Things ran along like this for a month or so. Joe mentioned at last that Ryder was giving the men rotten grub. I put in my oar at that. I had a contract under Ryder, but we hadn’t much use for each other—and I was short-handed, too.
“You come down here and cut bolts for me,” I proposed. “I can’t pay more per cord than Ryder does, but I’ll guarantee you better food.”
He considered this a minute.
“All right,” he said indifferently. “It’ll be a change, anyway.”
He landed in my camp at ten the next morning and went to work. I can’t say that we got any closer for all that we worked in sight of each other by day and slept under the same roof in the same room at night. Joe remained a silent, preoccupied man. But he had decent food to eat, and I had an efficient shingle-bolt cutter, and, in addition, an able crib player to pass the lonely evenings.
I don’t know why, but I felt sorry for him. There was nothing concrete in his speech or action to arouse that feeling. It was just an atmosphere, one that I should likely never have sensed if I hadn’t known him under different circumstances. I couldn’t get it out of my head that the man had suffered, was still suffering, still being seared by some inner fire. It isn’t natural for a man of that type to cut loose from everything and everybody. He never got a letter, never seemed to expect one, never wrote one. He didn’t seem to have any care for the future, any ambition. He lived from one day to another, just putting in the day. It seemed to satisfy him. But it didn’t satisfy me. It didn’t seem natural.
When he had been with me about six weeks we began to get some bad summer winds on the gulf. Skeleton Point lies just at the entrance to one of the worst tidal passages on the whole North Pacific. The thirty-odd miles of the gulf’s width is pinched to a pair of half-mile narrows—one against Vancouver Island, one on the mainland side, where my camp stood. Through this pent channel the tides come and go with devilish ferocity. Woe to the small craft caught therein at the full run either way. Even the powerful coasters lie up for the slack of the tide, for few have power to buck that tide race, and if they run with it, the danger is little less. Reef and point thrust out from the closing shores to fling the headlong current this way and that in great whirls that will suck down a sixty-foot timber as if it were a match. The rivers of the Western watershed have their “hell gates”—but that gateway of the sea which I speak of, leading through narrow reaches to the open water of Queen Charlotte Sound, is the true gate to hell for those who take it otherwise than at slack water.
This snarling trap for mariners rose to the zenith of its fury a few hundred yards past the lagoon in which I boomed my shingle bolts for Ryder. Snarling rips lifted their torn crests offshore from my cabin, when the ebb run met the gulf swell. And just within Skeleton Point where the pent channel widened suddenly, beginning there and extending its circumference past my lagoon, there swirled and circled ceaselessly—save for a brief hour at slack water—a huge back eddy, in which sailed around and around all the driftwood and flotsam spewed through Hell Gate or brought to its door by ebb and flood. Round in its circle the gray-green water swept, swifter and more swift, until at full run in or out it raced, and a hollow whirlpool spun in the center like a top.
About three weeks after Joe came to work for me, we sat at dinner one day. Low tide came at one-thirty—the end of a big flood. It had become my habit to watch those tides. The tremendous inrushings and outpourings fascinated me. And I, like other men, had seen strange and fearful things happen there. Once, indeed, the foolhardy skipper of a coastwise boat, with ninety lives under his hand, tried to buck through Hell Gate. He had a sixteen-knot-boat contempt for fast water, and a schedule of gulf ports to make. He fought tide and whirl and rip and eddy till he laid Skeleton Point abeam. There his headway was no more than the race of the stream, and while he quivered and lurched a great swirl caught and swung him hard on the point, crushing the steel skin of his ship like so much cardboard—and of the ninety, only a dozen clawed desperately ashore. I saw that. I saw, too, a thirty-foot fishing boat go down by the nose in a whirlpool, go down and down till the water closed over her, to be shot afloat, keel up, ten minutes later, her crew of three drowned like rats in the pilot house. In no spirit of irony was that grim spot called Hell Gate.
As I said, we sat at our food, three of us. I gazed at the water foaming by the point, and saw nothing but the racing tide. A second later, with my eyes on my plate, Joe startled me with the vehemence of his exclamation: