Читать книгу Wild Geese Calling - Stewart Edward White - Страница 8

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THE FLOATS

JOHN BECAME a Sunday-morning habitué of the floats. For some time he remained merely a tolerated outsider to that quaint and self-contained community. For it was a community, apart from the city’s population. Its members were a broad-shouldered, round-barreled lot, with hands that they carried at half grasp, and they all gave the impression of great strength, though possibly in many cases this appearance may have owed something to the thick, double-breasted pea jackets, which might well have been a uniform, so alike were they. Aboard their boats they moved with lightness and confidence, sensing and meeting the shifts of their footing; but ashore they stepped heavily, with slow accuracy, planting each foot. It was as though they distrusted the stability of the land.

This was off season for most of them. Accustomed, by necessity of tide and the habit of fish, to begin their day at north-latitude dawn, and at times to end it only when the dark waters sparkled with phosphorescence, they now luxuriated, lying in. Often John arrived, and there was not a sign of life except the blue plumes of wood smoke from the stovepipes, and here and there a dog, atop the house or in the bow, his nose flat to his paws, blinking sleepily but prepared to be vigilant should occasion require. Then hatches began to scrape back, heads to appear, men here and there to step on decks. There they stood for several moments and expanded their chests and shoulders and looked at the sky and all about them, sizing up the day. Their air of grand and spacious proprietorship tickled John. It was as though they owned the weather.

They moved about, stepping from boat to boat. The decks were an acknowledged common thoroughfare, so that even the guardian dogs did not lift their heads at one passing, though a stranger would have been clamorously challenged. A few seemed to have various small business to attend. To these slowly drifted idlers who roosted on house or combing. And there were always rows squatting on the stringers of the floats. They smoked and spat overside and stared straight ahead at nothing for a long time until someone was impelled to address a remark to empty space. Then ensued an exchange of gossip that might occasionally enliven into discussion or dispute for a while. It ran its course and sank below the companionable luxury of silence.

John, at first rather diffidently, ventured to join one of these groups on the stringers. They appeared not to object to John. One or two nodded briefly in his direction. Otherwise he might not have existed. It was not so much that they ignored him. He was negligible, like the sea gulls sitting there above, atop the tall piles. He was welcome to listen, if that pleased him, or just sit or smoke his pipe or go away. It was all one to them. This was a public float. His occasional experimental remark they paused gravely to attend. Perhaps after a while someone replied. But immediately they withdrew, as it were, to their own gossip or their own silence. It was better just to listen. John caught himself wondering humorously if he was real. Towards noon they got up, one by one, deliberately, and returned each to his own craft, where presently the smoke from the stovepipes thickened and blued for the noon meal. John was left alone, privileged to sit there or go away, just as he pleased.

Nevertheless he liked it. He was content to listen. There was a salty flavor to the talk. John developed an interest in the price of halibut, the injustices of cannery men. He discovered that there were certain subjects that were always good for an argument. The Fraser-river rig versus the sloop rig, for example. Each had its violent partisans. Like the single-cinch or the double-cinch saddle in the cow country, reflected John, and immediately felt a warm link of kinship. He came to know all the arguments on both sides, for they were standardized and repeated almost verbatim on each occasion, but as heatedly as though they were new. Nothing was ever settled. He tried hard to understand them. He wished he knew more about boats. Still he was learning something by listening and straight absorption and using his eyes. At first they had been just boats, just as all fishermen were fishermen. Slowly he began to sense the differences, and why certain groups were always the same. He commenced to understand the profound caste distinction between the deep-sea troller off Cape Flattery and the drift-net fisher of sheltered waters, and so to develop an eye for line and rig. He easily appreciated the vast difference between the compact, businesslike schooners that battled the seas off Flattery and the makeshifts that puttered inside on odd jobs of crabs, herrings, shrimps and the like. But some others must be more slowly puzzled out, such as the sturdy seiners with their low broad sterns for nets; and the Frasers with their low sweet lines.

Though John was not even a small part of this life it drew and held him. He returned to his customary existence refreshed as by wine. He liked it all. He liked the strangeness of it, the flavor of it. It opened a door. Even the breeze here was different. It snapped with a liveliness brought in from the sea, and of a fine day the wavelets danced, sparkling, and spoke with little voices against the timbers next to his feet. Nor did the rain, unless it was very heavy, interfere with the day. These men seemed wholly indifferent to wet. They owned the weather. And always a rich and pungent smell of tar and fish and strong tobacco, and John liked even that.

