Читать книгу Wild Geese Calling - Stewart Edward White - Страница 9

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LEN

BY THE closing whistle John was sunk. Instead of going at once to the car line he dragged miserably along the water front, lost in gloom. This extra excursion was made with no thought of pleasure, but merely to postpone by even a little the dreaded moment. He was oblivious of his surroundings. At the top of the ramp stood Len Saunders, looking down on the floats. Len greeted him. He replied glumly and passed on. He was completely off Len Saunders; which was unjust, but this is a world of injustices. Saunders looked after him in faint surprise.

John continued on a dozen paces. He came hurriedly back. He seized Len by the arm. He was no longer completely off Len. On the contrary. Never in his life had he been so glad to run across a man. Len must come home with him to supper. John would not take no. Len must meet his wife; Len must tell her, tell them both, more about Alaska. John was almost feverishly cordial, overriding Len’s demurs.

“Your clothes are all right,” he said impatiently. “Of course she’ll be glad to see you. She doesn’t have to know ahead; she always has plenty for supper. Oh, anybody can get along with Sally, she wouldn’t scare a rabbit. She ...”

Len surveyed him from under his thick brows, the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement.

“Well,” he drawled finally, “you mind me of a preacher who met him up with an old she-bear and cubs, and it looked like he’d better get to praying. ‘Oh Lord,’ sez he, ‘vouchsafe thy servant a weepon to his hands, preferable a model 40-90 Winchester.’ Then, as the bear was getting pretty close, and there wasn’t any miracle yet, ‘But anything’ll do,’ yells the preacher, ‘even a newspaper would come in handy.’ Gave you hell for last night, did she?” Len chuckled.

John flushed. He was embarrassed. He wanted to defend himself. He wanted to explain. He wanted to defend Sally. Len waved all this aside.

“I’m tough,” said he. “Any critter takes a bite at me just blunts his teeth. Let’s get going.”

But John felt that Len did not understand things as he should.

“Look here,” interrupted Len, “this wife of yourn. She’s a kid, like you, ain’t she? She’s a female woman, ain’t she? That’s all I want to know.”

He refused further conversation until they had left the streetcar.

By that time John’s spirits had again dropped to zero. What could this roughneck know about it? A woman like Sally was wholly outside his experience. His original idea of taking Len home as a buffer had seemed a good one; but if Len was going to butt in ... John was getting disturbed.

“Rest easy, bub,” Len broke the silence with another of his startling flashes of intuition. “I ain’t going to make any breaks. But don’t you make none either. Just ease along till we get a chance to try the water.”

“You see,” hesitated John, “Sally’s sort of different, and she——”

“I know, I know,” Len laid his hand on John’s shoulder. “All you need is to hide behind me. That’s what you brung me for, ain’t it?” He chuckled indulgently; and John somehow felt like a lost small child, and Sally another lost small child, and them both taken by the hand, which was no way for a grown man to feel; but he liked it.

Sally received them brightly and agreeably. Too brightly: too agreeably. That was the trouble. Her conduct was impeccable. She was glad to meet Len; she was glad John had brought him home to supper; she talked; she seemed to display a polite interest in making Len talk. In all things her demeanor was correct. Nevertheless, John could have shaken her. She was too dang bright and chipper! She deliberately talked about things Len could not possibly know anything about. She was getting back at John through the unfortunate Len, by methods to which John could take no possible exception.

As for Len, in the interval before supper and at the meal itself he sat on the edges of chairs and said “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am.” John was sorry for him. His brag had certainly been called. The only satisfaction to John was that Len was indeed finding out how little he knew about women like Sally.

But at the end of the meal Len unexpectedly asserted himself. He got to his feet and began to help Sally carry the dishes into the kitchen.

“You sit and smoke with John,” said she. “This won’t take two minutes.”

He paid her no attention.

“I won’t wash them now,” Sally tried again, when finally they were all stacked on the drainboard. “I’ll do them later, or in the morning when there is more time.”

