Part 1

Troubled Waters

By Bertrand W. Sinclair Author of “Cargo Reef,” “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” Etc.

Life is a ghastly joke sometimes. It lifts a man to the pinnacle of his dreams—and then blows up the pinnacle. Instance this city man, turned logger.

The first time I met Joe Galloway after he married, I envied him. A friendly, good-natured envy, you understand. He had attained what looked to me like genuine success; he had got somewhere, both in a material and spiritual way. He had a connection that gave him income sufficient for his needs, sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living, and a substantial interest in the business besides, which was slowly but surely building up a competence for him. He had his little circle of friends, and his home. And he was mated to a woman any man might be proud of. I could not see anything a man really craves that was beyond his reach.

I’ve not had what you’d call a multifarious experience in the way of married folk, but I haven’t gone through the world blind. I have seen a lot that lived the proverbial cat-and-dog existence. I’ve seen a lot more that lived in a state of more or less tolerant indifference. And I have seen a few that appeared to have a corner on confidence and affection and genuine understanding, to be really mated, in the widest meaning of the term. Galloway and his wife seemed to me to be one of the finest examples of the latter that I’d ever come across. Joe was a real man, sterling. If one may know a woman by her ordinary manner, then Norma rang as true as he did. And she was a beautiful woman, too; one of those tall, perfectly formed, radiant creatures that a man is proud to be seen walking down the street with.

I’d gone to school with Joe Galloway, but I had seen nothing of him for many a long moon, until I ran across him quite by accident on a trip East. We had been chummy kids, and we had drifted apart because Joe was one of those quiet beggars that knows what he wants and stays everlastingly on the trail of his purposes—and I’m a rolling stone, a full-fledged brother in the order of the wandering foot. But time and distance made scant difference. He had a warm recollection of me, and he insisted that I make his home my headquarters. I did, and spent nearly three weeks with them. They made me feel one with themselves—and, as I said, I envied them in their happiness. If they were not happy and contented, there is no such satisfying state of mind.

I came back to the coast in due time, and while I didn’t write, because I’m not much on correspondence, I did retain some very vivid impressions of Joe and Norma Galloway. I liked to think of them like a pair of birds in their nest, while I was knocking about in logging camps, with bolt cutters and all the roving, restless lot my way of life took me among. A man playing a lone hand finds his life full of bleak spots. He can’t dodge them. And I suppose I thought of those two often because their lives seemed full of desirable things which had eluded me. As I saw it, they had attained as near to the ideal as we can ever reasonably expect to come.

So you can judge of my surprise and know that I was filled with deep wonder and kindred emotions when I came out on the wharf at Coderre Landing just as a tubby coaster backed away, and plumped into Joe Galloway sitting on a war bag, dressed in mackinaws and calked boots like any logger. I’d never seen him in such garb. I hadn’t seen him at all in four years, and he had a week’s growth of beard—but I knew him. And I knew by the way his eyes widened and then narrowed that he knew me. I spoke to him. For a second I thought he meant to refuse recognition. Then he stuck out his hand.

“Hello, Steve!” he said. “It’s a long time since we met.”

“It is, and I sure never expected to meet you here,” I blurted out.

His face darkened a trifle.

“No,” he answered slowly, “I don’t suppose you did. Still—I’m in a logging country, dressed like a logger. In fact, I am a logger. Do I look the part?”

I had to admit that he did, although I had no idea what he was driving at.

“You’re a friend of mine, aren’t you, Steve?” said he.

“I certainly am,” I replied.

“Well, then,” he continued, in a weary sort of tone, “just take me for granted. I’m here, going to work in a shingle-bolt camp. I’m a woodsman, and my name is Joe Hall. Just remember that, and don’t ask me how it comes to be that way. Will you? I’m here, but I don’t know how long I’ll be here, nor where I’ll be headed when I leave. And I don’t want to be reminded that I was ever anything else, or that things were ever any different.”

