Burned Bridges Part 28

He tried again, and once more the same voice, this time impatiently, said, "Wrong number."

"Wait," Thompson said quickly. "Is this Seymour 365L, corner of Larch and First?"

"Yes."

"I beg pardon for bothering you. I'm just back from overseas and I'm rather anxious to locate Mr. Carr--Samuel A. Carr. This was his home two years ago."

"Just a minute," the feminine voice had recovered its original sweetness. "Perhaps I can help you. Hold the line."

Thompson waited. Presently he was being addressed again.

"My husband believes Mr. Carr still owns this place. We lease through an agent, however, Lyng and Salmon, Credit Foncier Building. Probably they will be able to give you the required information."

"Thanks," Thompson said.

He found Lyng and Salmon's number in the telephone book. But the lady was mistaken. Carr had sold the place. Nor did Lyng and Salmon know his whereabouts.

Tommy would know. But Tommy was out of town. Still there were other sources of information. A man like Carr could not make his home in a place no larger than Vancouver and drop out of sight without a ripple.

Thompson stuck doggedly to the telephone, sought out numbers and called them up. In the course of an hour he was in possession of several facts.

Sam Carr was up the coast, operating a timber and land undertaking for returned soldiers. The precise location he could not discover, beyond the general one of Toba Inlet.

They still maintained a residence in town, an apartment suite. From the caretaker of that he learned that Sophie spent most of her time with her father, and that their coming and going was uncertain and unheralded.

The latter facts were purely incidental, save one. Tommy Ashe had that morning cleared the _Alert_ for a coastwise voyage.

Sam Carr and Sophie were up the coast. Tommy was up the coast. Thompson sat for a time in deep study. Very well, then. He, too, would journey up the coast. He had not come six thousand miles to loaf in a hotel lobby and wear out shoe leather on concrete walks.

CHAPTER XXVIII

FAIR WINDS

Within a gunshot of the heart of Vancouver lies a snug tidal basin where yachts swing to their moorings, where a mosquito fleet of motor craft lies along narrow slips, with the green woods of Stanley Park for a background. Thompson knew Coal Harbor well. He knew the slips and the boats and many of the men who owned them. He had gone on many a week-end cruise out of that basin with young fellows who looked their last on the sea when they crossed the English Channel. So he had picked up a working fund of nautical practice, a first-hand knowledge of the sea and the manner of handling small sail.

From the Granada he went straight to Coal Harbor. While the afternoon was yet young he had chartered a yawl, a true one-man craft, carrying plenty of canvas for her inches, but not too much. She had a small, snug cabin, was well-found as to gear, and was equipped with a st.u.r.dy single-cylinder gas engine to kick her along through calm and tideway.

Before six he had her ready for sea, his dunnage bag aboard, grub in the lockers, gas in the tanks, clearance from the customhouse. He slept aboard in a bunk softer than many a sleeping place that had fallen to his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half north, to clear Roger Curtis Point.

He blew through Welcome Pa.s.s at noon on the forefront of a rising gale, with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank.

As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of the Pa.s.s. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore her racing forward, and when the crest pa.s.sed she would drop into a green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in the trough again.

But she made merry weather of it. And Thompson rode the tiller, an eye to his sheets, glorying in his mastery of the sea. It was good to be there with a clean wind whistling through taut stays, no sound but the ripple of water streaming under his lee, and the swoosh of breaking seas that had no power to harm him. Peace rode with him. His body rested, and the tension left his nerves which for months had been strung like the gut on a violin.

Between Welcome Pa.s.s and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.

He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a pa.s.sage scarce twenty feet wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.

He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling rim of firs. Then he lay on a cus.h.i.+on in the c.o.c.kpit until dark came and the green sh.o.r.e of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosph.o.r.escent flashes of darting fish.

Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his bunk.

Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream. He was falling, falling swiftly from a great height in the air. On the tail of his plane rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar--boom--boom--boom--boom!

Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk. The queer dream had given place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued. As he put his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the sh.o.r.e beyond. Back of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running lights laid dead for him. It sheered a little. The brilliant ray blinked out. He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse pipe. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

He rose with the sun. Beside him lay a st.u.r.dily built motor tug. A man leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl.

Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.

Thompson emerged into the c.o.c.kpit. The air was cool and he was fully dressed. At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in the military salute--the formality tempered by a friendly grin. Thompson saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have been. Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had plowed.

