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.