Of course, I told him I would meet him halfway on that proposition, and we went up to the Coderre Hotel and had a drink, Joe packing his war bag over his shoulder, as if he had done it all the days of his life. We talked more or less perfunctorily, haltingly, dodging consciously old days and old themes. I found out that he was bound for the bolt camp under whose owner I myself held a five-hundred-cord contract. He seemed a little glad of that, and asked me a lot about my camp and prospects. Then, after a little, he asked the way to Ryder’s. I showed him, and he started out. I wanted him to wait an hour or so till I got my business transacted, but he seemed anxious to get on, and I didn’t urge my company upon him.

And I watched him hike off down an old skid road that led to Ryder’s camp at Skeleton Point, wondering. Naturally I wondered. When a man sloughs everything that makes life worth while and turns up at the hardest job on the Pacific coast with a different name, and something hard and bitter in his eyes, there’s something radically wrong. I didn’t ask him what it was. I had no intention of asking, of prying into his affairs merely to satisfy my own very human curiosity. In the language of the undertaker, it was his funeral. But I wondered. I surely did. I didn’t think he’d committed any crime. He didn’t act like a fugitive. He seemed to me more like a man who had come some terrible cropper and lost all heart for everything. And it must have been something sinister and very sweeping, for he wasn’t the sort of man who lets go easily.

What I saw of him afterward only confirmed those first impressions. He stuck at the Ryder job, and he used to come down to my camp every few days and play crib with me in the evening. There wasn’t much of the old life in him. Not that he was wearied with the work, because he was a powerful man. Whatever ailed him in his soul, his body hadn’t suffered. I’ve lived in the open most of my life, doing things that take endurance and muscle, and he was physically a better man than I. But where he used to sparkle, to be full of the devil, now he would sit around quietly, always immersed in his own thoughts, an absent look stealing over his face if he were left long to himself. And he never spoke of anything east of the Rockies, although the coast States seemed like a well-read book to him. So far as speech and actions went, the first thirty years of his life that I knew directly and indirectly seemed to have been blotted out. He never talked about it, and I dare say he didn’t even want to think about it.

Things ran along like this for a month or so. Joe mentioned at last that Ryder was giving the men rotten grub. I put in my oar at that. I had a contract under Ryder, but we hadn’t much use for each other—and I was short-handed, too.

“You come down here and cut bolts for me,” I proposed. “I can’t pay more per cord than Ryder does, but I’ll guarantee you better food.”

He considered this a minute.

“All right,” he said indifferently. “It’ll be a change, anyway.”

He landed in my camp at ten the next morning and went to work. I can’t say that we got any closer for all that we worked in sight of each other by day and slept under the same roof in the same room at night. Joe remained a silent, preoccupied man. But he had decent food to eat, and I had an efficient shingle-bolt cutter, and, in addition, an able crib player to pass the lonely evenings.

I don’t know why, but I felt sorry for him. There was nothing concrete in his speech or action to arouse that feeling. It was just an atmosphere, one that I should likely never have sensed if I hadn’t known him under different circumstances. I couldn’t get it out of my head that the man had suffered, was still suffering, still being seared by some inner fire. It isn’t natural for a man of that type to cut loose from everything and everybody. He never got a letter, never seemed to expect one, never wrote one. He didn’t seem to have any care for the future, any ambition. He lived from one day to another, just putting in the day. It seemed to satisfy him. But it didn’t satisfy me. It didn’t seem natural.

When he had been with me about six weeks we began to get some bad summer winds on the gulf. Skeleton Point lies just at the entrance to one of the worst tidal passages on the whole North Pacific. The thirty-odd miles of the gulf’s width is pinched to a pair of half-mile narrows—one against Vancouver Island, one on the mainland side, where my camp stood. Through this pent channel the tides come and go with devilish ferocity. Woe to the small craft caught therein at the full run either way. Even the powerful coasters lie up for the slack of the tide, for few have power to buck that tide race, and if they run with it, the danger is little less. Reef and point thrust out from the closing shores to fling the headlong current this way and that in great whirls that will suck down a sixty-foot timber as if it were a match. The rivers of the Western watershed have their “hell gates”—but that gateway of the sea which I speak of, leading through narrow reaches to the open water of Queen Charlotte Sound, is the true gate to hell for those who take it otherwise than at slack water.