Len turned on a faucet and tested the water with his finger. He looked about him, spied two dishpans hanging under the sink, haled them forth.

“Poor business,” said he. “No sense addin’ dirty dishes to what’s on your mind. Get them out of the way before you settle down. Then you can set comfortable.”

He turned on the hot-water faucet into one of the dishpans; looked about for the soap, discovered it at last in a little wire cage with a handle, examined this arrangement with approval and a faint surprise.

“That’s handy,” he observed. He swished it about in the hot water, making suds, moved that dishpan aside and filled the other, made as though to test the water.

“Look out!” warned Sally.

He looked at her in slow inquiry.

“You’ll scald your hands.”

He turned them over, examining them on all sides as though he had never seen them before.

“What, them?” said Len. He smiled abstractedly and finished his test. “Oak tanned,” he confided to Sally.

Sally caught at the cool ascendancy that somehow seemed to be escaping her.

“I should much prefer,” said she, “to postpone this until later.”

“You can wipe,” said Len. “Where’s your dishrags?”

John appeared in the doorway.

“What’s going on here?” he wanted to know. “Oh—can I help?”

He was obviously nonplused. In John’s world, as a matter of course, women did the women’s work—when there were any women—just as men did the men’s work. He would have been perfectly willing to help, but the thought had never even entered his head.

“You go sit down,” said Len. “We’ll tend to this.”

John hovered a moment and disappeared. Len methodically washed a plate in the soapy water, swished it about in the rinsing water, handed it to Sally. After a moment’s hesitation she took it and began slowly to dry it on one of the soft towels she made for this purpose from emptied flour bags. She was staring at Len with puzzled attention. His hands must indeed, as he said, be oak tanned. He plunged them in and out of the hot water indifferently. He did not look at Sally. Indeed he seemed quite unaware of her, except as a recipient for the cleaned utensils. His awkwardness had somehow evaporated. He was at ease in a native self-sufficing dignity of his own. Somehow, without a word said, the roles had been reversed. In spite of herself Sally felt diminished. Len had become a personality. She was puzzled.

The silence continued a long time. Len’s serene detachment began slightly to annoy Sally. Somehow he had escaped her.

“John tells me you come from Alaska, Mr Saunders,” she said abruptly.

Len turned a limpid blue eye in her direction.

“Yes ma’am.” And then after a pause: “I know somethin’ about Alaska.”

The timing and the slight emphasis on the last word seemed to give the phrase significance. Or did it? Sally glanced sharply at Len’s face. Its expression was serene, bland and innocent. But she could not be sure. She flushed slightly.

“I suppose it’s awfully cold up there?” She asked the usual banality from the surface uncertainty of her mind. But it did not arouse Len’s indignation as when John had made the same remark.

“It ain’t nigh so cold as it looks to people’s minds,” said Len. “Things is hardly ever as chilly as they look to be, outside.” Another pause. “That was an extra-fine supper you gave us, especially and you not expecting company. I know: I’m a sort of a cook myself. Got to be.” He reached out suddenly to take from her hand the plate she was about to dry, examined the bottom and plunged it again into the soapy water. “Condemned,” he said briefly. Now how, wondered Sally, did he see that? He must have eyes in the side of his head. “Funny thing,” Len was continuing placidly, “how a man gets to be a good cook just cooking for himself, but a woman she’s got to have a man to cook for, or she’s no good at it at all. Yes, that was sure a fine supper.” He examined the bottom of the plate, tested a speck of black on it with his fingernail and plunged it into the rinsing water. “Growed there,” he remarked briefly of the spot. Again the pause. “Appearances is generally deceitful, as the poet says,” observed Len.

Sally stopped wiping dishes to attend to Len. She looked at him afresh, with new eyes. Here was now none of the embarrassment of awkwardness before which she had so strutted her superiorities. Len was quite at ease. Sally doubted if he had ever really felt otherwise. It came to her with a slight shock that the shoe was on the other foot, that all along he had been secretly enjoying himself. Playing a part, as it were. Sally had a quick mind. She caught the connection. He wasn’t fooling her any more.

