear in court. He has to travel to various small towns to find the defendants. He hates the work. When he is sent to New Mullion to find a man named Oliver Lutkins, he expects another miserable day in another small, dull town.
Bill — the friendly hack driver
At the New Mullion train station, the narrator meets Bill, a friendly, chatty hack driver (a carriage driver for hire). Bill seems like exactly the kind of warm, genuine, small-town character the narrator had romanticised from city life. He is helpful, good-humoured, and immediately offers to help find Lutkins. He seems to know everyone in town. The narrator is charmed and delighted. They spend the day together looking for Lutkins at Bill's suggestions.
The search — going everywhere but finding nothing
Bill takes the narrator to every place where Lutkins might be found: Fritz's saloon, Gustaff's barber shop, the poolroom, Lutkins's farm, Lutkins's mother's house. At each stop, they are just too late — Lutkins was there, but just left. Bill negotiates with each person on the narrator's behalf, going inside while the narrator waits outside. The narrator pays generously for the hack, buys Bill lunch, and feels he has made a real friend. He never finds Lutkins.
The narrator is sent back — and the trick is revealed
The narrator returns to his office having failed to serve the summons. His firm sends him back to New Mullion the next day with a person who knows what Lutkins looks like. As soon as they arrive, the local person identifies Bill at the station. Bill, the helpful hack driver — is Oliver Lutkins himself. He has spent the entire previous day helping the narrator look for himself. When Lutkins sees that he has been identified, he laughs. His mother, a formidable woman who apparently threatened the original identification party with a hot iron, joins in. The narrator is deeply embarrassed.
Character Analysis
Bill / Oliver Lutkins
The trickster — protagonist and antagonist simultaneouslyHis performance
Lutkins's deception is so good because it is built on genuine charm. He is friendly, warm, funny, and apparently helpful. He talks to the narrator as an equal, shares opinions, and seems genuinely engaged. This is not a cold con — it is a warm one. Lutkins makes the narrator feel he has found a true friend in a strange town.
His intelligence
Lutkins's plan is elegant: instead of avoiding the narrator, he becomes the narrator's guide. He controls every step of the search — who they visit, how long they stay, what is said. By staying close to his pursuer and leading the search himself, he ensures it fails. The plan requires quick thinking and constant improvisation.
His humour
When the trick is finally revealed, Lutkins laughs. He is not ashamed or frightened — he is amused. This detail humanises him. He bears the narrator no malice; it was a game, and he won. The laughter is the story's final, deflating note for the narrator.
The Narrator (the young lawyer)
The deceived — the story's moral subjectHis naivety
The narrator is young, idealistic, and too quick to trust. He romanticises small-town life and its people, seeing in Bill everything he imagined was absent from the city. This idealisation makes him easy to deceive — he wants Bill to be genuine, so he does not question whether he is.
His self-awareness
By the end, the narrator understands what happened and is embarrassed. But he also learns something about himself: he was deceived not just by Lutkins's skill but by his own desire to believe. The story gently mocks not just his gullibility but the urban romanticism that drove it.
What he represents
The narrator represents well-educated people who think they understand the world but are undone by their own assumptions. He is trained in law — a profession about evidence and proof — yet he takes Bill entirely at face value. His professional training and his personal gullibility are in comic contradiction.
Themes
Deception and gullibility
The story is fundamentally about how easy it is to deceive someone who wants to be deceived. The narrator is not stupid — he is trusting. Lutkins exploits this by being exactly what the narrator wants: warm, helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly. The story suggests that our desires shape our perceptions, and that this makes us vulnerable to those who understand our desires.
Urban romanticism about rural life
The narrator is a city-trained professional who romanticises small-town people as genuine and uncomplicated compared to city types. Lutkins is his idealised small-town character — and Lutkins is precisely the person deceiving him. The irony is that the narrator's romantic assumptions about rural honesty are what make the deception possible. Sinclair Lewis uses this to satirise a common urban sentiment.
Appearances and reality
Bill appears to be a helpful, genuine character — and is in fact the man the narrator is looking for. The story runs on the gap between how things appear and what they actually are. Lutkins uses his appearance (friendly, local, helpful) to create a false reality. The narrator trusts appearance over evidence.
Extract-Based Questions
The description of Bill and the moment of revelation are the most tested extracts. Know the dramatic irony in both.
"He was a large, rosy, friendly fellow. He was probably called 'Shorty' or 'Bill'. He had the kind of smile that makes you want to buy things from people you don't know."
Q1. What does this description of Bill suggest about the narrator's first impressions? What makes this description ironic in retrospect?
The description suggests that the narrator is immediately and powerfully charmed. The detail that Bill has 'the kind of smile that makes you want to buy things from people you don't know' is particularly revealing — it identifies, even as it describes the charm, the commercial dimension of that smile. In retrospect, this is perfectly ironic: the narrator did 'buy' something from Bill — a day's hire, several meals, and a complete story — and it was all in service of someone he did not know who was making him pay for his own deception. The narrator's charmed first impression is the root cause of everything that follows.
