The Project Gutenberg eBook of Troubled Waters, by Bertrand W. Sinclair

Title: Troubled Waters

Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair

Release Date: March 3, 2022 [eBook #67550]

Language: English

Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark.

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.

“Four years ago,” he continued, “like lightning out of a clear sky, she told me one day that our life had been an utter failure—that she had ceased to love me, that she had grown to love another man, and there was no use trying to go on.

“Man,” he broke out passionately, “it drove me nearly mad, with the combined madness of grief and jealous rage. I knew I loved her, but until I saw myself losing her I never realized how much she meant to me, how my life was bound up in her. I humiliated myself, pleaded and raved and threatened. It seemed to me a madness that had stricken her. I couldn’t see why such a thing had to be. There we were, happy, I thought, in our companionship. We had our home, our little circle of friends, all the beautiful plans for the future that, we’d made together. Nothing seemed to count—nothing but the fact that she loved some other man and no longer cared for me—that she was living a lie, and that she was not going to live a lie any longer.

“I didn’t know the other man. I never saw him, never learned his name even. I never could visualize him, somehow. But he was there somewhere in the background, with her hopes and dreams focused on him. I couldn’t seem to grasp that phase of it, why she should turn away from me, when she had loved me once, as I know she did. We’d had our differences. Every man and woman living in the intimacy of marriage has them. They were trifling things to me, I don’t even know if it was a mere succession of petty irritations that brought it about. But there it was. And while she was sorry, while she regretted it, there was only the one way out as she saw it. She had to get away from me, to live her own life in her own way. In every bitter discussion that I forced on her when I was lashing out against the impending break I dreaded so, I could see that she was getting farther and farther away from me, that I had no power to stir in her any emotion except resentment, and a little pity.

“So I threw up my hands. I wanted to play fair, as she had played fair. She wanted to be free, and she was financially dependent on me alone. I cherished a glimmer of hope that she’d come to her senses—as I put it—at the last minute. But she didn’t. And so I sacrificed everything, turned it all into cash. I didn’t care. Hell, there was a while I didn’t know what I was doing. I had to get quick action or go mad. She was leaving me, but I didn’t want economic need to drive her into another man’s arms before she was ready. She wanted to avoid that herself. Oh, we talked it over time and again, talked soberly and sensibly when I felt like shutting off the breath in her white throat rather than let her go. That was only white-hot jealousy. I couldn’t help it, but I did control it. When I’d cleaned up everything I had about eighteen thousand dollars in cash, and I’d wrecked the foundation of a fortune. But that seemed nothing beside this other dread thing that was happening. That gnawed at me day and night. And I had to move with caution, to avoid open scandal. I wanted to save her that. Oh, it was maddening! But the time came at last. I kept five thousand and gave her the rest. And I hit the trail. I had to. I’ve been hitting it ever since.

“I never heard from her. I don’t know how she’s faring. I do know that I can’t get away from the hurt of it. I’ve lost something more than my mate. The heart to buck up and make life give me those things I used to value is clean gone. I strewed that five thousand dear across the continent trying to make myself forget. But I didn’t. You can’t knife a man that way without leaving a sore wound. I peg along from day to day. But when I think of doing otherwise, when I think of trying to start all over again, I find myself asking ‘What’s the use?’ If I could shut out all those old memories. But I can’t. My mind keeps eternally on them, like this back eddy, circling around what was and might have been and can’t be. I’m a Samson shorn, without the mercy of perishing when the pillars of my house fell about me.”

Joe stopped and drew the palm of his hand over his forehead. His eyes were glistening. He stared for a minute out over the uneasy gulf, unseeing, over Broderick’s head. And Broderick’s gaze was fixed on him with a queer, half-pitying expression.

“Didn’t you ever go back or write to find out if, after all, your wife might have been the victim of an illusion and only realized it when you stepped out of her life?” Broderick asked carelessly.

Joe shook his head.

“No,” said he. “I didn’t give her up without a struggle, and when I had to I let go completely. I couldn’t persuade myself to make another effort. She knew her own mind, and she held to her determination when it was making me suffer like the damned. She was sorry. But I didn’t want her pity. I wanted her love.”