This snarling trap for mariners rose to the zenith of its fury a few hundred yards past the lagoon in which I boomed my shingle bolts for Ryder. Snarling rips lifted their torn crests offshore from my cabin, when the ebb run met the gulf swell. And just within Skeleton Point where the pent channel widened suddenly, beginning there and extending its circumference past my lagoon, there swirled and circled ceaselessly—save for a brief hour at slack water—a huge back eddy, in which sailed around and around all the driftwood and flotsam spewed through Hell Gate or brought to its door by ebb and flood. Round in its circle the gray-green water swept, swifter and more swift, until at full run in or out it raced, and a hollow whirlpool spun in the center like a top.

About three weeks after Joe came to work for me, we sat at dinner one day. Low tide came at one-thirty—the end of a big flood. It had become my habit to watch those tides. The tremendous inrushings and outpourings fascinated me. And I, like other men, had seen strange and fearful things happen there. Once, indeed, the foolhardy skipper of a coastwise boat, with ninety lives under his hand, tried to buck through Hell Gate. He had a sixteen-knot-boat contempt for fast water, and a schedule of gulf ports to make. He fought tide and whirl and rip and eddy till he laid Skeleton Point abeam. There his headway was no more than the race of the stream, and while he quivered and lurched a great swirl caught and swung him hard on the point, crushing the steel skin of his ship like so much cardboard—and of the ninety, only a dozen clawed desperately ashore. I saw that. I saw, too, a thirty-foot fishing boat go down by the nose in a whirlpool, go down and down till the water closed over her, to be shot afloat, keel up, ten minutes later, her crew of three drowned like rats in the pilot house. In no spirit of irony was that grim spot called Hell Gate.

As I said, we sat at our food, three of us. I gazed at the water foaming by the point, and saw nothing but the racing tide. A second later, with my eyes on my plate, Joe startled me with the vehemence of his exclamation:

“For God’s sake, look at that!”

I picked the boat up at a glance, and knew that in the moment of my inattention the tide had vomited her out of Hell Gate and past the black teeth of Skeleton Point. But she was in hard case, helpless in that terrible sweep, lurching heavily down to her sheer strake. Thus she would lie canted on her side half a minute on end. Then she would straighten loggily. Again she would spin in the grip of a whirl, a masterless craft, at the whimsical mercy of the sea. I knew that by the way she yawed and spun, and the silence of her—no chatter of engine, nor dull popping of exhaust. Her power plant was dead. She was about a forty-footer, of the work-boat type. As for her crew—one man stood by the stumpy signal mast, and that was all I saw. He waved a hand to us airily, as if it were all in the day’s work, that sickening lurch, that uncontrollable spinning in the swirls.

We were all outside on the bank by then, my third man, Joe, and myself. I squinted seaward and saw very near at hand the tide rips tumbling in a rising gulf swell.

“There’s only one chance for him on God’s green earth,” said I. “If he goes into those rips without steerageway—good night. If the back eddy catches him, we might heave him a line as she swings past. Come on!”

Past the mouth of the lagoon, a low cliff gave straight down on the eddy’s sweep, and I had often noticed that driftwood making its interminable round passed under the cliff. At the end of my cabin hung a coil of half-inch rope. This I took hurriedly, and a link from a boom chain weighing perhaps half a pound for a weight whereby to cast the line. Skirting the lagoon, we three came to the cliff and stood by to watch, I knotting fast the weight. And by the turn of chance or the hand of Destiny, the back eddy caught him in the nick of time.

As he swung out of the seaward stream into the eddy and turning from those ominous rips began his swift circle inshore and toward us, I knew that his chance was small if we failed to reach him on the first or second turn.

I knew his trouble by the boat’s loggy swing. Without power to give her steerageway, she had swept through Hell Gate, taking water by the barrel, escaping destruction against cliff and reef only by some miracle of the sea. But she rode deep, and listed heavily now to starboard, now to port, as if all weary of the struggle. Her buoyancy was gone. If she circled in the eddy till she drew to its center that spinning whirl would suck her down.

“Give me the line!” Joe said, as she shot down toward us.