And then, one morning, without reason, quite smoothly and naturally, John was one of them. He had said nothing; he had done nothing. He was accepted. He did not know why, but the reason was simple enough. They had become accustomed to him. He was part of the landscape, like the gulls. The man next to him offered his pouch of tobacco.

Thereafter it was taken for granted that John belonged. The dogs knew this. He crossed decks under their noses on his way to someone’s cabin in acceptance of an invitation to “mug up” on coffee in thick cups. Sometimes they acknowledged him by the slightest quiver of the tail, but they were neutral to his advances. It was not their business to make friends; only to recognize them.

John was interested in the tidy housekeeping. It was marvelously tidy, for he had been fortunate enough to fall in with the aristocracy of the trade, men who took pride in their craft. Everything had its place and was in it. Some of the contraptions and the economies of space delighted him with their ingenuity. Everything was compact, within hand’s reach. John began to understand why these men stood still and threw back their shoulders and filled out their chests when they first came on deck. They were expanding to a new scale, a new dimension. The simplest things caught John’s attention—such as a lamp in gimbals. He had never before been where a lamp needed anything but its solid base to stay upright. If this ignorance had been merely partial, it might have caused impatience or even contempt. But—as to nautical matters—it was so complete that it enlisted interest. It did not seem credible that a grown man should never have seen a deep-sea gurry rig: why, every longshore kid gets his pap to fix him a toy one on the dory and works it on blue perch! It was sort of amusing to think up something else to spring on John, the simpler the better. His naïve admiration gave a man a little swagger feeling inside. Obscurely they sensed John’s quality, though they could not have defined it, so their self-esteem was the more warmed.

The season was waning. It was not yet time to begin fitting out in earnest, but here and there men began to tinker at odd jobs: replacing standing rigging, sandpapering in anticipation of painting weather, fitting new leathers in bilge pumps, cutting sheet brass into long rough blanks and tap-tap-tapping them to fit into a form carved in a block of hardwood. This was the artisan’s model trolling spoon. After he had shaped it and smoothed it and fitted it with swivels at either end and attached the hook, he rigged it to a short line on a pole and dragged it back and forth overside. He watched critically its action in the water and retrieved it and tapped daintily a little here, a little there, modifying by a hair the overcurve of its tail, the up-tilt of its nose, perhaps the convexity of its medial line, and tried it again. Sometimes he hit what he wanted almost at once. Sometimes he must test over and over. But never did it dangle with its fellows, hung by the hooks on the wire in the cabin, until it performed to satisfaction. A row of self-appointed critics perched on cabin and rail and spat overside and proffered comment and suggestion, to which the artisan paid not the least attention. He had his own ideas and was willing to defend them, but not while he was busy. This matter of trolling spoons was one of the ever arguable subjects, never to be settled; whether they should be of the Stewart or the MacMahon type. But on one thing they did agree, an abysmal scorn for anyone who used anything store bought! John could not see any difference and said so, and they laughed at him tolerantly.

From time to time the close-packed integrity of the winter’s lay-up between the floats began now to be disturbed. Somebody wanted to get out and later to get back in, after a low-tide session in the grid copper-painting the bottom. That involved much shifting of everybody else. John could lend a hand at this. He enjoyed it. They let him help in other small matters, much as one indulges a child. But here occasionally John surprised them. He could splice as well as they could, for instance; he was quick and deft with sail needle and palm; he could sew a neat grommet; he could throw a bowline; he seized rope ends competently; he got the laugh on old Svensen, elaborately preparing to teach him a Turk’s Head, by taking the line from him and completing the knot before Svensen had barely begun. They did not know that all this was cowboy stuff as well as sailor stuff. It injected a wholesome doubt in their complacencies. They gave John more credit than he deserved. And indeed he was, in other things, an apt pupil. He caught on. It was never necessary to tell him or show him a thing twice. Sometimes he did not need to be told at all. He figured it out in advance. As the season neared, John was actually in demand on Sunday mornings.

“That feller, he’s better’n most hired hands,” said old Svensen.

Sally was glad John had found something congenial to occupy the Sunday mornings. She was now playing the organ at the church and being paid for it. John was astonished to hear of this unsuspected accomplishment.

“It’s a bluff,” she confided to him. “I don’t really play the organ. But it’s enough like the piano so I can get by with simple things like hymns.”