“You don’t get my point,” Broderick pursued. “If you ask me, I’d say you acted like a fool—any man’s a fool to take a woman’s actions for granted until she’s committed herself irrevocably. You’ve been eating your heart out for four years, and yet you don’t even know but what she’s suffering as much as you do—aching for you to come back. For all you know, the very moment that you were gone and she was free to marry the other man, it may have dawned on her that she didn’t want to, that you filled a place in her life no one else could possibly fill. I don’t think you’ve got a very comprehensive knowledge of women, Joe, or of human nature in general. You two loved each other. All right. That being so, you passed together through that peculiar ecstasy of feeling that burns like a flame at mating, and, like a flame, sometimes burns out—but always leaves smoldering embers. A man and a woman can only have that emotional experience at its full intensity, once. When you have had it, it’s something that no one and nothing can take away. Its impressions can’t be ironed out as you can iron the wrinkles out of a piece of cloth. It’s a bond between a man and a woman as long as their hearts beat. Do you suppose that the hundred and one associations of your life together meant nothing to your wife?”

“They didn’t seem to,” Joe answered sullenly. “She was sick of it all. She thought she saw happiness in another direction.”

“The reason for that you probably know better than I do,” Broderick said. “But if I loved a woman I’d take nothing for granted. Not even if she swore to her feelings on a stack of Bibles. She’d have to prove her words by her deeds before I gave up hope. If she’d been mine once, I’d almost have to know she was finding comfort in another man’s arms before I’d be convinced that her feeling for me was dead. There’d be pain in that, but it would take about that to convince me. And by your own admission you don’t know. You haven’t given her or yourself a fair fighting chance. It’s one thing to act in a whirl of feeling. Things often look altogether different when you’ve dropped back to everyday living. You took your hurt and ran away and nursed it. You didn’t wait to see what happened after you’d done your part. You don’t know but she’s somewhere nursing a grief that overtook her the minute you took yourself beyond sight and hearing of her.”

“No chance,” Joe muttered.

“No chance?” Broderick echoed, with a tinge of scorn in his voice. “The law of probabilities is all on your side. I wish I felt my chances as good. I wish that my chance of happiness had been half as good as yours. Would I throw up my hands and go wandering up and down the earth with pain and uncertainty and self-pity like thorns in my flesh? I should say not!”

“You don’t understand,” Joe answered somberly. “There’s some things a man can’t put into words. He can only feel them.”

“But I do understand,” Broderick insisted. “I’ve been through the mill. A man gets on the grid, and he can only squirm. I know what it is to ache with a pain that isn’t physical. But with me it came of actual unescapable knowledge—the pain of sheer unchangeable hopelessness. You took a lot of things for granted. Seems to me you ran away under fire.”

Joe threw out his hands impotently. “What the devil else could I do?” he demanded harshly. “She had to be free—free to marry the man she wanted. I could have stood on my rights as a husband. What was the use? She’d only have hated me. It wasn’t any light love affair with her. She wasn’t that kind. She wanted happiness—she could only see it in a certain direction—but she wanted it to come decently and honorably. There was no ground for divorce. I had to devise a ground. So I deserted her. As I saw it, there wasn’t anything else for me to do.”

Broderick’s eyes gleamed.

“You’re a man,” he said quietly, “a real man. But a fool for all that, I think. Didn’t it ever occur to you that she might really miss you after those years of intimate living? That your clean sweep of everything might have made a gap in her life that nothing but you yourself could fill in again? A woman’s human—gifted or cursed, as you like to put it—with all the human vagaries of impulse. Sometimes it takes a grand upheaval to make us see things as they really are—to know ourselves.”

Joe got to his feet and threw his arms wide to the sunset, and let them fall by his side.

“Why should I try to fool myself?” he said. “All I want is to forget. That’s all.”

He went into the cabin. We heard the creak of his bunk as he threw himself down. Broderick clasped both hands over his knees and stared at the ground. His brows knitted, as over some problem he strove to solve. After a minute, he looked at me.

“Joe unburdened his soul very completely,” he said. “Does his right name happen to be Galloway?”

“Why, yes, that’s his name,” said I—surprised into admission. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know,” Broderick muttered. “But I had a hunch.”

He sat for a little while, picking up pebbles and casting them over the bank with a flip of his hand. Then he, too, rose and went into the cabin.

The door stood open beside me, and the small window above my head. Every word they uttered within came distinctly to me. I heard Broderick repeat almost word for word, impatiently, challengingly, the last questioning sentences he had put to Joe.