As though he sensed accurately the moment when she reached this point, Len’s mild blue eyes swiveled in her direction. They were blank and bland and noncommittal. Then, as they held her own, an inquiry crept into them, succeeded after a moment by a faint twinkle deep down.

“Ain’t that right?” asked Len.

“What?”

“That a woman ain’t as mad as she looks when she cooks a man as good a supper as that?”

She gave back his gaze defiantly for a moment, then suddenly she laughed.

“He’s real sorry,” said Len.

The words reminded Sally of her grievances.

“Then I think he’d better tell me so!” she cried.

But Len did not at once meet this.

“How long you two been married?” he asked.

“Seven months.”

Len sighed.

“That’s not very long, is it, lookin’ at it one way? And yet it’s a long while sometimes, lookin’ at it another. Now you take it wintertimes, back country, in Alaska—not on the coast; that’s mild. You’ve no idee how long it can be when you’re snowed up and can’t get around none.” Len laid aside his wash rag and perched one hip up on the drainboard, a feat his length made possible, and settled down as though for a long comfortable chat. “Gets you by and by,” said he, “so you act like nothin’ human, and when spring breaks and it’s all behind you, you look back and wonder if you’re the same fellow.” Len paused to chuckle reminiscently. “There was two old cusses I knew been pardners twenty years. They lived together and summered together and wintered together and got drunk together and stuck to each other like death to a dead nigger. Cuss out any one of them, and you had the other one crawlin’ your hump. And they never had no differences between themselves.

“They’d wintered it together a lot of times, like I said, but they got out and around a lot, for they were running trap lines. And then one year they got snowed in, good and plenty. One of them bad blizzard years. Couldn’t stick their noses out for three solid months. They were all right: plenty of grub. But you know what? They got so they weren’t speakin’. Fact! And then one morning one of ’em took a swallow from his cup and spit it out. ‘That’s rotten coffee,’ says he, which was the fust words spoken in that cabin for a week. And the other fellow, who had made the coffee, didn’t say nothing back, but he just pulled out his six shooter and——”

“Oh!” cried Sally.

“No ma’am. He put a hole plumb through that coffeepot. Now wa’n’t that just plumb ridiculous?”

Len laughed and slipped down from the edge of the drainboard.

Sally did not pretend to misunderstand.

“But we haven’t been cooped up together all the time,” she objected. “John’s had his work and I——”

“Have had your play,” interjected Len with uncharacteristic swiftness.

“You mean ...” Sally was thoughtful.

Len laid his hand on her arm.

“Now mind you, I don’t know nothin’ about it—John ain’t said a word. But I’m guessin’ he’s stuck pretty close—off hours I mean.” His eyes held hers compellingly. After a moment Sally bowed her head. “It’s only nat’ral, Sally,” said Len gently. “I think he’s done damn well. Excuse me,” he caught back the oath with quaint and incongruous primness.

“Oh, I’m not blaming him,” burst out Sally. “I can see that. But why couldn’t he have let me know! I nearly died!”

“He knows that,” said Len. “He’s sorry. But,” he fixed her with an eye that for the first time proved itself capable of sternness, “don’t you go for to make him say so. Understand?”

“Why shouldn’t he say so? I’m sorry for being such an idiot—about the police, I mean.”

“Police?”

“I—I reported to the police. I got so worried finally that I——”

“You sicked the police on him!” cried Len incredulously. “Oh, jeeker-snipes!” He began to laugh. He clung to the edge of the drainboard. He dissolved in laughter, doubling over helplessly. “That’s funny!” said he, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked at her small figure with new compassion. “You pore kids. Seven months,” said he.

“I suppose it was funny,” said Sally in a doubtful voice.

“Not for you.” Len sobered suddenly. “You were scairt.”

He handed her the last of the dishes, emptied the dishpans, methodically wrung out the cloth and hung it up.

