Troubled Waters

That is how Ed Broderick happened into my camp at Skeleton Point and gave me a pair of human enigmas to observe. He seemed quite indifferent as to where he went or what he did. A certain cynically cheerful humor came over him when he was dried and fed. He had no strings on him, he declared. The G. G. Company owed him no wages, and his duty to them ended with reporting the matter. And the upshot of that near-tragedy was that Broderick took on a job with me, cutting cedar into bolts for the hungry shingle saws.

From the very beginning he seemed to exercise a tonic effect on Joe. I don’t attempt to explain it. I know that it worked out that way. The two became fast friends. Broderick could always banish those silent spells of brooding under which Joe fell. He could make him grin, rouse him out of that deadly absorption in himself. They had in common the fact that both were afflicted with the itching foot, both had a past of which they never talked. Both were men of education, both were of the East. It showed in their inflections, their mannerisms. But the territory beyond the Rockies lay always ignored in the speech.