The prey of the strongest
Date: 2022-09-19T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Revenge -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; British Columbia -- Fiction; Sawmills -- Fiction

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Title: The prey of the strongest

Author: Morley Roberts

Release date: September 19, 2022 [eBook #69014]
Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Hurst and Blackett, Limited, 1906

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69014

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PREY OF THE STRONGEST ***

THE PREY OF THE STRONGEST

BY

MORLEY ROBERTS

LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED,
Paternoster House, E.C.

1906

PREFACE

To Archer Baker,
European Manager of the Canadian
Pacific Railroad

MY DEAR BAKER,

Of all the men I worked with on the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the Kicking Horse Pass and on the Shushwap, when you and men like you were hustling to put it through, I am not, nowadays, in touch with one. They are, doubtless, distinguished or have gone under. Some of them, perhaps, lie in obscure graves beside the track of other roads, which, in their parlance, "broke out" when the C.P.R. was finished: when End of Track joined End of Track: when the very bottom of their world fell out because two Worlds, East and West, were united by our labour, yours and theirs and even mine. Others of them are perhaps famous. They may have some mighty mountains and a way station named after them, as you may have, for all I know: they may even be Managers! And what so great as a Manager of a Through Continental Road, after all? There are Ministers and Monarchs and other men of note, but to my mind the Managers top them all. That is by the way, and you shall not take it as flattery: the humble worker with the pick and shovel and hammer and drill and bar, like myself, cannot but think with awe of the cold clear heights in which they dwell.

Years ago, when I was toiling on another grade, in another sort of rock-cut, hewing out a trail for myself in the thick impenetrable forests of which the centre may be Fleet Street or where Publishers dwell, I came across you. And it is to my credit that I never let you go. Most men represent other men or shadows, but you represented yourself and a great part of my old life: you stood for the Grade, for the Mountains, and the Passes, for the steel rails, for the Contractors with whom I worked, for the Road, for all Railroads, for Canada and British Columbia, linked and made one at last. You know what Colonial fever is: that disease of desire which at intervals afflicts those of us who have come back out of the Wilderness. You were often the cause of it and the cure of it. Perhaps I owe you one: perhaps but for your giving me a chance of vicarious consolation in our talk, I might have laid my bones by some other railroad in the West on the illimitable fat prairies of our Canada. Therefore I offer you this book. I offer you only a sketch, a rough and incomplete sketch, of certain obscurer aspects of life in one of the finest countries in the world, a country for which I have as much hope as I have affection. I have not tried to put the Pacific Slope into a pannikin. To cram British Columbia into a volume is as easy as trying to empty Superior with a spoon. For it was a full country when I knew it: when your Big Bosses came along with drills and dynamite and knocked the Rockies and the Selkirks into shape to let your Railroad through. In those days the World emptied many thousand of its workers into your big bucket, and in that bucket I was one drop. I had as partners, as tilikums, men from the Land of Everywhere: not a quarter, hardly a country, of the round world but was represented in the great Parliament of the Pick and Shovel and Axe that decreed the Road, the Great Road, the one Great Road of all!

I have seen many countries, as you know, but none can ever be to me what B.C. was when I worked there. It fizzed and fumed and boiled and surged. It was in a roar: it hummed: it was like the Cañon when the grey Fraser from the North comes down to Lytton and smothers the blue Thompson in its flood. We lived in those days: we worked in those days: we didn't merely exist or think or moon or fool around. We were no 'cultus' crowd. We lit into things and dispersed the earth. Some day, it may be, I shall do another book to try and recall the odours of the majestic slain forests and the outraged hills when your live Locomotives hooted in the Passes and wailed to see the Great Pacific. In the meantime I offer you this, which deals only incidentally with your work, and takes for its subjects a Sawmill and the life we lived who worked in one on the lower Fraser, when we and the River retired from the scene that to-day ends in busy Vancouver and yet spreads across the Seas.

It is possible that you will say that there is too much violence in this story, seeing that it is laid in British Columbia and not South of the Forty Ninth Parallel. Well, I do not hold you responsible for the violence. Even in law-abiding B.C. man will at times break out and paint the Town red without a metaphor. There is a great deal of human nature in man, even when suppressed by Judge Begbie: and Siwashes will be Siwashes, especially when "pahtlum," or drunk, as they say in the elegant Chinook with which I have adorned a veracious but otherwise plain story. Take it from me that there is not an incident, or man, or woman in it who is not more or less painted from real life. That amiable contractor for whom we all had quite an affection, whom I have thinly veiled under the name of Vanderdunk, is no exception. He will, I feel sure, forgive me, but some of the others might not and they are veiled rather more deeply. This I owe to myself, for I may revisit B.C. again and I cannot but remember that, for some things I said of folks out there many years ago, I was threatened with the death, so dear to the Western Romancer, which comes from being hung by the neck from a Cottonwood. If ever I do see that country again, I hope it will be with you. As my friend Chihuahua would have said, "Quien sabe?" My best regards to you, tilikum! Here's how!

