Burned Bridges Part 14

Being in a town that was at once a frontier camp and a minor seaport, and being there at a season when the major industry of salmon-packing was at its height, the search of Tommy Ashe and Thompson for a job was soon ended. They were taken on as cannery hands--a "hand" being the term for unskilled laborers as distinguished from fishermen, can machine experts, engineers and the like. As such they were put to all sorts of tasks, work that usually found them at the day's end weary, dirty with fish scales and gurry, and more than a little disgusted. But they were getting three dollars and a half a day, and it was practically clear, which furnished a strong incentive to stick it out as long as the season lasted--a matter of two more months.

"By that time," said Tommy Ashe, "we'll have enough coin to venture into fresh fields. My word, but we do earn this money. It's the nastiness I object to, not the work. I shan't forget this first hundred dollars I've earned by the sweat of my manly brow."

In the fullness of time the salmon run came to an end. The pack being finished the hands were paid off. In company with half a hundred others, Ashe and Thompson were shipped from the Suchoi Bay Canneries back to Wrangel again.

In Wrangel, before they had been there four hours, Thompson got the offer of work in a pile camp. He took his prospective job under advis.e.m.e.nt and hunted up Tommy Ashe. Tommy dangled his legs over the edge of the bed in their room, and considered the matter.

"No," he said finally. "I don't believe I'll take it on. I think I'll go down to Vancouver. I'm about two hundred dollars strong, and I don't really see anything but a poor sort of living in this laboring-man stuff. I'm going to try some business proposition. I've got a pretty fair acquaintance with motor cars. I might be able to get in on the selling end of the game, and there is good money in that in the way of commissions. I know some people there who should be able to show me the ropes. In a big live seaport like that there must be chances. Yes, I think I'll try Vancouver. You'd better come too, Wes."

Thompson shook his head. He knew nothing of business. He had no trade.

For a time--until he came face to face with an opportunity he could recognize as such--he shrank from tackling a city. He had not quite Tommy's confidence in himself.

"No," he said. "I'd like to--but I don't believe I'd make good. And I don't want to get in a position where I'd have to be looking for somebody to throw me a life line. I don't seem to mind common hard work so much. I don't imagine I could jump right into a town and be any better off than I would be here. When I get a little more money ahead I'll be tempted to take a chance on a city. But not yet."

From this position Tommy's persuasion failed to move him. Tommy was earnest enough, and perfectly sincere in promising to see him through.

But that was not what Thompson wanted. He was determined that in so far as he was able he would make his own way unaided. He wanted to be through with props forever. That had become a matter of pride with him.

He went back and told the pile-camp boss that he would report in two days.

A southbound steamer sailed forty-eight hours later. She backed away from the Wrangel wharf with Tommy waving his hand to his partner on the pierhead. Thompson went back to their room feeling a trifle blue, as one does at parting from a friend. But it was not the moodiness of uncertainty. He knew what he was going to do. He had simply got used to Tommy being at his elbow, to chatting with him, to knowing that some one was near with whom he could try to unravel a knotty problem or hold his peace as he chose. He missed Tommy. But he knew that although they had been partners over a hard country, had bucked a hard trail like men and grown nearer to each other in the stress of it, they could not be Siamese twins. His road and Tommy's road was bound to fork. A man had to follow his individual inclination, to live his own life according to his lights. And Tommy's was for town and the business world, while his--as yet--was not.

So for the next four months Thompson lived and worked on a wooded promontory a few miles north of Wrangel, very near the mouth of the river down which he and Tommy Ashe had come to the sea. He was housed with thirty other men in a bunkhouse of hand-split cedar; he labored every day felling and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g tall slender poles for piling that would ultimately hold up bridges and wharves. The crew was a cosmopolitan lot so far as nationality went. In addition they were a tougher lot than Thompson had ever encountered. He never quite fitted in. They knew him for something of a tenderfoot, and they had not the least respect for his size--until he took on and soundly whipped two of them in turn before the bunkhouse door, with the rest of the thirty, the boss and the cook for spectators. Thompson did not come off scathless, but he did come off victor, although he was a b.l.o.o.d.y sight at the finish. But he fought in sheer desperation, because otherwise he could not live in the camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different att.i.tude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights would be respected.