It was the first word he had spoken, and with it there shone in his eyes such a gleam of resolve as I had never surprised there—as if before a fellow being’s peril his own embittered soul had cast off its lassitude, had fired with the human instinct to do, to help, to save.

He swung the link on the rope’s end as a sling-shot thrower whirls his missile, and as the boat—now showing the name _Grosbeak_ in bold white against her black bow—came abreast, he shot the line with a tremendous heave of his body. I could not have cast it as far by forty feet, I know. But the throw failed. It was scarce in a man’s arm to bridge the distance. The speed of the current helped to fool him besides. The line fell short, and to the rear.

“Haul in!” Joe panted. “Haul fast!”

I hauled, and as I hauled he threw off his clothes, his heavy boots, and catching the loose end of the line, knotted it about his breast under the armpits.

“Ahoy, you!” he yelled. We were running now along the bank to keep abreast. “Swim for it. I’ll meet you with the line.”

It was a desperate chance for both of them. But the man leaning against the pilot house threw off shoes and cap, and, running aft, poised lightly on the stern. Then he waved a hand and plunged headfirst, rose, and faced cliff-ward, borne swiftly along on the eddy, but swimming with slow, vigorous strokes. Galloway—or Hall, as he wished to be known—sprinted along the cliff and gained some headway on the swimmer.

“Pay out!” he gritted. “And keep along with the current if you can.”

Then he plunged, thirty feet to the gray-green sweep of the eddy.

It was a great fight, with us two helpless watchers and every chance against that hardy soul from the _Grosbeak_. With a line on Joe, we could haul him in. The other had to reach him or drown. And it seemed to me and my bolt cutter that he lost ground, that the eddy carried him out for all the power of his stroke. But we told each other that if he could hold his own Joe would get him.

And he did. With a scant fathom of line left in my hands, and the _Grosbeak_ man fast weakening, they met. I saw Joe grip him, and saw him relax in that grip. Then we hauled them in and lifted them out on a flat rock, both near gone—for the pull of the rope against the drag of the tide held them under half the time.

The man was conscious, but utterly exhausted, too spent to speak. He lay on his side, breast heaving, hair in clammy strands across his brow. A good-looking, clean-built chap of thirty, maybe. All he had on him was a thin undershirt and a pair of cotton overalls. Their damp cling threw into clean contours the depth of his chest and the ropy muscle of his arms. His face was almost boyish. He lay there panting, blinking up at me. Slowly a wry grin, an odd expression for one who had been near to death, stole across his face.

He sat up and looked at the _Grosbeak_, now on her second swing, drawing fatefully near to the vortex.

“I wonder if she’ll make it?” he murmured indifferently.

“It’s about a hundred to one that she won’t,” I answered.

He looked at Joe appraisingly.

“You’re all right,” said he, “to take a long chance like that for a rank stranger. I figured it was thumbs down for me. I knew I couldn’t swim ashore in that current, and I knew she’d founder as soon as she struck those rips.”

“She isn’t going to strike the rips,” my bolt cutter put in. “Look at the old packet.”

The _Grosbeak_ lay over on her side and skidded—that is the only way I can describe her action—skidded right into the whirlpool, and spun there a dozen turns. Then, curiously, her broad fan-tail stern sucked down, down till the bluff bow pointed skyward, and so spinning, she disappeared.

“Either way,” said the man, with a shrug of his shoulders, “it made no difference.”

“Well, you didn’t,” Joe observed quietly.

“Thanks to you, I didn’t,” he said. “Still—I wasn’t particular.”

I looked at him attentively. He nursed his chin in one hand, staring at the place where the _Grosbeak_ had been, a queer, pursed-up twist to his lips. For a man who had cheated death by scant ten feet of manila, he was singularly calm, even indifferent.

“How did it happen?” I asked. “The _Grosbeak’s_ a stranger through these waters.”

“Nanaimo boat,” said he. “Belongs to the G. G. Fish Company. We started through Hell Gate in plenty of time to get through on the first of the run. But she dropped her propeller. You can guess the rest. Except that the skipper—there were just the two of us—got panicky when she began to take water in some of the boiling places. He was so afraid for his life that he threw it away.”

