The booking facilities at Wrangel are primitive, to say the least. When
Thompson inquired about southbound passage, he was told to go down and
board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at
eleven that night. So he took all his meager belongings, which he could
easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down
half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his
passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled,
clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.
There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed
to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in
mackinaws and heavy laced boots. Thompson, habitually diffident, asked
no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner
of the North. He laid down his bag and roll, sat awhile listening to the
shift of feet and the clatter of cargo winches on deck and pierhead.
Then, growing drowsy, he stretched himself on a cushioned seat with his
bag for a pillow and fell asleep.
He woke with an odd sensation of his bed dropping out from under him.
Coming out of a sound slumber he was at first a trifle bewildered, but
instinctively he grasped a stanchion to keep himself from sliding across
the floor as the vessel took another deep roll. The smoking room was
deserted. He gained his feet and peered out of a window. All about him
ran the uneasy heave of the sea. Try as he would his eyes could pick up
no dim shore line. And it was not particularly dark, only a dusky gloom
spotted with white patches where a comber reared up and broke in foam.
He wondered at the ship's position. It did not conform to what he had
been told of the Inside Passage.
And while he was wondering a ship's officer in uniform walked through
the saloon. He cast a quick glance at Thompson and smiled slightly.
"This outside roll bother you?" he inquired pleasantly.
"Outside?" Thompson grasped at the word's significance. "Are we going
down outside?"
"Sure," the man responded. "We always do."
"I wonder," Thompson began to sense what he had done, "I say--isn't this
the Roanoke for Seattle?"
The mate's smile deepened. "Uh-uh," he grinned. "This is the Simoon,
last boat of the season from outside northern points. We had to put into
Wrangel, which we rarely do. The Roanoke berthed right across the
wharf from us. Got aboard us by mistake, did you?"
Thompson nodded.
"Well," the officer continued, "sometimes the longest way round is the
shortest way home. We don't touch this side the Golden Gate. So you may
as well see the purser when he gets up and have him assign you a berth.
It's pretty near daylight now."