To John it was just as surprising and just as remarkable to learn that she could play the piano. Sally did not seem to think much of it; “not the little I can play,” said she. He was fired with the desire to hear her perform, but he could not overcome his robust revulsion against the Reverend Morgan’s exaggerated ecclesiastical elocution and his sanctimonious piety of manner. This was the fashion of the day, so that churchgoers accepted it as a part of church, without particularly noticing it; but John’s inhabitude saw it fresh, as he had seen Hamlet and Othello. Sally did not try to combat his attitude. But she managed to get the keys to the church and to get hold of the boy who worked the pump and played for John on Sunday afternoon. He was enormously impressed. It was wonderful that Sally, his Sally, could sit up there so high and so little before that redoubtable gilded monster and cause it to roar mightily or sing small as she willed, as though it were a great obedient beast. John’s heart swelled, for nothing more delighted him than to find something new to be proud of in Sally. She sure had that thing tamed!

He came away inspired with a wonderful idea. But inquiry, first chance he had, at Talman’s Music Shop, on Fourth Street, ruined it, at least for the time being. He had no idea pianos cost anything like that!

He was proud of Sally, but at first he jibbed a little at the idea of her taking money. However, as that attitude was not really his own, but only a vague reflection of convention, he soon yielded. But on one point he was firm. They wanted Sally for the evening services also. He would not stand for that: nor, indeed, did the idea appeal to Sally herself.

“Then they probably won’t want me mornings either,” said she doubtfully.

However, the matter was arranged.

“I’m glad,” said Sally. “You see I thought I’d use the money to rent a piano.”

“Good lord!” cried John. “Can you rent the things? Nobody told me.” He was disgusted with that fool clerk at Talman’s; but he was glad Sally was going to have a piano anyway.

John’s way home from the mill, after work, was by a streetcar on Second Street, just one block up from the water front. But quite often he would walk the extra short distance past the floats before turning up the hill. He did not stop; he wanted to get home for his hour before supper with Sally. But he liked to see the twinkle of lights and their reflected gleam and smell the cooking and catch the whiff of sea mingled with it and the dim loom of masts and the meditative lapping of waters. The floats were dark, save for the marking lights at their ends, and deserted. The life of the community had withdrawn within itself, like the sea anemones on its piles.

But on this particular night it had not withdrawn. On the contrary. John perceived the northerly float, the float ordinarily reserved for the aristocracy of the fleet, to be crowded with men, as were the decks of the boats in the immediate vicinity. Must be a full gathering, and an angry gathering, to judge by the voices. This was too much for John. He descended the ramp and stood for a minute or so trying to make out what it was all about. He could snatch only fragments. Too many men trying to talk each other down. Something about fish, of course. He touched the man next him.

“What’s the row?” he asked.

The man turned so that John was able to see him clearly in the light from a street lamp above. John knew all the fishermen, but this was a stranger. He did not look like a fisherman; but neither did he look like a city man. In spite of a suit of somewhat baggy “store clothes,” he carried an impress of the out of doors. In age he might have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. His figure was long and loose jointed and spare, but it looked strong and wiry. His face, too, was long and thin, the flesh at cheek and temple hollowed right down to the bony structure, but here, too, was no effect of emaciation, rather of hard carved leanness. His eyes, in deep sockets, surveyed John with lively and good-humored relish. John’s interest quickened. He did not know this breed of cats.

“Same old thing,” said the stranger. “Fish.” He spat into the water. “The poor goddam fools,” he added, an enormous contempt in his voice.

He spoke slowly, deliberately, without raising his voice, but John could hear him above—or below—the hubbub. He raised a hand to brush aside his long graying mustache. The hand was large and veined and knobby. And somehow at once the look of that hand added to the man a quality of deliberate competence that would never be hurried and would never fail. All the time John felt the stranger’s eyes sizing him up in turn, and the stranger—slowly and competently—making up his mind.

“Every season same thing,” the latter resumed presently. “Canners come out with the prices they are going to pay for fish, and the fishermen don’t like them, and they get out like this and yowl like a lobo wolf that’s going to tear up the moon by the roots, and then they go out and catch fish and sell ’em to the canners—at those prices,” he added dryly.

“Well ...” began John uncertainly.