Along with this incidental light upon the ways of his fellow working-men he learned properly how to swing an axe; he grew accustomed to dragging all day on the end of a seven-foot crosscut saw, to lift and strain with a cant hook. The hardening process, begun at Lone Moose, continued unceasingly. If mere physical hardihood had been his end, he could easily have pa.s.sed for a finished product. He could hold his own with those broad-shouldered Swedes and Michigan loggers at any turn of the road. And that was a long way for a man like Thompson to come in the course of twelve months. If he could have been as sure of a sound, working philosophy of life as he was of the fitness of his muscles he would have been well satisfied. Sometimes it was a puzzle to him why men existed, why the will to live was such a profound force, when living was a struggle, a vexation, an aimless eating and sleeping and working like a carthorse. Where was there any plan, any universal purpose at all?

Having never learned dissipation as a form of amus.e.m.e.nt, nor having yet been driven to it by the sheer deadliness of incessant, monotonous labor, Thompson was able to save his money. When he went to Wrangel once a month he got a bath, a hair-cut, and some magazines to read, perhaps an article or two of necessary clothing. That was all his financial outlay. He came back as clear-eyed as when he left, with the bulk of his wages in his pocket, where some of his fellows returned with empty pockets and aching heads.

Wherefore, when the winter snows at last closed down the pile camp Thompson had acc.u.mulated four hundred dollars. Also he had made an impression on the contractor by his steadiness, to such an extent that the man offered him a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to come back and take charge of a similar camp in the spring. But Thompson, like Tommy Ashe, had grown troubled with the wandering foot. The money in hand gave him security against want in strange places. He would not promise to be on hand in the spring. Like Tommy, he had a notion to try town, to see for himself what opportunity town afforded. And he pitched on Vancouver, not alone because Tommy Ashe was there, but because it was the biggest port on Canada's western coast. He had heard once from Tommy. He was a motor-car salesman now, and he was doing well. But Tommy's letter was neither long nor graphic in its descriptions. It left a good deal of Vancouver to Thompson's imagination. However, like the bear that went over the mountain, Thompson thought he would go and see what he could see.

Wrangel lies well within the Inside Pa.s.sage, that great waterway which is formed between the mainland and a chain of islands that sweeps from Cape Flattery in the south to the landward end of the Aleutians. All the steamers that ply between Puget Sound and Skagway take that route.

Seldom do the vessels plying between southern ports and the far beaches of Nome come inside. They are deep-sea craft, built for offsh.o.r.e work.

So that one taking a steamer at Wrangel can travel in two directions only, north to Skagway, south to Puget Sound.

The booking facilities at Wrangel are primitive, to say the least. When Thompson inquired about southbound pa.s.sage, he was told to go down and board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at eleven that night. So he took all his meager belongings, which he could easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his pa.s.sage, and he pa.s.sed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled, clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.

There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in mackinaws and heavy laced boots. Thompson, habitually diffident, asked no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner of the North. He laid down his bag and roll, sat awhile listening to the shift of feet and the clatter of cargo winches on deck and pierhead.

Then, growing drowsy, he stretched himself on a cushioned seat with his bag for a pillow and fell asleep.

He woke with an odd sensation of his bed dropping out from under him.

Coming out of a sound slumber he was at first a trifle bewildered, but instinctively he grasped a stanchion to keep himself from sliding across the floor as the vessel took another deep roll. The smoking room was deserted. He gained his feet and peered out of a window. All about him ran the uneasy heave of the sea. Try as he would his eyes could pick up no dim sh.o.r.e line. And it was not particularly dark, only a dusky gloom spotted with white patches where a comber reared up and broke in foam.

He wondered at the ship's position. It did not conform to what he had been told of the Inside Pa.s.sage.

And while he was wondering a ship's officer in uniform walked through the saloon. He cast a quick glance at Thompson and smiled slightly.

"This outside roll bother you?" he inquired pleasantly.

"Outside?" Thompson grasped at the word's significance. "Are we going down outside?"

"Sure," the man responded. "We always do."

"I wonder," Thompson began to sense what he had done, "I say--isn't this the _Roanoke_ for Seattle?"

The mate's smile deepened. "Uh-uh," he grinned. "This is the _Simoon_, last boat of the season from outside northern points. We had to put into Wrangel, which we rarely do. The _Roanoke_ berthed right across the wharf from us. Got aboard us by mistake, did you?"

