Life is a ghastly joke sometimes. It lifts a man to the pinnacle ofhis dreams—and then blows up the pinnacle. Instance this city man,turned logger.
The first time I met Joe Galloway after he married, I envied him. Afriendly, good-natured envy, you understand. He had attained whatlooked to me like genuine success; he had got somewhere, both in amaterial and spiritual way. He had a connection that gave him incomesufficient for his needs, sufficient to maintain a decent standard ofliving, and a substantial interest in the business besides, which wasslowly but surely building up a competence for him. He had his littlecircle of friends, and his home. And he was mated to a woman any manmight be proud of. I could not see anything a man really craves thatwas beyond his reach.
I’ve not had what you’d call a multifarious experience in the way ofmarried folk, but I haven’t gone through the world blind. I have seena lot that lived the proverbial cat-and-dog existence. I’ve seen a lotmore that lived in a state of more or less tolerant indifference. AndI have seen a few that appeared to have a corner on confidence andaffection and genuine understanding, to be really mated, in the widestmeaning of the term. Galloway and his wife seemed to me to be one ofthe finest examples of the latter that I’d ever come across. Joe was areal man, sterling. If one may know a woman by her ordinary manner,then Norma rang as true as he did. And she was a beautiful woman, too;one of those tall, perfectly formed, radiant creatures that a man isproud to be seen walking down the street with.
I’d gone to school with Joe Galloway, but I had seen nothing of himfor many a long moon, until I ran across him quite by accident on atrip East. We had been chummy kids, and we had drifted apart becauseJoe was one of those quiet beggars that knows what he wants and stayseverlastingly on the trail of his purposes—and I’m a rolling stone, afull-fledged brother in the order of the wandering foot. But time anddistance made scant difference. He had a warm recollection of me, andhe insisted that I make his home my headquarters. I did, and spentnearly three weeks with them. They made me feel one withthemselves—and, as I said, I envied them in their happiness. If theywere not happy and contented, there is no such satisfying state ofmind.
I came back to the coast in due time, and while I didn’t write,because I’m not much on correspondence, I did retain some very vividimpressions of Joe and Norma Galloway. I liked to think of them like apair of birds in their nest, while I was knocking about in loggingcamps, with bolt cutters and all the roving, restless lot my way oflife took me among. A man playing a lone hand finds his life full ofbleak spots. He can’t dodge them. And I suppose I thought of those twooften because their lives seemed full of desirable things which hadeluded me. As I saw it, they had attained as near to the ideal as wecan ever reasonably expect to come.
So you can judge of my surprise and know that I was filled with deepwonder and kindred emotions when I came out on the wharf at CoderreLanding just as a tubby coaster backed away, and plumped into JoeGalloway sitting on a war bag, dressed in mackinaws and calked bootslike any logger. I’d never seen him in such garb. I hadn’t seen him atall in four years, and he had a week’s growth of beard—but I knew him.And I knew by the way his eyes widened and then narrowed that he knewme. I spoke to him. For a second I thought he meant to refuserecognition. Then he stuck out his hand.