“Little wuss than usual this year,” admitted the stranger. “Six cents for reds, two for pinks, one cent for whites. Makes even me a little riled, and I don’t give a damn, really, whether anybody ever catches another fish from now to doomsday. I’ve had to eat so many of the dang things I get to wish they’d forgot to invent ’em. God! At such prices I’d almost be inclined to turn fisherman myself just so I could catch them and throw them back. But that’s goin’ a leetle far.” He acknowledged John’s laugh with a slow smile. “Mebbe that’ll prod ’em so they’ll do something,” he resumed. “It sure would if they had the guts of a sea worm which hasn’t hardly any at all, if that much. No, I take that back,” said the stranger with an air of trying to be fair about it. “They got guts, or they wouldn’t be goin’ deep-sea in them rigs,” he waved a hand in contemptuous dismissal of the whole fleet. “If they could agree together and stick to it for ten minutes ...” he amended.

John’s always eager interest in new things was greatly stirred. Here were plenty of new things. The man himself was new: John’s experience of men was unable to place him. His various and apparently sincere scorns were new—for the fishermen on whom John had come near to bestowing a boyish hero worship, for their boats—what could possibly be criticized in them? Yet John liked this man; his opinions could not be dismissed. John must know them. As had happened to him before, a whole new world of some kind had suddenly opened before him. He must find out about it.

“What could they do?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you if you want to know——” The stranger obviously had positive views. He stopped. “Jees,” said he, “you can’t hear yourself think here. Let’s get out.”

They mounted the ramp to the streets. At the top the man stopped and faced John.

“My name is Saunders,” he announced formally.

“Mine’s Murdock,” said John.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Saunders, with the air of encountering John for the first time, and solemnly thrust out his hand.

They shook, and at once Saunders’ whole figure appeared to relax in sociable companionship.

“This is no good,” he observed. “Let’s go over to Casey’s where we can set down and have a beer.”

At this time of day Casey’s was nearly empty, though Casey himself had already taken a place behind the bar. Daytimes he rarely bothered with personal supervision, but could always be produced at need from some mysterious back room. He was a burly man, the expression of whose face never changed, yet somehow one knew without mistake whether Casey liked him or not. Casey approved of a few, had no use whatever for a few, with most was indifferent and impersonal. He bounced efficiently but wholly without rancor. He knew all about everybody in his part of town. He knew John and nodded to him now, though, as we are aware, John had had little to do with the saloon. He knew Saunders and called him by name. “Here yet, hey, Len?” said he.

John and his new acquaintance sat at one of the round tables just off the bar. Casey himself brought their beer.

“Kelly not in yet,” he half questioned.

“You’d be the first to know it if he was.”

“I guess,” agreed Casey. He jerked his head toward the float. “Strike?”

“I suppose. They’re still jawing.”

Casey moved the cloth in his hand round and round one spot, near the center of the table.

“What’s the offer?” he asked Casey presently.

“Six, two and one.”

The saloon keeper shook his head.

“Small pickings,” said he. He moved slowly away. “There’s yellow dogs in every pack,” he said over his shoulder.

“And there’s ways of handling yellow dogs,” said Len Saunders, calling after him. Casey nodded his head without looking around. Len took a draft of his beer. “Where I came from they’d handle ’em all right,” he muttered. He set down his glass and rested both elbows on the table and turned his attention to John. “I can’t quite make you out, old timer,” said he, “but you ain’t any cheechako back where you belong from. Where’s that?”

John chuckled.

“Back where I belong from we never ask strangers that question.”

Saunders was still looking him over.

“Thought you had a look of hoss about you,” said he, “though I ain’t took notice of your legs.”

John laughed outright.

“Keno!” he surrendered. “Well, I ain’t stole away; I’m still a couple of jumps ahead of the sheriff. I’d as soon tell you. Call it from Montana to Mexico. I don’t rightly belong anywhere—except here,” he added.

“You don’t belong here,” stated Saunders positively. “I ain’t prying,” he added in half apology, “but I like to place a man in my mind.”

“So do I,” said John pointedly.

“Oh, me. I’m from Alaska.”

“Alaska!” cried John, leaning forward.

But Len was not ready to talk about Alaska.

“You was asking about them poor dumb brutes.” He jerked an elbow in the general direction of the water front. “It’s simple, like I told you. All they got to do is quit. The canners got to have fish; they can’t begin to get enough for a pack from the traps. They’d come around fast enough with decent prices. Ten or twelve cents for reds, say. Only they know damn well that all they got to do is to sit tight and pretty soon one or another of these yellow dogs Casey speaks of gets pinched kind of low and begins to sneak in a load or two, and some more of the yellow dogs hears about it and don’t want to get left out, and before you know it the whole strike is busted wide open, and everybody’s out hustling fish.” Len spat disgustedly at a sawdust-filled box ten feet away—and hit it.

