THE RESTLESS FOOT
Being in a town that was at once a frontier camp and a minor seaport,
and being there at a season when the major industry of salmon-packing
was at its height, the search of Tommy Ashe and Thompson for a job was
soon ended. They were taken on as cannery hands--a "hand" being the term
for unskilled laborers as distinguished from fishermen, can machine
experts, engineers and the like. As such they were put to all sorts of
tasks, work that usually found them at the day's end weary, dirty with
fish scales and gurry, and more than a little disgusted. But they were
getting three dollars and a half a day, and it was practically clear,
which furnished a strong incentive to stick it out as long as the season
lasted--a matter of two more months.
"By that time," said Tommy Ashe, "we'll have enough coin to venture into
fresh fields. My word, but we do earn this money. It's the nastiness I
object to, not the work. I shan't forget this first hundred dollars I've
earned by the sweat of my manly brow."
In the fullness of time the salmon run came to an end. The pack being
finished the hands were paid off. In company with half a hundred others,
Ashe and Thompson were shipped from the Suchoi Bay Canneries back to
Wrangel again.
In Wrangel, before they had been there four hours, Thompson got the
offer of work in a pile camp. He took his prospective job under
advisement and hunted up Tommy Ashe. Tommy dangled his legs over the
edge of the bed in their room, and considered the matter.
"No," he said finally. "I don't believe I'll take it on. I think I'll go
down to Vancouver. I'm about two hundred dollars strong, and I don't
really see anything but a poor sort of living in this laboring-man
stuff. I'm going to try some business proposition. I've got a pretty
fair acquaintance with motor cars. I might be able to get in on the
selling end of the game, and there is good money in that in the way of
commissions. I know some people there who should be able to show me the
ropes. In a big live seaport like that there must be chances. Yes, I
think I'll try Vancouver. You'd better come too, Wes."
Thompson shook his head. He knew nothing of business. He had no trade.
For a time--until he came face to face with an opportunity he could
recognize as such--he shrank from tackling a city. He had not quite
Tommy's confidence in himself.
"No," he said. "I'd like to--but I don't believe I'd make good. And I
don't want to get in a position where I'd have to be looking for
somebody to throw me a life line. I don't seem to mind common hard work
so much. I don't imagine I could jump right into a town and be any
better off than I would be here. When I get a little more money ahead
I'll be tempted to take a chance on a city. But not yet."
From this position Tommy's persuasion failed to move him. Tommy was
earnest enough, and perfectly sincere in promising to see him through.
But that was not what Thompson wanted. He was determined that in so far
as he was able he would make his own way unaided. He wanted to be
through with props forever. That had become a matter of pride with him.
He went back and told the pile-camp boss that he would report in two
days.
A southbound steamer sailed forty-eight hours later. She backed away
from the Wrangel wharf with Tommy waving his hand to his partner on the
pierhead. Thompson went back to their room feeling a trifle blue, as one
does at parting from a friend. But it was not the moodiness of
uncertainty. He knew what he was going to do. He had simply got used to
Tommy being at his elbow, to chatting with him, to knowing that some one
was near with whom he could try to unravel a knotty problem or hold his
peace as he chose. He missed Tommy. But he knew that although they had
been partners over a hard country, had bucked a hard trail like men and
grown nearer to each other in the stress of it, they could not be
Siamese twins. His road and Tommy's road was bound to fork. A man had to
follow his individual inclination, to live his own life according to his
lights. And Tommy's was for town and the business world, while his--as
yet--was not.
So for the next four months Thompson lived and worked on a wooded
promontory a few miles north of Wrangel, very near the mouth of the
river down which he and Tommy Ashe had come to the sea. He was housed
with thirty other men in a bunkhouse of hand-split cedar; he labored
every day felling and trimming tall slender poles for piling that would
ultimately hold up bridges and wharves. The crew was a cosmopolitan lot
so far as nationality went. In addition they were a tougher lot than
Thompson had ever encountered. He never quite fitted in. They knew him
for something of a tenderfoot, and they had not the least respect for
his size--until he took on and soundly whipped two of them in turn
before the bunkhouse door, with the rest of the thirty, the boss and the
cook for spectators. Thompson did not come off scathless, but he did
come off victor, although he was a bloody sight at the finish. But he
fought in sheer desperation, because otherwise he could not live in the
camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he
noted the different attitude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not
right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his
rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never
be very sure that his rights would be respected.
Along with this incidental light upon the ways of his fellow working-men
he learned properly how to swing an axe; he grew accustomed to dragging
all day on the end of a seven-foot crosscut saw, to lift and strain with
a cant hook. The hardening process, begun at Lone Moose, continued
unceasingly. If mere physical hardihood had been his end, he could
easily have passed for a finished product. He could hold his own with
those broad-shouldered Swedes and Michigan loggers at any turn of the
road. And that was a long way for a man like Thompson to come in the
course of twelve months. If he could have been as sure of a sound,
working philosophy of life as he was of the fitness of his muscles he
would have been well satisfied. Sometimes it was a puzzle to him why men
existed, why the will to live was such a profound force, when living was
a struggle, a vexation, an aimless eating and sleeping and working like
a carthorse. Where was there any plan, any universal purpose at all?
