Life is a ghastly joke sometimes. It lifts a man to the pinnacle of his 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. A friendly, good-natured envy, you understand. He had attained what looked to me like genuine success; he had got somewhere, both in a material and spiritual way. He had a connection that gave him income sufficient for his needs, sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living, and a substantial interest in the business besides, which was slowly but surely building up a competence for him. He had his little circle of friends, and his home. And he was mated to a woman any man might be proud of. I could not see anything a man really craves that was beyond his reach. I've not had what you'd call a multifarious experience in the way of married folk, but I haven't gone through the world blind. I have seen a lot that lived the proverbial cat-and-dog existence. I've seen a lot more that lived in a state of more or less tolerant indifference. And I have seen a few that appeared to have a corner on confidence and affection and genuine understanding, to be really mated, in the widest meaning of the term. Galloway and his wife seemed to me to be one of the finest examples of the latter that I'd ever come across. Joe was a real 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 is proud to be seen walking down the street with. I'd gone to school with Joe Galloway, but I had seen nothing of him for many a long moon, until I ran across him quite by accident on a trip East. We had been chummy kids, and we had drifted apart because Joe was one of those quiet beggars that knows what he wants and stays everlastingly on the trail of his purposes—and I'm a rolling stone, a full-fledged brother in the order of the wandering foot. But time and distance made scant difference. He had a warm recollection of me, and he insisted that I make his home my headquarters. I did, and spent nearly three weeks with them. They made me feel one with themselves—and, as I said, I envied them in their happiness. If they were not happy and contented, there is no such satisfying state of mind. 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 vivid impressions of Joe and Norma Galloway. I liked to think of them like a pair of birds in their nest, while I was knocking about in logging camps, with bolt cutters and all the roving, restless lot my way of life took me among. A man playing a lone hand finds his life full of bleak spots. He can't dodge them. And I suppose I thought of those two often because their lives seemed full of desirable things which had eluded me. As I saw it, they had attained as near to the ideal as we can ever reasonably expect to come.