“I suppose those first poor devils got to eat,” said John doubtfully.

“Why shouldn’t they eat—if they stick together?” Saunders fired up belligerently. “That’s what I’m telling you! But they got no notion of it. They talk big about it, but there ain’t a half-dozen men in that whole fleet got brains enough to fork over a pound of grub or a dollar of his own to keep the show going. The canners stick together all right. Hey, Casey, fill ’em up.”

“And bring some cigars,” added John. “So it’s different in Alaska, is it?”

“You’re God a’mighty damn right it is!” said Len. “And so I’ve told these poor timid sand peeps plain enough. Trouble is, the ones among ’em with any get-up-and-git in ’em has already gone to Alaska. Them that’s left hasn’t got lime enough in their backbones to whitewash the backside of a muskeeter. There’s better prices there, and steadier, there’s more fish and bigger fish and easier got at. Say, you can’t have no idee. In the run you can’t wade across a stream without bracing your legs so they don’t get knocked out from under you by salmon buttin’ again you. If they’d hold still you could walk right across on their backs. I’m not fooling. You just ought to see a salmon run!”

“I have,” said John. “I was raised on a ranch not far from the Dalles.”

“Oh—yes.” Len was momentarily deflated. It was slowly being borne in on John that Len was already somewhat tight. “Well, anyway,” Len recovered himself, though he now spoke more reasonably, “there ain’t no comparison at all, to a rational man, and if they had any sense they’d move on up out of this mess, and I’ve told ’em so till I’ve got tired of being sorry for such dumb critters.” Len was losing interest in fish. He stared at his empty glass for a moment. “Let’s make it whisky,” he suggested abruptly. “It’s a good chaser.”

“All right,” agreed John. But he did not want Saunders to run down. “Or don’t the canners try it on up there?” he asked. The question worked.

“Bet your life they do,” assented Len fervently. “But they don’t get nowhere with it.”

“Fishermen stick together?” suggested John.

Saunders laughed out loud, and John somehow was startled, as though at a rare phenomenon.

“Don’t have to,” he replied in the manner of one confiding a secret. “It’s the canners that don’t stick.”

The situation, Len explained further, was the exact reverse. It was the canners who got together and set the scale and agreed solemnly with each other not to buy any fish from anybody at a higher price. And then the season began, and it was short—much shorter than here down south—and they had to have fish or put up a short pack. And it wasn’t three days, said Len gleefully, after the run really started, before you could get your money, on the quiet, most anywhere you took your fish, if you just kept mum about it.

“Hell, they begin to plan double-crossing each other before they get out of their meeting!” said Len.

There were too many of them. Down here was only a few big companies, Len explained. Up there was the big companies and a whole raft of little fellows, one-line independents, all trying to cut each other’s throats or gobble each other up. “I,” observed Len parenthetically and without emotion, “was one of the little fellows; I got gobbled up. Fisherman’s paradise, if they only knowed it. I don’t give a damn one way or another,” added Len. “I’m no fisherman. Nothing to it. All they need is a little brains, a few guts and maybe a strip of iron bark.”

“Iron bark? What’s that for?” John caught at this.

“Sheathin’. Along the waterline. Ice.”

John’s face kindled at the word.

“Spray freezin’ to the rigging”—Len’s voice was sarcastic—“grindin’ of the floes. Franklin. Greeley. Bergs loomin’ up through the fog. My hero! Rats!” He surveyed John a contemptuous moment. “All the ice you get is mebbe a little glacier ice workin’ up some of the inlets.”

“I bet it’s pretty cold at that,” volunteered John in retreat.

“Oh, my God.” Len exhibited exaggerated weariness. “It must be awful cold,” he said in a high, mimicking voice. “That’s what they all spring on you, every damn one of ’em, just the minute you say ‘Alaska’ to them. Say!” He turned on John in startling belligerence. “Alaska’s got a goddam sight better climate than this stinkin’ wet hole, let me tell you! Rocks and ice—that’s all you think. You and your country!” he dismissed the state of Washington. “What you got? We got it better and bigger and more room for it. Stick those damn measly little things you call mountains up there, and you’d never see ’em, less’n you’re looking for foothills. Let me tell you——” He gave it up suddenly. “Oh hell! Casey!”

“This is on me,” said John.

