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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a34b26d --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #67550 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67550) diff --git a/old/67550-0.txt b/old/67550-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 35e1f4b..0000000 --- a/old/67550-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1232 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Troubled Waters, by Bertrand W. -Sinclair - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Troubled Waters - -Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair - -Release Date: March 3, 2022 [eBook #67550] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark. - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROUBLED WATERS *** - - - 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. - -“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. - - -[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 20, 1915 issue -of The Popular Magazine.] - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROUBLED WATERS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. 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Thus, we do not -necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper -edition. - -Most people start at our website which has the main PG search -facility: www.gutenberg.org - -This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/old/67550-0.zip b/old/67550-0.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index dea513a..0000000 --- a/old/67550-0.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/67550-h.zip b/old/67550-h.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index dcd7596..0000000 --- a/old/67550-h.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/67550-h/67550-h.htm b/old/67550-h/67550-h.htm deleted file mode 100644 index 75b1943..0000000 --- a/old/67550-h/67550-h.htm +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1340 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html> -<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> -<head> - <meta charset="UTF-8" /> - <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Troubled Waters, by Bertrand W. Sinclair</title> - <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover" /> - <style> - body { margin-left:8%; margin-right:8%; } - p { text-indent:1.15em; margin-top:0.1em; margin-bottom:0.1em; text-align:justify; } - .ce { text-align:center; text-indent:0; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; } - h1 { text-align:center; font-weight:bold; font-size:1.2em; margin-top:1em; } - .tn { background-color:linen; font-size:0.8em; border:1px solid silver; margin-top:1.8em; margin-left:8%; margin-bottom:1em; width:80%; padding:0.4em 2%; } - </style> -</head> -<body> -<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Troubled Waters, by Bertrand W. Sinclair</p> -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Troubled Waters</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: March 3, 2022 [eBook #67550]</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p> - <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark.</p> -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROUBLED WATERS ***</div> -<div class='ce'> -<h1>Troubled Waters </h1> -<div>By Bertrand W. Sinclair</div> -<div style='font-size:0.9em;font-style:italic;'>Author of “Cargo Reef,” “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” Etc. </div> -</div> -<blockquote> -<p style='text-indent:0'>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.</p> - -</blockquote> -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Hello, Steve!” he said. “It’s a long time since we met.”</p> - -<p>“It is, and I sure never expected to meet you here,” I blurted out.</p> - -<p>His face darkened a trifle.</p> - -<p>“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?”</p> - -<p>I had to admit that he did, although I had no idea what he was driving -at.</p> - -<p>“You’re a friend of mine, aren’t you, Steve?” said he.</p> - -<p>“I certainly am,” I replied.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>He considered this a minute.</p> - -<p>“All right,” he said indifferently. “It’ll be a change, anyway.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“For God’s sake, look at that!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Give me the line!” Joe said, as she shot down toward us.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>Grosbeak</i> 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.</p> - -<p>“Haul in!” Joe panted. “Haul fast!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Ahoy, you!” he yelled. We were running now along the bank to keep -abreast. “Swim for it. I’ll meet you with the line.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Pay out!” he gritted. “And keep along with the current if you can.”</p> - -<p>Then he plunged, thirty feet to the gray-green sweep of the eddy.</p> - -<p>It was a great fight, with us two helpless watchers and every chance -against that hardy soul from the <i>Grosbeak</i>. 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.</p> - -<p>And he did. With a scant fathom of line left in my hands, and the -<i>Grosbeak</i> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>He sat up and looked at the <i>Grosbeak</i>, now on her second swing, -drawing fatefully near to the vortex.</p> - -<p>“I wonder if she’ll make it?” he murmured indifferently.</p> - -<p>“It’s about a hundred to one that she won’t,” I answered.</p> - -<p>He looked at Joe appraisingly.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“She isn’t going to strike the rips,” my bolt cutter put in. “Look at -the old packet.”</p> - -<p>The <i>Grosbeak</i> 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.</p> - -<p>“Either way,” said the man, with a shrug of his shoulders, “it made no -difference.”</p> - -<p>“Well, you didn’t,” Joe observed quietly.</p> - -<p>“Thanks to you, I didn’t,” he said. “Still—I wasn’t particular.”</p> - -<p>I looked at him attentively. He nursed his chin in one hand, staring -at the place where the <i>Grosbeak</i> 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.</p> - -<p>“How did it happen?” I asked. “The <i>Grosbeak’s</i> a stranger through -these waters.”</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“How?” I inquired.</p> - -<p>“Took the dinghy to row ashore,” the man grinned. “A whirl caught -him.”</p> - -<p>He turned his thumb down expressively.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“Less time than that,” I smiled. “In the meantime, come on to the -cabin and get some dry clothes on—both of you.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“What hit <i>you</i> below the belt?” Joe asked softly.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“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 <i>is</i> 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?”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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?”</p> - -<p>I nodded.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>Joe shook his head.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“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?”</p> - -<p>“They didn’t seem to,” Joe answered sullenly. “She was sick of it all. -She thought she saw happiness in another direction.”</p> - -<p>“The reason for that you probably know better than I do,” Broderick -said. “But if I loved a woman I’d take <i>nothing</i> 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.”</p> - -<p>“No chance,” Joe muttered.</p> - -<p>“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!”</p> - -<p>“You don’t understand,” Joe answered somberly. “There’s some things a -man can’t put into words. He can only feel them.”</p> - -<p>“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. <i>You</i> took a lot of things for granted. Seems to me you -ran away under fire.”</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>Broderick’s eyes gleamed.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>Joe got to his feet and threw his arms wide to the sunset, and let -them fall by his side.</p> - -<p>“Why should I try to fool myself?” he said. “All I want is to forget. -That’s all.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Joe unburdened his soul very completely,” he said. “Does his right -name happen to be Galloway?”</p> - -<p>“Why, yes, that’s his name,” said I—surprised into admission. “How did -you know?”</p> - -<p>“I didn’t know,” Broderick muttered. “But I had a hunch.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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?”</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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:</p> - -<p>“Oh, Steve!”</p> - -<p>“Here!” I answered.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Did you hear?” he asked.</p> - -<p>“I heard you declare yourself,” said I frankly. “Then I moved out of -earshot.”</p> - -<p>He sat silent for a time.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“I’ve known Joe since we were kids,” I said. “He’s a white man.”</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>Broderick lifted his head and laughed harshly.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>Broderick laughed hard and mirthlessly.</p> - -<p>“I suppose I could,” he said. “But it would be better if he made the -first move. However, I know <i>she</i> 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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Broderick strode along the cliff. When I caught up with him he was -seated on a log, holding his face in his hands.</p> - -<p>“You did write, And she came,” I said—for lack of something less -obvious.</p> - -<p>“Shut up!” he gritted. “I’m not in a talking mood.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“I guess all’s quiet along the Potomac.” Broderick lifted his face at -last. “I’ve done my bit. Let’s go back.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Ed has gone,” I said—and added a white lie to smooth things. “He told -me to wish you luck.”</p> - -<p>It seemed to me a shade of relief crossed both their faces. Love <i>is</i> -selfish. But I couldn’t blame them.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<div class='tn'> - <p style='text-indent:0'>Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in - the October 20, 1915 issue of <i>The Popular Magazine</i>.</p> -</div> -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROUBLED WATERS ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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