“Now,” said he cheerfully, “we’re goin’ in and have a good time. And after I go, you act nat’ral!”

He started toward the door. Sally followed more slowly.

“Len,” she said in a small voice.

He turned. She stood before him, very small below his great height. The eyes she raised to his were swimming.

“Huh?” asked Len.

“Nothing—only—Len, do you know, you’re something of a dear!”

“Just act nat’ral,” repeated Len.

Len now became the life of the party and was as garrulous as before he had been silent. John stared at him in puzzled amazement. And Sally! It was as though the two had known each other for years. She wanted to hear about Alaska. She insisted that Len tell about Alaska.

“It’s never been anything to me but a space up north.” She made a comical face. “I asked him whether it wasn’t awfully cold up there,” she confided parenthetically to John. He brightened visibly at this attention. “By the look of his face, I gathered he had trouble getting through the tropical vegetation!” She laughed, and Len chuckled. He pondered a moment collecting his thoughts.

“It’s kinda hard to commence with a standing start that way,” he confessed. “Alaska’s too big. It’s too many kinds of things. I’ve lived there twenty-odd years, and I ain’t even begun to know about it.”

“What is there about it that especially appeals to you?” prompted Sally. “Why do you like to live there?”

“It’s big,” said Len. “It’s big—and it’s brand-spang new. Nobody’s spoiled it yet. Don’t believe they can. It’s like this country must have been, way back, when white folks fust come to it. Better,” he amended. He groped painfully for expression. “I reckon I like it because a man’s got room up there, and plenty of air, and he’s his own boss, and he stands on his own feet. It’s up to him. Everything’s there for him, but he’s got to have the sabe and the guts to go after it. If he gets in trouble, he’s got to be quick on his feet getting out: there ain’t no police for him to holler for——” He checked short as he realized the slip, but at once caught himself. “Safe place for John, here,” he said boldly. He cast toward Sally a look of challenge.

“He’d better take me there.” She laughed gaily and then flushed a little with pleasure at the profound approbation she caught in Len’s eyes. “I think you have the makings of an Alaskan, all right,” she hastened on, “quick on your feet getting out of trouble,” she explained. “But you haven’t told me yet what it’s like,” she urged.

She questioned him and continued to question, and Len answered until at last he kindled and was off under his own power. They listened in growing fascination as a picture took form. Mountains two miles high, not as isolated peaks as in the Cascades, but in range after range, up and up and back and back, unbroken ramparts shouldered together containing and guarding the unknown. About their feet illimitable forests of spruce and fir, garments let fall.

“Timber line’s low in that country,” said Len, “mebbe three or four thousand feet.

“Turquoise-blue glaciers, like big rivers awinding. Some places they run right down to the sea, and there the bergs break off and float away.

“Something to see, that,” said Len, “and hear. Sounds like the world’s busting up.

“Man wants to go where no man ever set foot before, there’s his chance,” said Len. “He could poke around for years and always somethin’ new.” Lakes swarming with trout. The meanderings of wooded canyons alive with rivers, and wide hidden valleys opening out. Great waterfalls—some of them taller’n Niagara, Len assured them, dozens of them. Everywhere. The sound of them falling was never out of your ears. “Sort of big and solemn,” said Len, “like mountains look.”

“It must be lovely,” sighed Sally, “but a little big—and frightening. Unfriendly.”

“That’s just the back country,” Len hastened to assure her. “Along the coast it’s friendly enough.” He tried for an image. “You know that paper they use to put on shelves with the edges all scalloped and punched and cut out in fancy patterns? Well, the coast is like that, fifty mile deep in islands and bays and inlets, and passages between, so’s a man could sail around in there till he grew gray whiskers and never cross his own wake.” Hundreds of harbors, thousands of them, where a man can put in, and in every one of them rivers and long flats and meadows. “Man would never suspect he was anywhere near a high country at all,” said Len, “less’n he caught an opening in the trees.” Nothing big and frightening about that, he told Sally. Cozy as you please. Everything grows fine there account of the long hours of sunshine. In June the daylight’s never out of the sky all night. Grass in the meadow higher’n your head. “And,” Len addressed Sally directly, “you ought to see the flowers, hundreds of acres of them, solid; sure a pretty sight. Why,” said Len, “I wouldn’t live nowhere else if you give me the whole show and throwed in a drink for good measure!”

