Fifty-seven days after boarding the Glenalvon I bade farewell to her crew. Dressed in khaki uniform and an ancient pair of sea boots that had cost me four messes of plum duff, I landed with the captain at a rocky point on the further side of the cove. He marched before me until we had reached the door of an isolated saloon, then turned and dropped into my hand seven and a half dollars.
“I’ve brought you here,” he said, “to save you from losing your wages to those sharks down there in Squiremouth. You must be back on board by to-morrow night.”
“Eh!” I gasped.
“Oh, I have to tell you that,” snapped the skipper, “or I can’t set you down as a deserter,” and, pushing aside the swinging doors before him, he disappeared.
I plodded on towards the city of Victoria. The joy of being on land once more, above all of being my own master, was so acute that it was with difficulty that I refrained from cutting a caper in the public highway. For once I realized the full strength of that instinct which drives the seaman on the day he is paid off from a long voyage to plunge headlong into the wildest excesses of dissipation.
In reality I was still in a foreign land; yet how every detail about me suggested the fatherland from which I had so long been absent. The wooden sidewalk drumming under my boots; the cozy houses, roofed with shingles instead of tiles, and each standing with retiring modesty in its own green lawn; the tinkle of cow-bells in neighboring pastures—a hundred unimportances, that passed unheeded when I dwelt among them, stood forth to call up reminiscences of my pre-wandering existence. In Victoria every passer-by seemed a long-lost friend, so familiar did each look in feature, garb, and actions. All that day, as often as I heard a voice behind me, I whirled about and stared at the speaker, utterly astonished that he should be speaking English.
I caught the night boat for Seattle and landed at midnight in my native land after an absence of four hundred and sixty-six days. For two days following I did little but sleep, then set out one evening to “beat my way” eastward, landing in Spokane the second night thereafter. My wages as a seaman being nearly exhausted, I put up at the “Ondawa Workingman’s Inn,” purchased a job at an employment agency, and spent a week “bucking the concrete board” for J. Kennedy, a bustling Irish contractor to whom Spokane is indebted for most of her sidewalks. At the end of that time I turned over another dollar to the employment agency and shipped as a railway laborer to Paola, Montana. The train halted at midnight at the station named, an isolated shanty in a wild mountain gorge; but, having no desire to tramp ten miles across the parched foothills to the camp of the contractor, I went on, like several of the “agency gang,” by the same train—this time crouched on the steps of a Pullman car. My companions dropped off one by one as the night air set their teeth chattering, but I clung to my place until daylight came and the conductor, raising the vestibule floor above my head, invited me to “hit the grit.”
A four-mile walk brought me to Havre. From one of its restaurants I had barely emerged when a ranchman accosted me. When night fell I was speeding eastward in charge of seven car-loads of cattle. Six days later I turned the animals over to the tender mercies of a packing-house in Chicago, and, on the morning of October fourteenth, entered the portals of my paternal home.