“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 hell.  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 passed between them far up the narrow gut of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that deep pass 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 cushions in the cockpit 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, shimmering 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 shore.  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.