"He was so casual, so friendly, that I was not offended by his rudeness. He had a lively way of conversation."
Q1. Why is the narrator not offended by Bill's casual manner? What does this tell us about his state of mind?
The narrator is not offended because he is in the grip of idealisation. He has romanticised small-town people as honest and uncomplicated, and Bill fits the image perfectly. Bill's casual manner seems like authenticity — the opposite of city pretension — rather than like disrespect. This tells us that the narrator's judgements are being filtered through his desires: he sees what he wants to see, not what is actually there. His susceptibility to the deception is an emotional and intellectual condition, not just carelessness.
"Bill, the hack driver — was Lutkins himself. He had spent the whole day helping me look for himself!"
Q1. What is the effect of the exclamation mark in the final sentence? How does this sentence deliver the story's central irony?
The exclamation mark conveys the narrator's incredulity and embarrassment — the full force of realisation hitting him at once. The sentence's structure — 'helping me look for himself' — captures the irony perfectly. The phrase is logically absurd (you cannot help someone find you while being the person they are looking for) but it is exactly what happened. The absurdity is the joke and the lesson simultaneously. Lutkins spent the entire day in control of a search designed to find him, and the narrator paid for the privilege.
Short-Answer Questions (3 marks)
Name the trick — 'Lutkins acted as the narrator's guide while being the person the narrator was looking for.' That specificity earns the marks.
Q1. Why was the narrator charmed by Bill? What qualities did Bill seem to have?
The narrator was charmed by Bill because Bill seemed to embody everything he had romanticised about small-town life: warmth, directness, local knowledge, and genuine friendliness. Bill was large, cheerful, and had a disarming smile. He was knowledgeable about everyone in town, spoke freely, and seemed to take a personal interest in helping the narrator. Compared to the impersonal city world the narrator worked in, Bill seemed like a genuine, uncomplicated human being — which was exactly the impression Lutkins wanted to create.
Q2. How did Lutkins deceive the narrator throughout the day?
Lutkins, posing as 'Bill' the hack driver, volunteered to help the narrator find Oliver Lutkins. He controlled the entire search — suggesting where they should go, going inside each location to ask questions while the narrator waited outside, and always reporting that Lutkins had 'just left'. He kept the narrator busy, cheerful, and spending money (on the hack, on lunch) while ensuring they never found the man they were looking for. Since the man they were looking for was Bill himself, the search was designed to fail from the start.
Q3. What lesson did the narrator learn from his experience in New Mullion?
The narrator learned that his romanticised view of small-town people — as more genuine, honest, and uncomplicated than city people — was naive. He had been deceived precisely because he wanted to believe in Bill's friendliness. The lesson is that good intentions and warm appearances can be tools of deception, and that trusting someone without evidence is a form of gullibility, not open-mindedness. The narrator's embarrassment at being outsmarted by the very person he was sent to find is a deflating but important education.
Long-Answer Questions (5 marks)
Write 8–10 sentences. Include the role of the narrator's romanticism in enabling the deception — it is the story's central irony.
Q1. How does Sinclair Lewis use humour and irony in 'The Hack Driver' to comment on the narrator's gullibility and his romantic ideas about rural life?
'The Hack Driver' is a comic story about a well-educated young lawyer who is thoroughly deceived by the man he has been sent to find. Sinclair Lewis uses both irony and humour to make his point — not cruelly, but with the kind of gentle mockery that makes the reader laugh and think at the same time.
The central irony of the story is structural: the narrator spends an entire day looking for Lutkins with Lutkins as his guide. Every time they 'miss' him, Lutkins has orchestrated the miss. The search is a perfect inversion of its stated purpose. The narrator pays for this inversion — the hack fee, the lunch, the wasted day — and is happy to do it because he believes he has found a genuine friend.
Lewis uses humour primarily through the gap between the narrator's enthusiasm and the reader's growing suspicion. As the narrator describes Bill's charm, his directness, his warmth, the reader begins to ask: why does this helpful man know exactly where Lutkins isn't? The humour is in seeing the deception before the narrator does.
The story also satirises urban romanticism. The narrator has idealised small-town people as genuine and honest — a contrast with the impersonal city. Lutkins is, in fact, exactly the kind of warm, friendly small-town person the narrator imagined. But he uses that warmth to deceive. Lewis's point is that the narrator's romantic assumptions about rural honesty are precisely what make him vulnerable.
The ending — Lutkins laughing when identified — is the story's final ironic touch. He bears no malice. It was a game, and it was fun. The narrator's embarrassment is real; Lutkins's amusement is genuine. The story closes on this asymmetry: the trained lawyer was outsmarted, cheerfully, by a hack driver who never stopped smiling.
Marking Breakdown
5 marks: 1 for the structural irony (looking for Lutkins with Lutkins), 1 for the humour of the gap between narrator's trust and reader's suspicion, 1 for the satire of urban romanticism, 1 for Lutkins's character as the embodiment of the narrator's ideal used against him, 1 for the final irony of the laughing ending.
Grammar in this chapter
Lewis's comic narration uses reported speech extensively — the narrator recounts what Bill said about Lutkins throughout the day.