“Why bother me with your theories,” Galloway answered roughly. “What is it to you? What do you know about these things I’ve been fool enough to talk about?”

“I know all there is to know about it,” Broderick answered slowly. “A great deal more than you yourself know. I’m the other man.”

I drew beyond hearing at that. It lay between the two of them, a matter intimate and grievous, not for casual ears. So I moved to the corner, where only came the indistinguishable drone of their voices, wondering to myself if the devil that rises in men where a woman is concerned would presently set them at each other’s throats. They were strong, passionate men. I was a little afraid for them, for I liked them both.

An hour passed. Dusk merged into darkness. Still they talked, their voices never rising above that repressed murmur. Then the lamp flashed its yellow square through the doorway, and both came out. Joe turned away and walked along the cliff slowly, a dim outline in the night. Broderick stood looking about. Presently he called:

“Oh, Steve!”

“Here!” I answered.

He came and sat down on the ground beside me. The match he laid to his pipe bowl showed his face hard-drawn. His eyes smoldered.

“Did you hear?” he asked.

“I heard you declare yourself,” said I frankly. “Then I moved out of earshot.”

He sat silent for a time.

“Joe doesn’t actively blame me,” he said at last. “But he resents everything. He’s lived within himself so long, bottling up his grief, that he’s morbid. I can’t do anything with him, can’t make him see sense. The thing he ought to do for their own two sakes—write to Norma or go to her and make up—he won’t do. You knew her, it seems. You heard his side of it—absolutely true, so far as it goes. But there’s two sides to everything.”

“Fire away,” said I—for I knew by his tone that he was smoldering inside, that he wanted the relief of talk that would neither be misunderstood nor resented.

“Joe made the same mistake that other men have made and regretted,” Broderick went on, “as near as I can gather. He let his ambition and his business overshadow his wife and his home. I suppose he felt that everything was fixed and secure and final. And that’s a bad thing with any woman young and proud and passionate as Norma Galloway. It was very simple. Joe was getting wholly immersed in his business. He was traveling a lot for his firm. And I happened to wander into her life at a time when she was in a peculiarly receptive state of mind. That sounds commonplace—but I’m not good at analysis. I loved her in my own headlong way. Nothing else mattered to me but her. I knew where I stood. She thought she did. There wasn’t anything sordid or underhand about it. We talked it over from every angle, God knows. She wasn’t happy with him. All her feeling for him seemed dead. She knew I loved her, and she believed she loved me, and that for us two life together meant happiness if we could take it up honorably together. So she told him, and you know how he played his part.”

“I’ve known Joe since we were kids,” I said. “He’s a white man.”

“He is,” Broderick agreed. “Every inch of him. But, as I said, something of a fool where a woman’s heart is concerned. He took too much for granted—let go too easily. He didn’t have anything but her word for it—and a woman’s word is nothing in matters of this sort. One can talk and talk and never get anywhere. It’s deeds that count. He didn’t give her a chance. He never saw me, never even knew my name. I wasn’t looming a big figure before him to drive him insane with impotent jealousy. But when the big upheaval came, he effaced himself as absolutely as if he had been buried. He made no effort to learn how things went.

“And then”—Broderick bowed his head for a second—“then, after he was gone, and there was nothing to do but wait patiently a little while, get a divorce quietly, and marry me, she woke up. It wasn’t me she wanted. It was Joe. She’d loved him in the beginning. When he’d made the complete renunciation, stepped out of her life for good and all, she found something lacking, a place that nobody else could fill, that she wanted him back, that her heart ached to have him back. Oh, you can’t ever tell anything about a woman. And yet, I suppose it was only natural. He’d become a part of her life. I was only an incident. I suppose so many things used to rise up and make her long for him. She’d lived with him. The nearest she’d ever been to me was to kiss me shyly once or twice.

“Anyway, once he was gone, it was all different. The money he gave her she banked and left alone. She would no more have lived on it than she would have let me support her. She used to say that she was being punished for breaking a good man’s heart for a passing whim.”

Broderick lifted his head and laughed harshly.

“Meaning Joe, of course,” he said. “It didn’t seem to occur to her that I was very deeply involved. The most she would let me do for her was to help her get a position. I happened to have a cousin in the millinery business in Utica, and Norma got work there—enough to live decently on. And when I’d tried every means to move her, and failed, I had to get out and get action or go crazy. So I went on the tramp, like Joe, a good deal. I can live anywhere, under any conditions. And there you are.

