“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.