This was the first time in many months John had sat at a table and had a lot of drinks. And it was also the first time he had swapped men-talk and cussed aplenty and smoked a see-gar and swaggered spiritually in that expansive glow of comradeship possible only with another male. He had not missed these things. He had not realized their absence. If confronted with the thought he would have laughed at it. He saw plenty of men: the mill men, the fishermen. But his instinct knew better. With the mill men he worked. The fishermen were better, but them he visited in alien country—their boats and their occupation and their very thoughts. There had lacked a catalyst, some place like Casey’s, with its sawdusted floor, its dingy bar and its big mirror covered with designs traced in soap and the bottles and the pyramids in front of it and the chromo of Custer’s Last Stand on one wall and the fully matured naked lady on the other and the flyblown garlands of colored paper and the unventilated swirls of tobacco smoke, fully to release for him the loud, rough, satisfactorily vulgar essence of masculinity in which he could blend with a fellow being and wherein was the sustenance necessary to their souls. Here it was, for John, because he and this fellow, Len Saunders, spoke the language of the same tribe. He could have stayed on until midnight swapping yarns with Len. He pulled out his watch and looked at it. He got to his feet, uttering an exclamation of surprise. No idea it was so late, he told Len; must get on home. He’d see Len some more, have him out to the house ...

John stepped forth from Casey’s into the street. Certain starved psychic tissues were all plumped up. All departments of his being were in balance, fed and satisfied. Therefore he felt top of the world. He looked at his watch again. Gosh, it was late! He decided to walk home. Another twenty minutes would not make any difference. He felt like walking.

He climbed a block and set off along First Street, singing under his breath snatches of cowboy ballads. He used the range versions in preference to those offered the general public. They lacked refinement, but John felt ribald. He had his hat cocked over one eye. People looked after him. Some of them laughed, but in amused sympathy. John did not bother about them. He had much grander things to occupy him, though he did not know what they were. Up near Madison Street he encountered the two girls, Eloise and her yellow-haired friend, who had stopped him on his way to the water front that first morning long ago. This was not remarkable, for here was their beat and hour. They recognized him at once in spite of the lapse of time and the change in his clothing.

“Hullo, lumberjack!” Eloise stepped before him. He came down from somewhere to recall them.

“Oh, hello,” said he. “Ain’t you girls gone home to bed yet?” He waved them majestically aside.

Somewhere beyond the Washington Hotel certain practical affairs of life began to loom in the fog. It was borne in on John that he must commence to lay a course or collide with them. There was Sally. He had not really forgotten Sally, of course; but up to this moment she had been hull down and becalmed, as it were. John paused to admire his nautical imagery. Regular sailor talk. This idea slipped him sideways into another realm of relativity, so that he glowed with extraordinary affection for his fishermen friends, whom he now perceived to be fine fellows, in spite of what Len had said about them. And when he got his boat——He halted short to contemplate this thought. It had just popped into his mind, natural as you please. After a moment he walked on. Sure, he was going to get a boat. Always intended to get a boat.

Oh yes, Sally! Sally was going to be sore—at first. He couldn’t blame Sally. She’d got supper all ready, and probably it had got cold waiting, or all burned up; and it was quite a chore cooking supper, and Sally always took a lot of pains over it. He’d be mad himself. Serve him right if she hadn’t saved him any. That was all right: he wasn’t hungry, or he could rustle in the new icebox.

“Gosh, I’m going to catch hell!” John was tickled. He’d never seen Sally really mad. He’d get what was coming to him, all right. John felt largely tolerant and magnanimous toward Sally because he was so willing to acknowledge that she had a right to get mad. But she didn’t know about Len. When she knew about Len she’d be sorry she got mad.

The thought that Sally might have been worried about him never even cast a shadow on his mind.

The shades were up. He could see her sitting by the table under the lamp. She appeared to be doing nothing at all, just sitting there.

“Laying for me with a stuffed club!” John chuckled to himself. He was in great feather. The situation was one of high comedy. It had worked around so that, somehow, the joke was on Sally. John cast about in his mind how to make the most of it and still smooth down Sally. He decided to be funny.

So he tilted his hat still farther and sneaked cautiously up the front steps and across the porch to the front door. Here he paused to get a good ready, then suddenly snatched open the door, leaped into the room and struck a pose.

“Hoopla!” shrilled John in conventional circus-clown entrance. “Here we are again!”

