The Snoqualmie Hotel in Olympia was on Capitol Way, fronting on the usual square city block of park. I left by the coffeeshop door and walked down a hill to where the last, loneliest reach of Puget Sound died and decomposed against a line of disused wharves. Corded firewood filled the foreground and old men pottered about in the middle of the stacks, or sat on boxes with pipes in their mouths and signs behind their heads reading: "Firewood and Split Kindling. Free Delivery."
Behind them a low cliff rose and the vast pines of the north loomed against a gray-blue sky.
Two of the old men sat on boxes about twenty feet apart, ignoring each other. I drifted near one of them. He wore corduroy pants and what had been a red and black Mackinaw. His felt hat showed the sweat of twenty summers. One of his hands clutched a short black pipe, and with the grimed fingers of the other he slowly, carefully, ecstatically jerked at a long curling hair that grew out of his nose.
I set a box on end, sat down, filled my own pipe, lit it, puffed a cloud of smoke. I waved a hand at the water and said: "Youd never think that ever met the Pacific Ocean."
He looked at me.
I said: "Dead end-quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this." He went on looking at me.
"I'll bet," I said, "that a man that's been around a town like this knows everybody in it and in the country near it.''
He said: "How much you bet?"
I took a silver dollar out of my pocket. They still had a few up there. The old man looked it over, nodded, suddenly yanked the long hair out of his nose and held it up against the light.
"You'd lose," he said.
I put the dollar down on my knee. "Know anybody around here that keeps a lot of goldfish?" I asked.
He stared at the dollar. The other old man near by was wearing overalls and shoes without any laces. He stared at the dollar. They both spat at the same instant. The first old man said: "Leetle deef." He got up slowly and went over to a shack built of old boards of uneven lengths. He went into it, banged the door.
The second old man threw his axe down pettishly, spat in the direction of the closed door and went off among the stacks of cordwood.
The door of the shack opened, the man in the Mackinaw poked his head out of it.