Thompson nodded.

"Well," the officer continued, "sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home. We don't touch this side the Golden Gate. So you may as well see the purser when he gets up and have him a.s.sign you a berth.

It's pretty near daylight now."

He nodded and went on. Thompson, holding fast, getting his first uncomfortable experience of the roll and recovery of a ship in a beam sea, made his way out on the after deck. Holding on the rail he peered over the troubled water that was running in the open mouth of Dixon Entrance, beyond which lay the vast breadth of the Pacific, an unbroken stretch to the coast of j.a.pan.

Again Chance was playing the deuce with his calculations. For a few minutes he felt uncommonly irritated. He had not started for San Francisco. He did not want to go to San Francisco. Still--what was the odds? San Francisco was as good as any other town. He shrugged his shoulders, and feeling his way to a coiled hawser sat down in the bight of it to contend with the first, faint touch of seasickness.

CHAPTER XV

THE WORLD IS SMALL

For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare which is to San Francisco what the aorta is to the arterial system.

Gazing down from a height of four stories he could see a never-ending stir, hear the roar of vehicular traffic which swelled from a midnight murmur to a deep-mouthed roar in the daylight hours. And on either side the traffic lane there swept a stream of people like the current of the Stikine River.

He was not a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of the globe. San Francisco--is San Francisco--a melting-pot of peoples, blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the city lacks of s.p.a.ciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a great pace.

It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any source whatever. Those hurrying mult.i.tudes, that unending stir, the kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that environment, so he felt--as he had not at first felt in the North--that in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the big game was played. It was the ant.i.thesis of the North inasmuch as all this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a forthright compet.i.tive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of environment.

How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the world.

He had no misgivings about making a living. He could always fall back on common labor. But a common laborer is socially of little worth, financially of still less value. Thompson had to make money--using the phrase in its commonly accepted sense. He subscribed to that doctrine, because he was beginning to see that in a world where purchasing power is the prime requisite a man without money is the slave of every untoward circ.u.mstance. Money loomed before Thompson as the key to freedom, decent surroundings, a chance to pursue knowledge, to so shape his life that he could lend a hand or a dollar to the less fortunate.

He still had those stirrings of altruism, a ready sympathy, an instinct to help. Only he saw very clearly that he could not be of any benefit to even a limited circle of his fellow men when at every turn of his hand economic pressure bore so hard upon him as an individual. He began to see that getting on in the world called for complete concentration of his efforts upon his own well-being. A pauper cannot be a philanthropist. One cannot take nothing from nothing and make something.

To be of use to others he must first grasp what he required for himself.

Once he was settled and familiar enough with San Francisco to get from the Ferry Building to the Mission and from the Marina to China Basin without the use of a map he began to cast about for an opening. To make an apprentice beginning in any of the professions required education. He had that, he considered. It did not occur to him by what devious routes men arrived at distinction in the professions. He thought of studying for the law until the reception he got in various offices where he went seeking for information discouraged him in that field. Law students were a drug on the market.

"My dear young man," one kindly, gray-haired attorney told him, "you'd be wasting your time. The law means a tremendous amount of intellectual drudgery, and a slim chance of any great success unless you are gifted with a special apt.i.tude for certain branches of it. All the great opportunities for a young man nowadays lie in business and salesmanship."

Business and salesmanship being two things of which Thompson knew himself to be profoundly ignorant, he made little headway. A successful business operation, so far as he could observe, called for capital which he did not possess. Salesmanship, when he delved into the method of getting his foot on that rung of the ladder, required special training, knowledge of a technical sort. That is, really successful salesmanship.

The other kind consisted of selling goods over a counter for ten dollars per--with an excellent chance of continuing in that unenviable situation until old age overtook him. This was an age of specialists--and he had no specialty. Moreover, every avenue that he investigated seemed to be jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.

Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. He looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for him--fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.

When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer loneliness drove him out on the streets. His room was a cheerless place, a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more. Many a time, lacking any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco's streets. He sought out parks, beaches, public buildings. At night he would drift, a silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the downtown district that was a blaze of light.

That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the haunt of the soap-boxer. This curious thoroughfare lay upon the borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco's Chinatown. For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given over to an impromptu form of public a.s.sembly, a poor man's debating ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and quarters from the crowd.