“Good game country?” John asked his first question.

Best in the world. Len was positive about that, though at first he seemed to despair of his ability to express in words how good a game country it was. Swarms of small stuff. Ducks and geese by the million—that’s where the whole population breeds. You don’t hunt deer: you just go out and get one. Any man, said Len impressively, who kills him a deer more’n forty rods from his small boat is just a damn fool looking for hard work. No need to. Deer are so thick that the soft ground looks like a flock of sheep had trompled it. Get you a sheep or goat any time you want to climb for it. Bear everywhere. See a dozen a day if you look for ’em. John could not inhibit a look of doubt when Len said that some of them stood ten or twelve feet high on their hind legs.

“I ain’t lying,” said Len without heat. “Don’t have to. I do lie a little sometimes, to some folks,” he acknowledged, “but that’s only to keep practiced so’s I won’t strain myself when I tell the truth. I ain’t lying to you folks now. Honest I ain’t. It’s just like I say.”

They had to believe him.

“Can a man make a good living up there?” asked John.

Len came off the boil. He examined this soberly.

“Depends on what you mean by a good living,” he replied, picking his words with care. “If you mean getting a lot of money, I dunno. Some makes good money—canners and such. But they don’t live there—only summers, in the season. Some mighty good stakes are made trapping; there’s worlds of good fur. A fisherman gets off better there than he does here—like I told you. A good live man’s got plenty of chances, I reckon. There’s other things. You could grow most anything, but what you going to do with it? Same with lumber. There’s too much of it down here, nearer home.” Len pondered and shook his head. Then suddenly he looked up. His eyes flashed. “No,” said he, “by and large a man’ll probably make more money here. But,” he extended his great gnarled hand, “what will he do with it? What does anybody do with money? I’ll tell you. He buys life with it. That’s all. Life, living. And there’s a country where he gets it without money. He don’t have to ‘make a good living’: it’s all ready made. Tell me this,” Len leaned forward, “if you had all the money in the world, where could you go to buy yourself a better chance to be a man? or do it safer.”

“Safer?” echoed Sally dubiously.

“You’ll never starve.” Len relaxed and struck a match on his thumbnail to refire his pipe. “There’s meat—anywhere—plenty of it for the shooting; and salmon and trout and halibut and cod for the catching; and clams and crabs more’n you’d believe; and if you’re right up agin it there’s wild strawberries as big as the tame ones down here, and wild potatoes and Hudson Bay tea and wild rice and parsnips and goose tongue and celery and such, and not just something to eat, either—every bit as good as you can raise,” he assured Sally earnestly, “and you can raise garden truck if you want to, as far as that goes. And there’s good timber for a shack; and cord wood just outdoors——”

“Food, shelter, warmth,” murmured Sally. “Thoreau said those were man’s basic needs.”

“Never met him,” said Len, “but he was dead right. Barring maybe a few ca’tridges and a little coffee and sugar, a man can live like a king and never go near a store.” He came off the boil again. “Leastwise suits me,” said he. “I don’t bother none about money—till I get down where I got to use it. I’ve made some, and I can’t say it done me much good except to worry was I going to keep it.” He grinned wryly. “Which I didn’t,” he added.

Sally sighed.

“It does sound wonderful and wide and free.” Her eyes were dreamy.

Len made a motion as though to look at his watch, but withdrew his hand.

“Lord, I been doing a lot of talkin’! It must be scand’lous late,” said he. “Seems like every time I git going about Alaska somebody don’t know enough to go home.”