“But,” he broke out, after a little, “I didn’t let go like he did. I wrote to her. Time and again, at first. Every few months since. That’s how I know where she is, and how she still feels. She’s there yet, pegging away, waiting. She’s his wife, legally, in spirit, every way. She’s been true as steel. And her one solace is that some time he’ll come back, or she’ll find out where he is and win him back and make up somehow for these ghastly years.

“And can you see the tragedy in it?” Broderick went on. “He refuses to act. He won’t do anything. He says he has suffered till he’s numb. And I can’t make him see that she has suffered, too, is suffering yet, as he is. It’s pride. If I were in his place, I’d have no pride. I’d crawl on my hands and knees in the dust back to her if I could create for myself the longing she has for him. It isn’t worth while to be proud and aloof and miserable when all you have to do is reach out your hands for happiness. Two of us can get our feet out of this deadly coil. Why should all three be lonely and miserable? I know he doesn’t want to have it that way. It’s just a stubborn streak. He’s morbid. What has been can’t be helped. But the future, that’s a different matter.”

“You might write and tell her where he is and how he feels about it,” I suggested. “That would be a fine thing to do.”

Broderick laughed hard and mirthlessly.

“I suppose I could,” he said. “But it would be better if he made the first move. However, I know she wouldn’t hesitate. Yes, I dare say it would be eminently proper for me to be the god in the machine—to bring them together with a Heaven-bless-you-my-children—and then fade away. Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that.”

He got up abruptly and walked into the cabin. When I followed, he was in his bunk, the blankets drawn over his head. A few minutes later, Joe came in. What sort of truce they had declared I never knew. Between them as men there was genuine liking. If that matter of a woman had stirred up feeling of any intensity between them, they were men enough to repress it.

So, for a matter of two weeks, the days marched past, filled with the monotonous labor of cutting and piling cedar bolts. The fall days were on us, with their long, gray evenings. My bolt contract was about done, and we took it easy, working short hours. The first man in kindled the kitchen fire, and also built another on the ground before the cabin door. When we had eaten we would sit outside under the projecting eave smoking our pipes before the cheerful crackling logs. It was pretty much as it had been before that night of soul unburdenings—except that we talked a bit less freely, there was more of constraint upon us.

Then one evening, in the first gray of dusk, when we had knocked off early and were sitting outside by the fire, watching the same tubby coaster that had brought Galloway to Coderre go lurching past Skeleton Point into the maw of Hell Gate, I heard the clatter of a buggy on the little-used road that ran between the landing and my camp. In a minute it gained the clearing. I saw the figure of a woman beside the driver. A few seconds later she was clambering out and walking toward us with a firm step. Norma Galloway, just as I recalled her, fair strands of hair wind-blown across her face, deep blue eyes shining, lips a trifle parted, her gaze fixed on Joe.

I turned to look for Broderick. He was all but behind the cabin, and he beckoned me imperatively. I followed. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one man looming before her, and he stood rooted to the ground as if he doubted the evidence of his visual sense.

Broderick strode along the cliff. When I caught up with him he was seated on a log, holding his face in his hands.

“You did write, And she came,” I said—for lack of something less obvious.

“Shut up!” he gritted. “I’m not in a talking mood.”

I don’t know how long we sat there. Broderick did not move, nor lift his head. It grew dark. I looked toward the cabin now and then, and once saw the fire break into a yellow gleam when some one stirred it.

“I guess all’s quiet along the Potomac.” Broderick lifted his face at last. “I’ve done my bit. Let’s go back.”

We walked slowly. Nearing the cabin and the soft glow before it, a stick broke in a shower of sparks and sent up a bright flame that threw into bold relief two figures—Joe on a block seat, his wife curled on the earth beside smiled up at him, and then at me. There wasn’t any further explanation needed.

“Ed has gone,” I said—and added a white lie to smooth things. “He told me to wish you luck.”

It seemed to me a shade of relief crossed both their faces. Love is selfish. But I couldn’t blame them.

I gave them the cabin that night and made my bed beside the fire. But I didn’t sleep. No. Broderick loomed too big in my mind.

The back eddy had brought him unwitting to the spot, to straighten a grievous tangle in two lives, to bring peace to unquiet souls. And it might be that the eddy took him away. I don’t know. I’ve often wondered. I know I never saw him, never heard of him again.