“How did it happen?” I asked. “The Grosbeak’s a stranger through these waters.”
“Nanaimo boat,” said he. “Belongs to the G. G. Fish Company. We started through Hell Gate in plenty of time to get through on the first of the run. But she dropped her propeller. You can guess the rest. Except that the skipper—there were just the two of us—got panicky when she began to take water in some of the boiling places. He was so afraid for his life that he threw it away.”
“How?” I inquired.
“Took the dinghy to row ashore,” the man grinned. “A whirl caught him.”
He turned his thumb down expressively.
“So here I am,” he continued, “safe and sound, which I didn’t look for. Sitting on a rock in a shirt and overalls. Oh, well, it’ll be all the same a hundred years from now.”
“Less time than that,” I smiled. “In the meantime, come on to the cabin and get some dry clothes on—both of you.”
That is how Ed Broderick happened into my camp at Skeleton Point and gave me a pair of human enigmas to observe. He seemed quite indifferent as to where he went or what he did. A certain cynically cheerful humor came over him when he was dried and fed. He had no strings on him, he declared. The G. G. Company owed him no wages, and his duty to them ended with reporting the matter. And the upshot of that near-tragedy was that Broderick took on a job with me, cutting cedar into bolts for the hungry shingle saws.
From the very beginning he seemed to exercise a tonic effect on Joe. I don’t attempt to explain it. I know that it worked out that way. The two became fast friends. Broderick could always banish those silent spells of brooding under which Joe fell. He could make him grin, rouse him out of that deadly absorption in himself. They had in common the fact that both were afflicted with the itching foot, both had a past of which they never talked. Both were men of education, both were of the East. It showed in their inflections, their mannerisms. But the territory beyond the Rockies lay always ignored in the speech.
Otherwise it seemed that from the Gulf of Georgia to San Diego harbor their trails had crossed and recrossed unknowingly in the last four years. Many the incident they recalled where each had been among those present—a riot in a California hop field, a Frontier Day in Oregon, the stranding of a battleship on the bleak Washington coast. Brothers in unrest, they were, and I, listening to their talk of these things, wondered more and more what turn of fortune’s wheel had set Joe Galloway’s feet in these troubled ways.