Both Sally and John laughed wholeheartedly at this thrust. Len’s faded blue eyes lit with satisfaction. He arose.

“Thanks for a good supper, Sally,” said he. “I’ve sure enjoyed myself.”

“You must come again,” said Sally.

“Just ask me.”

“I will.” There was more in her voice than the simple words conveyed.

They looked at one another. Len patted her shoulder.

“Comin’ along far as the corner?” he asked John.

Outside the two men tramped in silence until safely beyond earshot. They must go single file because of the narrowness of the plank walk. Len stopped, halting John. He cut short what John started to say.

“You listen to me.” He took an edge of John’s coat between thumb and forefinger and shook it in emphasis of his words. “Things is all right now. All you got to do is to keep them that way. Forget the whole thing. Don’t never refer to it again—leastwise not until you can laugh about it—together. And don’t act gentle and forgiving and elaboratelike neither; that’s worse. Go right ahead like it never happened.”

John was serious and troubled. He understood exactly what Len meant. But he dreaded the first moments after he opened the door. How begin? What was a good thing to say? It would be all right after they got over the hump; but that was going to be no cinch.

“You don’t need to say anything at all,” said Len. “Just love her up. Good lord, that’s one of the things they invented loving ’em for—to git over humps. And don’t worry about its bein’ awkward when you open the door,” he decided to add. “She’s thought of that, too. I’m betting she won’t be there when you open that front door. She’s gone to bed. You see if I ain’t right.” He hesitated a moment.

“You seem to know a lot about women.” But John’s voice was doubtful.

“I’m a wise old coot,” returned Len complacently. “I didn’t really invent the critters, but I might have been around when they done so.” He turned serious again. “This ain’t ‘women,’” said he. “This, is just you and Sally.”

“Sally wants you to come again,” John reminded, holding his hand in farewell. “Where you staying? Marshall House?”

“No, I left there. I’ll see you around the floats.” He disengaged his hand and turned away. “Now mind!” repeating, as seemed to be his habit. “No palaver. Just love her up; love her up good. Ought to be nothin’ hard about that,” he added, but so low that John failed to catch the words. “Well, good night,” he said abruptly and swung away down the line toward the streetcars.

“Good night,” John called after him. “Len, you’ve saved my life.”

“Shucks,” growled Len without looking back. “I’ll be seein’ you before long.”

That happened sooner than either, at the moment, expected. The very next evening, after the supper dishes had been put away—John helped—and the two had returned to the main room, Sally drew her chair out to face John’s. Her expression was determined. She had come to some sort of conclusion, that was evident, and John was at once alarmed. What now?

“John,” she began seriously, “just what do you know about Len Saunders?”

“Why,” John sat up straight in surprise, “he seems all right to me.”

“Of course he’s all right.” Sally was impatient. “He’s a dear. But what do you know about him?”

“Why, just what you heard him say, honey. But what you driving at? Seems to me——”

Sally cut him short.

“John, did you see how he ate last night? That man was hungry.”

John relaxed. He was not the target after all.

“Sure he was. So was I. And that was extra-special grub, if I do brag up my wife’s cooking.”

“And did you see how, when he thought it was late, he reached for his watch, and then drew his hand back as if he remembered that it wasn’t there? And his cuffs?”

“What about his cuffs?”

“They were held together by safety pins.”

John whistled.

“By golly, Sally, I believe you’re right,” he said slowly, “now you mention it. I never noticed.” Sally glanced at him scornfully, but said nothing. It was her theory that men never noticed anything. “Now I come to think of it,” he sat up straight again, “he told me the other evening he was at the Marshall House, and last night he told me he’d left there, and when I asked him where I could get hold of him, he sort of put me off, said I’d find him at the float sometime. Say”—he was fully roused—“that won’t do!”

“Of course it won’t do.”

“I’ll look him up tomorrow, if I can find him.”

“You find him,” instructed Sally with decision.

“I can’t figure how a man like him come to get in such a fix.”

