Free Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Page B

lungs.
    “Come on, Rody,” Joe said. “Lend a hand. We’ve got to get Frank to a doctor.”
    “No.” Frank’s voice was impersonal. “You can’t get me down to that platform and then down the ladder. I’d bleed to death before you got me down the raise. You guys go ahead. When they get the drift opened up will be time enough for me. Or maybe when they can come back with a stretcher. I’ll just sit here.”
    “But—” Joe protested.
    “Beat it,” Frank said.
    Bert lowered himself through the opening and dropped. “Come on!” he called. “It’s okay!”
    Rody followed. Joe hesitated, mopping his face, then looked at Frank, but the big man was staring sullenly at the dark wall.
    “Frank—” Joe stopped. “Well, gee—”
    He hesitated, then dropped through the hole. From the platform he said, “Frank? I wish—”
    His boots made small sounds descending the ladder.
    The carbide light burned lower, and the flame flickered as the fuel ran low. Big Frank’s face twisted as he tried to move; then his mouth opened very wide, and he sobbed just once. It was all right now. There was no one to hear. Then he leaned back, staring toward the pile of muck, his big hands relaxed and empty.
    “Nobody,” he muttered. “There isn’t anybody, and there never was.”

 
     
    O LD D OC Y AK
----
     
     
    When I reached San Pedro, I was seventeen, passing as twenty-four, and I’d been on my own for two and a half years. I’d skinned dead cattle in West Texas, worked on a ranch in New Mexico, done assessment work on mining claims in Arizona, worked a few weeks with a circus, and had ridden freight trains from El Paso to the Gulf. From there I’d gone to sea, to the West Indies and Europe. At various places where I’d passed through or worked, I’d fought in the ring eleven times and outside the ring twice as often. Being a stranger in town can be rough .
    In San Pedro I had to wait for a ship, so I did whatever came to hand, which wasn’t much. Times were hard, and there were ten men for every job, few of which lasted for more than a few hours. The home guards had all the good jobs, and what we outsiders got was just the temporary or fill-in jobs .
    Rough painting or bucking rivets in the shipyards, swamping on a truck, or working “standby” on a ship were all a man could find. It was not enough. We all missed meals and slept wherever we could. The town was filled with drifting, homeless men, mostly seamen from all the countries in the world. Sometimes I slept in empty boxcars, in abandoned buildings or in the lumber piles on the old E.K. Wood lumber dock .
    There is a neat little bunch of shops on the edge of the ship channel in San Pedro called Port o’ Call, but it stands where that lumber dock once stood and where the ships were where the steam schooners used to discharge their deck loads of lumber brought down from Aberdeen, Gray’s Harbor, or Coos Bay up on the northwest coast. Sometimes those piles of lumber were so placed that they formed a small cave, a shelter from the rain. I used to wrap newspapers under my coat and sleep there with a soft rain falling and the sounds of traffic on the channel .
    Being a seaman with seaman’s papers, I sometimes went aboard those steam schooners hunting work and usually managed to stay for a meal. I remember many of them with affection, although some of the names have faded from memory. There were the Yellowstone, the Catherine G. Sudden , and of course, the Humboldt. Long after my own experience with the Humboldt I heard one of those stories that every seaman enjoys .
    What the captain’s name was, I do not recall, but I knew him slightly. One day I was reciting something by Robert W. Service to a couple of acquaintances, and suddenly a line would not come to me. Then a voice from behind me supplied the line. It was the captain of the Humboldt. I thanked him, and after that we spoke when passing. The story I am about to tell was another thing .
    The Humboldt had