Having never learned dissipation as a form of amusement, nor having yet
been driven to it by the sheer deadliness of incessant, monotonous
labor, Thompson was able to save his money. When he went to Wrangel once
a month he got a bath, a hair-cut, and some magazines to read, perhaps
an article or two of necessary clothing. That was all his financial
outlay. He came back as clear-eyed as when he left, with the bulk of his
wages in his pocket, where some of his fellows returned with empty
pockets and aching heads.
Wherefore, when the winter snows at last closed down the pile camp
Thompson had accumulated four hundred dollars. Also he had made an
impression on the contractor by his steadiness, to such an extent that
the man offered him a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to come
back and take charge of a similar camp in the spring. But Thompson, like
Tommy Ashe, had grown troubled with the wandering foot. The money in
hand gave him security against want in strange places. He would not
promise to be on hand in the spring. Like Tommy, he had a notion to try
town, to see for himself what opportunity town afforded. And he pitched
on Vancouver, not alone because Tommy Ashe was there, but because it was
the biggest port on Canada's western coast. He had heard once from
Tommy. He was a motor-car salesman now, and he was doing well. But
Tommy's letter was neither long nor graphic in its descriptions. It left
a good deal of Vancouver to Thompson's imagination. However, like the
bear that went over the mountain, Thompson thought he would go and see
what he could see.
Wrangel lies well within the Inside Passage, that great waterway which
is formed between the mainland and a chain of islands that sweeps from
Cape Flattery in the south to the landward end of the Aleutians. All the
steamers that ply between Puget Sound and Skagway take that route.
Seldom do the vessels plying between southern ports and the far beaches
of Nome come inside. They are deep-sea craft, built for offshore work.
So that one taking a steamer at Wrangel can travel in two directions
only, north to Skagway, south to Puget Sound.
The booking facilities at Wrangel are primitive, to say the least. When
Thompson inquired about southbound passage, he was told to go down and
board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at
eleven that night. So he took all his meager belongings, which he could
easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down
half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his
passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled,
clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.
There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed
to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in
mackinaws and heavy laced boots. Thompson, habitually diffident, asked
no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner
of the North. He laid down his bag and roll, sat awhile listening to the
shift of feet and the clatter of cargo winches on deck and pierhead.
Then, growing drowsy, he stretched himself on a cushioned seat with his
bag for a pillow and fell asleep.
He woke with an odd sensation of his bed dropping out from under him.
Coming out of a sound slumber he was at first a trifle bewildered, but
instinctively he grasped a stanchion to keep himself from sliding across
the floor as the vessel took another deep roll. The smoking room was
deserted. He gained his feet and peered out of a window. All about him
ran the uneasy heave of the sea. Try as he would his eyes could pick up
no dim shore line. And it was not particularly dark, only a dusky gloom
spotted with white patches where a comber reared up and broke in foam.
He wondered at the ship's position. It did not conform to what he had
been told of the Inside Passage.
And while he was wondering a ship's officer in uniform walked through
the saloon. He cast a quick glance at Thompson and smiled slightly.
"This outside roll bother you?" he inquired pleasantly.
"Outside?" Thompson grasped at the word's significance. "Are we going
down outside?"
"Sure," the man responded. "We always do."
"I wonder," Thompson began to sense what he had done, "I say--isn't this
the _Roanoke_ for Seattle?"
The mate's smile deepened. "Uh-uh," he grinned. "This is the _Simoon_,
last boat of the season from outside northern points. We had to put into
Wrangel, which we rarely do. The _Roanoke_ berthed right across the
wharf from us. Got aboard us by mistake, did you?"
Thompson nodded.
"Well," the officer continued, "sometimes the longest way round is the
shortest way home. We don't touch this side the Golden Gate. So you may
as well see the purser when he gets up and have him assign you a berth.
It's pretty near daylight now."
He nodded and went on. Thompson, holding fast, getting his first
uncomfortable experience of the roll and recovery of a ship in a beam
sea, made his way out on the after deck. Holding on the rail he peered
over the troubled water that was running in the open mouth of Dixon
Entrance, beyond which lay the vast breadth of the Pacific, an unbroken
stretch to the coast of Japan.
Again Chance was playing the deuce with his calculations. For a few
minutes he felt uncommonly irritated. He had not started for San
Francisco. He did not want to go to San Francisco. Still--what was the
odds? San Francisco was as good as any other town. He shrugged his
shoulders, and feeling his way to a coiled hawser sat down in the bight
of it to contend with the first, faint touch of seasickness.