“You told me yourself, the other day, that it’s almost impossible now to get any kind of a job anywhere,” pointed out Sally.

“Yes, it’s hard times; we’re lucky,” admitted John. “But that wasn’t what I was thinkin’ of. What I mean was, how’d he come to be here at all, broke flat? Seems like, if all he says about Alaska is true, that he wouldn’t have——”

“Does all that matter?” asked Sally.

“Don’t strike me like a drinkin’ man who’d blew all his——”

“He’s not,” stated Sally positively. “You find him; and you bring him back to supper. Tell him—oh, tell him I’ve got a pot roast that we can’t eat up ourselves. Anything. But get him.”

“You bet!” cried John. He was getting indignant. “Why he couldn’t have just give me a hint! He ought to know that I——”

“He wouldn’t.” Sally seemed determined that John should not finish a sentence.

“Well, he will now,” promised John truculently.

“Now listen, John.” Sally was very serious. “Don’t you do anything but get him up here. Don’t ask him questions, and above all don’t offer him money. It wouldn’t do. It just wouldn’t do. You must trust me on that. And after we have supper, I want you to get out. Leave us. I’ll tell you to go down and get some beer; and you go; and I don’t want you to act surprised or say you never knew me to drink beer or anything like that. Just go. And don’t come back before you’re wanted.’”

“All right.” John was relieved. Sally’s small erect figure looked like it meant business. John had great faith in Sally when she looked like that. “What you aimin’ to do, Sally?” he asked curiously.

“Find out,” her tone was brief. “Then we’ll know what to do.”

John sank back in his chair. Sally was in charge; he could leave it to Sally.

“If he needs money to get back home, or anything——” He began vaguely, then stopped. It was unnecessary to tell Sally that. “How’ll I know when I’m wanted back?”

“I’ll pull down the curtain shade.”

John looked at her admiringly. She had it all figured out.

There was no difficulty. Len was at the floats. He was only too glad to accept the invitation. Furthermore, on the way to the house, he made unnecessary some of the questions Sally undoubtedly had in mind.

“I’m waiting for a fellow I know,” he explained his making the float his headquarters. “Trader. He’s headed down this way from Alaska. Thought I’d ketch me a ride with him back. He knows me pretty well and knows I’m handy with a boat. He’s considerable overdue. Damn nuisance. Keeps a man waitin’ around doin’ nothing.”

Supper went merrily, with a great deal of interchange between Len and Sally, and John sitting by. He enjoyed that. It was as good as watching a play, with Sally teasing Len like a humming bird darting in and out, and Len sitting there like a carved-out wooden image, but every once in a while saying something kind of quiet and drawly that got back at her plenty and made them all laugh. John had never seen Sally so keyed up and gay.

John did not say much, he was having too good a time, but when supper was over he got back at Sally, in a mild sort of fashion, but enough to make her flash a glance of amused appreciation in his direction.

“I got an idea,” he beat her to it. “I’m going to trot down and get a few bottles of beer. That ought to go pretty good.”

He grinned at her. Not much of a joke, merely grabbing off the cue she had given herself in this small arrangement of things; but these two did not need much of a joke to get that warm feeling inside.

However, John did not pursue undeviatingly his errand. Once outside, he stopped to watch for a moment or so. Through the window he saw Len ensconced by Sally in the big chair; he saw him fill his pipe, and Sally, still afoot, trying to light a match for it by snapping its head against her thumbnail the way Len had done the other evening, and Len reaching out to take the match away from her, evidently expostulating in alarm lest she trap a burning fragment beneath the nail, and himself snapping it alight, and Sally laughing at him. Then he saw Sally pick up the small chair and plant it squarely in front of Len and sit down; and John, recognizing the funny little tilt of her head, himself laughed.

“Poor old Len!” he said to himself, “ain’t got a show in the world!” and tramped away contentedly to get the beer.