It seemed to him a good idea at the time; but somehow the scene fell flat. The comedy aside, his sudden appearance might have done the trick, were it not that his muffled footsteps across the front porch had not been quite as muffled as he had fondly believed them. Sally had heard. By the time the doorknob had ceased its careful turning, profound and thankful relief had passed its brief moment. She looked at John in such a way that the enormous imbecility of his posture was revealed to him as by a blinding light. He sank back on his heels and removed his hat from the side of his head and tossed it in the general direction of the davenport, after which stage business he turned to Sally a rather sickly smile of propitiation.

“I’m sorry to be so late, honey, honest I am,” said John. He made a move toward Sally, but thought better of it. The climate did not seem right in that direction. “Gosh,” said John, “you don’t know how surprised I was when I looked at my watch and saw what time it was! I came right away then; but then I thought, ‘Well, Sally wouldn’t wait supper this long anyway, so I’ll just walk home instead of taking the streetcar,’ and that took me a little longer of course——You did have supper, didn’t you, honey?” No reply to this. “Oh!” John bethought himself. “You see I struck a fellow down at the floats, and we got to talking—the fishermen were having a big pow-wow over the prices of fish—that is, what the canneries were going to pay this next season—and of course they were pretty mad and talking pretty loud, so Len and I—Len’s this fellow I was telling you about—Len Saunders is his name, and he’s a fine fellow, different from anybody you ever saw before in your life, he’s had so much experience. You’d like Len. He told me that in Alaska—you see he comes from Alaska—he went up there only about ten years after we took over from the Russians——” He stopped. Where was he? Doggone it, why didn’t Sally say something and not just sit there like that looking at him that way? John was still standing in the middle of the floor, and he had a curious sensation that he was getting bigger and clumsier and more spraddled out and footless every second, while Sally became smaller and more compact and self-contained and competent. What he ought to do was walk over to the big armchair and set down and cross his legs and fill his pipe, easylike. But he couldn’t. He had to stand there and let her look at him like—like a little small stick of giant powder with a short fuse. Somehow it had worked around so the joke was no longer on Sally. It was on him. If there was a joke. John cleared his throat. “So we went over to Casey’s,” he began again, “and got to talking, and you don’t know how surprised I was when I looked at my watch——”

Doggone, he was back right where he started from! A first faint warmth of indignation began to animate his abjectness. He had it coming to him all right, but why didn’t she say something?

She was saying something in a tight, level voice.

“Did it occur to you that it was just possible I could not have one idea of what had happened to you?” she asked; then, before he could reply, “Did it enter your head that I might think something had happened to you?”

Obviously this had not occurred to John, as his bewildered face testified.

“Or,” continued Sally, still evenly, but in one tone higher of intensity, “that I might be sitting here by myself, hour after hour, getting more and more frantic with worry? Imagining all sorts of things?” She stopped, bit her lip, caught back a control that was slipping.

She arose to her feet so quickly that John instinctively stepped back. Without a glance in his direction she went into the bedroom, but almost immediately returned. Her movements were staccato, as though each was a container of an energy that must be held in. She had jammed her small felt hat on her head and was struggling into her coat.

“Where—where are you going?” stammered John. Things were moving much too fast for him. “Honey! You aren’t going away!” At last he was able to move. He made as though to stop her. She faced him squarely, her small chin thrust out.

“If you want to know,” said she, “I’m going to the hotel. I must telephone.”

“Telephone!” John was again all at sea.

“Yes, telephone. To the police. That you’ve got back.”

She made as though to pass him.

“Hold on,” said John. “Let’s get this straight. What’s this about the police?” Abruptly he was sober. His eyes had steadied on hers in a cool, level directness that some of his former associates back in the Great Basin had learned to think of as dangerous. Sally stood still waiting for him to give her passage. John’s face slowly reddened, but he gave no other indication as yet that now he, too, was thoroughly angry. Indeed, his next remark was made with the silky gentleness that, to the Great Basin, had also been a danger signal.

“I asked you a question,” said he.

“I telephoned the police that you had disappeared and to look for you,” said Sally, as though to a child.

“I see,” said John. His eyes did not leave her face. Nevertheless, for a moment, his gaze seemed to shift like a searchlight beacon to something hidden and then to swivel back. “And why,” his voice was still gentle, “did you do that?”

In face of what she sensed to be a new and strange domination, Sally’s long-held control gave way.

“What did you expect me to do?” she cried angrily. “Sit here like a ninny and wait your good pleasure, not knowing whether you’d been hurt or killed?”