"It's a fine morning after a wild night," Thompson broke the conversational ice.

"It was a wild night outside and no mistake," the man replied. "We took cover about midnight--got tired of plowing into it, and wasn't too keen for wallowing through them rips off the Cape. Say, are you back long from over there?"

"Not long," Thompson replied. "I left England two weeks ago."

"How's it going?"

"We're over the hump," Thompson told him. "They're outgunned now. The Americans are there in force. And we have them beaten in the air at last. You know what that means if you've been across."

"Don't I know it," the man responded feelingly. "By the Lord, it's me that does know it. I was there when the shoe was on the other foot. I was a gunner in the Sixty-eighth Battery, and you can believe me there was times when it made us sick to see German planes overhead. Well, I hope they give Fritz h.e.l.l. He gave it to us."

"They will," Thompson answered simply, and on that word their talk of the war ended. They spoke of Vancouver, and of the coast generally.

"By the way, do you happen to know whereabouts in Toba Inlet a man named Carr is located?" Thompson bethought him of his quest. "Sam Carr. He is operating some sort of settlement for returned men, I've been told."

"Sam Carr? Sure. The _Squalla_ here belongs to him--or to the Company--and Carr is just about the Company himself."

A voice from the interior abaft the wheelhouse bellowed "Grub-pi-l-e."

"That's breakfast," the man said. "I see you ain't lighted your fire yet. Come and have a bite with us. Here, make this line fast and lay alongside."

The wind had died with the dawn, and the sea was abating. The _Squalla_ went her way within the hour, and so did Thompson. There was still a small air out of the southeast, sufficient to give him steerageway in the swell that ran for hours after the storm. Between sail and power he made the Redonda Islands and pa.s.sed between them far up the narrow gut of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that deep pa.s.s when night came on. And by late afternoon the following day he had traversed the mountain-walled length of Toba Inlet and moored his yawl beside a great boom of new-cut logs at the mouth of Toba River.

Thanks to meeting the _Squalla_ he knew his ground. Also he knew something of Sam Carr's undertaking. The main camp was four miles up the stream. The deep fin-keel of the yawl barred him from crossing the shoals at the river mouth except on a twelve-foot tide. So he lay at the boom, planning to go up the river next morning in the canoe he towed astern in lieu of a dinghy.

He sat on his cus.h.i.+ons in the c.o.c.kpit that evening looking up at a calm, star-speckled sky. On either side of him mountain ranges lifted like quiescent saurians, heads resting on the summit of the Coast Range, tails sweeping away in a fifty-mile curve to a lesser elevation and the open waters of the Gulf. The watery floor of Toba Inlet lay hushed between, silvered by a moon-path, s.h.i.+mmering under the same pale rays that struck bluish-white reflections from a glacier high on the northern side. It was ghostly still at the mouth of the valley whence the Toba River stole down to salt water, with somber forests lining the beach and clinging darkly on the steep slopes. A lone light peeped from the window of a cabin on sh.o.r.e. The silence was thick, uncanny. But it was a comforting silence to Thompson. He felt no loneliness, he whom the lonely places had once appalled. But that was a long time ago. Sitting there thinking of that, he smiled.

No man lives by, for, or because of love alone. Nor does a woman, although the poets and romancers have very nearly led us to believe a woman does. Yet it is a vital factor upon some occasions, in many natures. There had been times in Thompson's life when the pa.s.sion Sophie Carr kindled in him seemed a conflagration that must either transfigure or destroy him. It was like a volcano that slept, and woke betimes.

The last two years had rather blotted out those periods of eruption. He had given her up, and in giving up all hope of her, Sophie and everything that linked her with him from Lone Moose to the last time he saw her had grown dim, like a book read long ago and put by on the shelf. In the fierce usages of aerial warfare distracted thought, any relaxing from an eagle-like alertness upon the business in hand, meant death swift and certain. And no man, even a man whose heart is sore, wishes to die. The will-to-live is too strong in him. Pride spurs him.

To come off victorious over a concrete enemy, to uphold the traditions of his race, to be of service--these things will carry any man over desperate places without faltering, if he feels them.

And Wes Thompson had experienced that sort of vision rather keenly. It had driven him, a man of peaceful tendency, to blood-drenched fields.

For two years he had been in another world, in a service that demanded of a man all that was in him. He was just beginning to be conscious that for so long he had been detached from life that flowed in natural, normal channels.