Time passed, however, and Joe seemed to brighten up. So far as Broderick went, he was a mighty man with ax and saw, and my bolt piles rose in corded ricks. Some devil rode him, too, at times, but it rode him to drink more than was good for him, and to fight like a tiger when the liquor was on him. He seldom sat and pondered. He was all action. In the following two months, he broke out at divers times in this fashion. And one evening when the three of us were sitting with our pipes—I having let my other man go—Joe took him mildly to task. They had got so chummy that they had planned a prospecting and trapping trip when my contract was finished:
“What satisfaction is there in going on one of these rampages?” Joe asked. “You only hurt yourself and make enemies of the men you bruise up in those wild rows.”
“I don’t know that it’s a matter of satisfaction,” Broderick replied thoughtfully. “Only life seems to me now and then to be nothing but a ghastly joke. And I get a crazy impulse to tear everything to pieces.”
“What hit you below the belt?” Joe asked softly.
“Myself, I guess,” Broderick grunted. “Circumstances. Most of us have our skeletons. When mine rattles I hate the noise so bad I try to drown it out any old way.”
“While I sit still and listen to the clatter of the bones—or I used to——” Joe threw out his hands impatiently. “Damn it, you’re right, Ed. Life is a ghastly joke sometimes. It lifts a man to the pinnacle of his dreams—and then blows up the pinnacle. Look at me. Five years ago I could say honestly and fervently that the world was mine—or that part thereof that I desired. I had everything a man wants—money, friends, a home, a woman’s love. And I had to give it all up. It burned me. It hurts yet. I guess I let it hurt me, because it’s always been simmering in my mind, and I’ve never been able to talk about it to any one—never wanted to. I hugged it to myself, and went about crying to myself against fate. And still—I’ve often wondered if I’m any different from other men; if the same thing comes to other men, and if they take it the same way?”
He looked up. Broderick was staring absently out over the tide race past Skeleton Point, and Joe met only my mildly questioning gaze. He smiled gently.
“I didn’t murder anybody, nor loot a bank, nor commit any felony whatever to send me on the tramp under an assumed name, Steve,” he said to me. “I suppose when I put it in plain words it all sounds like a confession of sheer weakness. It was very simple. You remember how everything was with me when you were back there? You remember Norma?”
I nodded.
“Four years ago,” he continued, “like lightning out of a clear sky, she told me one day that our life had been an utter failure—that she had ceased to love me, that she had grown to love another man, and there was no use trying to go on.