"You should, too. Yaah!"
And, as though he had settled that once and for all, Captain Schultz waddled away to speak to the mate who was supervising the stevedores. A little uncertainty arose in Ramsay.
This—this half-wilderness, half-civilization in which he found himself was a land of strong contradictions. Lake Michigan, with all its fear and all its terror, and all its inspiration, lapped the Wisconsin shores. Yet some man could be so little impressed by the vast lake that he could name a boat for himself. Possibly a man capable of building or owning a ship like the Holter had a right to think of himself.
Ramsay turned again to look at the lake, and his mind projected him far away from the worn, slippery decks of the Holter. Almost he was unaware of the two silver dollars in his pocket, all the money he had left in the world, and of the uncertain future. At the same time, while his inmost being feasted on the lake, a part of his mind reviewed the events that had brought him here. He had an abrupt, uncomfortable revival of a New York memory.
There was a lion, a great, black-maned lion, in the New York zoo. It was well fed and well cared for, its every need attended. But most times the lion had still seemed restless and unhappy, and sometimes it had been a tired thing. Then it was hardly a lion at all but just a weary, living thing. Ramsay had wondered often how that lion felt.
He had never decided exactly how it did feel; within himself there were a dozen conflicting opinions. The lion paced its cage, and coming to the end of the very narrow limits granted to it, it turned and went back the other way. Coming to the end of the cage, it turned again. But all it ever found was the place it had already left. Once in a great while the lion had been very alert and very attentive. It was as though, now and again, the great animal could scent a wind of which nothing else was aware. That wind brought him memories of freedom, and happiness and the unhampered jungle life that had been.
Ramsay had gone often to see the lion, and though he never understood why, he always felt as though he had something in common with it, and he understood it partially. New York offered an abundance of opportunities, but they were well bound and well defined. There had always been a wild longing, a reckless yearning, within him, and often he thought that the newspapers which carried stories of the undeveloped Midwest were to him what the faint jungle scents had been to the lion. He had devoured every story eagerly. The Midwest was new, the papers had said. Good farm land, if one wanted to be a farmer, could be had for as little as four dollars an acre. It was the land of the future.
Again Ramsay jingled the two dollars in his pocket. He had answered the call of the Midwest because he could not help answering it. He had to try and to go and see for himself, but at the same time a caution, inborn in his Scotch mother and transplanted to him, could not be ignored. Before he burned his bridges behind him he had wanted to make sure that there were some ahead, and correspondence with the manager of the Three Points tannery had led to the offer of a job when he came. A dollar and twenty-five cents a day the tannery was offering able-bodied men, and there were too few men.
Ramsay looked out upon the lake, and a little thrill of excitement swept through him. Sometimes he had felt doubts about the wisdom of having left New York for the Midwest. He had been sure of a place to sleep and enough to eat as long as he stayed in New York, and again he felt the two dollars in his pocket.
Troubled, he looked out on the surging lake, and knew an instant peace. It was worth seeing. It was something few New Yorkers ever saw. The ocean was at their doorstep, and few of them even bothered looking at that; but the ocean was not like this. Lake Michigan was fresh and clean, different, wild and, as the papers had promised, new. Ramsay tasted the wet air, liking it as he did so.