When he returned, the shade was still up, so he waited. Len was sitting up straight now, leaning toward Sally. Their heads were close together, and they were talking seriously. The conversation continued a long time, so long that it seemed to John his protracted absence must be getting a little ridiculous. How long did they think it took to go down to Madison Street and back, anyway? But at last Sally arose and crossed the room to pull down the shade. John collected himself for a plausible stage entrance.

“Well, here we are,” he made great business with paper bags at the table. “I got a few pretzels, too. Where’s the glasses? What you two lazy lummoxes think you been doing all the time I’ve been running my legs off for you?” He made toward the kitchen to remedy the omission, all the time trying to catch Sally’s eye.

“Len and I have been talking,” said Sally; “we’ve got a scheme.”

John stopped at the kitchen door.

“Yes?” he questioned.

“Len’s waiting for a man, and he don’t know when he’ll get here, and I told him it was silly, while we had an extra room that we had no use for, for him to be living in some hotel all by himself, and that we’d love to have him here with us.”

“We sure would!” cried John heartily. “I don’t know of anybody I’d rather have. I was going,” John looked Sally in the eye, “to suggest it myself. That’s great!”

Sally gulped at this brazen statement, but recovered.

“That’s what I told him. Isn’t it lucky for us! Now we can get that truck garden spaded up and planted out that you’ve never had time to get at—Len says he’ll do it for us.”

“By golly, that’s great!” cried John with enthusiasm. “Getting so late in the season I was just going to hunt me up somebody to do it. Saves us the hire.” He grinned at her. “Get anywhere near this woman, she’ll put you to work all right.”

Len was smoking, staring straight ahead, his face expressionless. He appeared not to hear. Now he knocked out his pipe and turned his head toward them.

“You’re a great pair of kids,” said he. “You put on a good show.”

Deliberately he unfolded his long gaunt frame from the chair and stood looking at them. They looked back. Somehow they felt like two small children caught out. They did not know what to say. Len picked up his old felt hat.

“I’ll make you a good truck garden,” said he. He moved toward the door. “We’ll have the beer tomorrow night,” said he. He stopped and turned to face them, looking from one to the other. “John Murdock,” he said, and in his voice was a vibrant undertone of feeling, “if ever I hear you ain’t treating this woman the way you ought to, I’m going to look you up and knock your damn head off!”

The door closed behind him. Sally rushed to John and burst into sudden tears.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” she sniffed presently. “There’s nothing to cry about. But somehow ...”

“I know,” said John. Queer! He felt a little choky himself. “What’s it all about?” John asked after a while.

“I don’t know why I should cry,” Sally repeated, her wonder at herself growing. “I’m not a crying woman!”

The situation was not as pathetic as all that. It was something else; something about Len himself, and the way she felt toward him. “He’s just a dear, that’s all,” said Sally. And something of a dear yourself, thought John, stroking her bright head. She calmed presently. They sat down and talked.

Len was broke, all right. He’d made no bones of that, once she accused him directly. He’d put all his money into a little independent cannery up north, and the big cannery companies had waited until he was well established and then had squeezed him out.

“Something to do with banks and mortgages, I didn’t quite understand it all,” said Sally.

“He said something about being ‘gobbled up,’ as he called it, first time we met,” recalled John thoughtfully, “I didn’t pay much attention at the time.”

Len had come down to Seattle to see if he couldn’t save something out of the wreck. He hadn’t. Now he was hanging on until a man he knew, with a boat, got to Seattle. He’d get a ride back to Alaska with that man. That’s all there was to it.

“He was entirely cheerful about it,” said Sally. “He laughed at himself. Said he was a fool for bucking the canners and just got what was coming to him. He’d be all right once he got back. Only thing that bothered him was this man’s being so late. I had to pin him down hard before he’d admit he was in any trouble at all. And if I hadn’t thought of that truck-garden idea he wouldn’t have given in.”

“You’re a wonder, Sally,” said John. “But you didn’t fool him. He was onto you all the time.”

“I know it,” confessed Sally. “I think that’s what made me cry.”