“Hurt or killed?” John repeated the words in soft interrogation.

“You weren’t at the mill, I telephoned there. You’d left the mill hours before. You might have been slugged and robbed, you might have—how was I to know where you were? You’ve never been late before. And you didn’t come, and you didn’t come—I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went over to the Lonergans’ and asked him to go down to the floats to see if you were there, but I couldn’t believe you were there because I couldn’t imagine your staying so late without sending me word, and Mr Lonergan thought so too, and he went with me over to the Washington, and we telephoned the hospitals, but they didn’t know anything——” Sally had talked herself close to tears, which the right word from John would have released.

“Did Lonergan tell you to telephone the police?” He pursued his interrogation relentlessly.

“No. I had to do something, or I’d go crazy!” For the moment Sally was on the defensive. But only for a moment. “And while I was suffering torments, you sat there in a saloon, drinking!” She threw out the word scornfully, her anger rekindling. “Without one thought that I might be——”

“When I need a nurse to look after me I’ll let you know,” John cut her short. “I can take care of myself. I’ve managed to so far without any help.” His own anger was getting away from him. The merits of the case were submerged by it. All John could see, right now, was the spectacle of himself—he, John Murdock—led home by a grinning cop like a strayed small boy. Suppose they’d happened to find him at the float or in Casey’s or even had picked him up as he walked up Second Street. Nice thing that would be! He was getting madder every minute. Better look out! some remnant of sense warned him. “You go to bed,” he told Sally curtly. “I’ll do the telephoning.”

“You needn’t bother,” said Sally with spirit.

He did not reply, but turned on his heel and went out. His anger was helpless, for there was nothing he could do about it. She stared at the door, her hands tight clenched, in a despair of complete bafflement.

When John returned Sally was in bed, and the light turned low in the living room. He undressed there, extinguished the lamp, entered the bedroom with an elaborate absence of any effort at quiet. In the dimness John could just make out her small figure huddled as far as it could get toward the edge of the bed. It lay very still, too still for sleep. Nevertheless, it did not stir when John thrust himself beneath the covers. He flopped on his side, also as near his edge of the bed as he could get. They lay there, back to back, rigid and motionless lest each should know the other was awake, and the space between them was as the space of astronomical distance.

When the alarm clock sounded the following morning John got up, made his own breakfast, packed his tin lunch box and departed for work. Sally did not stir.

The coolness of time passing at work that did not engage all his attention had its effect. John got over his heat and began a little to regret. But he did not see what was to be done, unless the night had brought Sally around so that she was now able to see things reasonably. John made generous allowances for Sally, for now that he had got over being mad he could see she had a lot of excuse for getting fussed up. But not to go all to pieces that way! John flushed for shame of Sally whenever that police business recurred to his mind. He held Sally so dear that he hated to have to feel ashamed of her about anything. She’d gone all to pieces over nothing! Well, practically nothing. Good lord! After ten years of the kind of life he’d led with the wild bunch he certainly might be held competent to handle the Seattle water front! Whenever his thoughts took that track he began to get mad all over again. He’d just have to accept the fact. But he could not see how things could ever be quite the same again. And as the day wore on a more immediate and therefore more dismaying thought bore ever the more swiftly down on him. He had to go home. How would they meet? What would she say? What was he to say? John’s imagination constructed, released and discarded a dozen sketch dramas. As the closing hour neared he felt quick shoots of panic. He was scared. He had half a mind to go get drunk, good and drunk.

That was the best thing that could have happened to John. Not the getting drunk, but the thought of getting drunk as a way out. For it brought him an astounding illumination; so astounding that he stopped short in his tracks and nearly got bumped in the back of the head by a traveling block and did get cursed most profanely by Alex Hart, who was manipulating the block.

His idea of getting drunk was just his way of calling in the police! Yes, and Alex’s explosion of profanity—same thing. Alex held no such considered opinion of his person and ancestors as he had expressed. Alex was a good friend of his. But Alex had been scared. And when he had yielded in thought to that impulse to get drunk, he had been scared. And none of them had meant any of it, really; it was just their different ways of getting scared.

He went on about his business of the moment—which was that of tally clerk—so absent-mindedly as to draw a call-down from the yard boss. There remained in him no trace of resentment, but the immediate realities had not bettered. He still had to go home; and the mess must be straightened out; and what Sally was going to say, and what he could say—to make Sally understand ...