“How?” I inquired.

“Took the dinghy to row ashore,” the man grinned. “A whirl caught him.”

He turned his thumb down expressively.

“So here I am,” he continued, “safe and sound, which I didn’t look for. Sitting on a rock in a shirt and overalls. Oh, well, it’ll be all the same a hundred years from now.”

“Less time than that,” I smiled. “In the meantime, come on to the cabin and get some dry clothes on—both of you.”

That is how Ed Broderick happened into my camp at Skeleton Point and gave me a pair of human enigmas to observe. He seemed quite indifferent as to where he went or what he did. A certain cynically cheerful humor came over him when he was dried and fed. He had no strings on him, he declared. The G. G. Company owed him no wages, and his duty to them ended with reporting the matter. And the upshot of that near-tragedy was that Broderick took on a job with me, cutting cedar into bolts for the hungry shingle saws.

From the very beginning he seemed to exercise a tonic effect on Joe. I don’t attempt to explain it. I know that it worked out that way. The two became fast friends. Broderick could always banish those silent spells of brooding under which Joe fell. He could make him grin, rouse him out of that deadly absorption in himself. They had in common the fact that both were afflicted with the itching foot, both had a past of which they never talked. Both were men of education, both were of the East. It showed in their inflections, their mannerisms. But the territory beyond the Rockies lay always ignored in the speech.

Otherwise it seemed that from the Gulf of Georgia to San Diego harbor their trails had crossed and recrossed unknowingly in the last four years. Many the incident they recalled where each had been among those present—a riot in a California hop field, a Frontier Day in Oregon, the stranding of a battleship on the bleak Washington coast. Brothers in unrest, they were, and I, listening to their talk of these things, wondered more and more what turn of fortune’s wheel had set Joe Galloway’s feet in these troubled ways.

Time passed, however, and Joe seemed to brighten up. So far as Broderick went, he was a mighty man with ax and saw, and my bolt piles rose in corded ricks. Some devil rode him, too, at times, but it rode him to drink more than was good for him, and to fight like a tiger when the liquor was on him. He seldom sat and pondered. He was all action. In the following two months, he broke out at divers times in this fashion. And one evening when the three of us were sitting with our pipes—I having let my other man go—Joe took him mildly to task. They had got so chummy that they had planned a prospecting and trapping trip when my contract was finished:

“What satisfaction is there in going on one of these rampages?” Joe asked. “You only hurt yourself and make enemies of the men you bruise up in those wild rows.”

“I don’t know that it’s a matter of satisfaction,” Broderick replied thoughtfully. “Only life seems to me now and then to be nothing but a ghastly joke. And I get a crazy impulse to tear everything to pieces.”

“What hit _you_ below the belt?” Joe asked softly.

“Myself, I guess,” Broderick grunted. “Circumstances. Most of us have our skeletons. When mine rattles I hate the noise so bad I try to drown it out any old way.”

“While I sit still and listen to the clatter of the bones—or I used to——” Joe threw out his hands impatiently. “Damn it, you’re right, Ed. Life _is_ a ghastly joke sometimes. It lifts a man to the pinnacle of his dreams—and then blows up the pinnacle. Look at me. Five years ago I could say honestly and fervently that the world was mine—or that part thereof that I desired. I had everything a man wants—money, friends, a home, a woman’s love. And I had to give it all up. It burned me. It hurts yet. I guess I let it hurt me, because it’s always been simmering in my mind, and I’ve never been able to talk about it to any one—never wanted to. I hugged it to myself, and went about crying to myself against fate. And still—I’ve often wondered if I’m any different from other men; if the same thing comes to other men, and if they take it the same way?”

He looked up. Broderick was staring absently out over the tide race past Skeleton Point, and Joe met only my mildly questioning gaze. He smiled gently.

“I didn’t murder anybody, nor loot a bank, nor commit any felony whatever to send me on the tramp under an assumed name, Steve,” he said to me. “I suppose when I put it in plain words it all sounds like a confession of sheer weakness. It was very simple. You remember how everything was with me when you were back there? You remember Norma?”

I nodded.