Your sincere friend,
MORLEY ROBERTS.

THE PREY OF THE STRONGEST

I

"Klahya, tilikum."

As Pitt River Pete spoke he entered the humming Fraser Mill by the big side door chute down which all the heavier sawed lumber slid on its way to the yard. He had climbed up the slope of the chute and for some moments had stayed outside, though he looked in, for the sun was burning bright on white sawed lumber and the shining river, so that the comparative gloom of the Mill made him pause. But now he entered, and seeing Skookum Charlie helping the Wedger-off, he spoke, and Skookum, who could not hear in the uproar, knew that he said "Klahya."

The Mill stretched either way, and each end was open to the East and the West. It was old and grimed and covered with the fine meal of sawdust. Great webs hung up aloft in the dim roof. In front of Pete was the Pony Saw which took the lumber from the great Saws and made it into boards and scantling, beams and squared lumber. To Pete's right were the Great Saws, the father and mother of the Mill, double, edge to edge, mighty in their curved inset teeth, wide in gauge and strong whatever came to them. As they sang and screamed in chorus, singing always together, the other Saws chimed in: the Pony Saw sang and the Great Trimmer squealed and the Chinee Trimmer whined. Every Saw had its note, its natural song, just as naturally as a bird has: each could be told by the skilled hearer. Pete listened as he stepped inside and put his back against the studs of the wall-plates, out of the way of the hive of man, he only being a drone that hour. And the Big Hoes, Father and Mother of the Mill, droned in the cut of logs and said (or sang) that what they cut was Douglas Fir, and that it was tough. But the Pony Saw said that the last big log had been Spruce. The smell of spruce said "spruce" just as the Saw sang it. And the Trimmers screamed opposing notes, for they cut across the grain. Beneath the floor where the chorus of the Saws worked was the clatter of the lath-mill and the insistent squeal of the Shingle Saw, with its recurrent shriek of pride, "I cut a shingle, phit, I cut a shingle, phit!"

The whole Mill was a tuned instrument, a huge sounding board. There was no discord, for any discord played its part: it was one organic harmony, pleasing, fatiguing, satisfying; any dropped note was missed: if the Lath Mill stayed in silence, something was wanting, when the Shingler said nothing, the last fine addition to the music fell away. And yet the one harmony of the Mill was a background for the soloes of the Saws, for the great diapason of the Hoes, for the swifter speech of the Pony, for the sharp cross note of the Trimmers. The saws sang according to the log, to its nature, to its growth: either for the butt or the cleaner wood. In a long log the saws intoned a recitative: a solemn service. And beneath them all was the mingled song of the belts, which drove the saws, hidden in darkness, and between floors. Against the song of the Mill the voice of man prevailed nothing.

When any man desired to speak to another he went close to him and shouted. They had a silent speech for measurements in feet; the hand, the fingers, the rubbed thumb and finger, the clenched hand with thumb up, with thumb down, called numbers for the length of boards, of scantling, what not.

"Eleven feet!" said the rubbing thumb and forefinger.

If any spoke it was about the business of the Mill.

"Fine cedar this," said Mac to Jack, "fine cedar—special order—for——" a lost word.

But for the most part no one spoke but the saws. Men whistled with pursed lips and whistled dumbly: they sang too, but the songs were swallowed in the song of the Saws. They began at six and ran till noon unless a breakdown happened and some belt gave way. But none had given this day and it was ten o'clock. The men were warm and willing with work, their muscles worked warm and easy. It was grand to handle the lever and to beat in the iron dogs: to use the maul upon the wedges as the Saws squealed. They worked easy in their minds. They looked up and smiled unenvious of idle Pitt River Pete. They knew work was good, their breath felt clean: their hearts beat to the rhythm of the Mill.

As mills go it was a small one. It could not compete with the giants of the Inlet and the Sound who served Australia, which grows no good working wood, or South America. It sent no lumber to Brisbane, no boards to Callao or Valparaiso. It served the town of New Westminster and the neighbouring ranches: the little growth of townships on the River up to Hope and Yale. Sometimes it sent a cargo to Victoria or 'Squimault. A schooner even now lay alongside the wharf, piled high with new sawed stuff, that the saws had eaten as logs and spewed as lumber.

As logs! Aye, in the pool below, in the Boom, which is a chained log corral for swimming logs, a hundred great logs swam. Paul (from nowhere, but a tall thin man) was the keeper and their herder. He chose them for the slaughter, and went out upon them as they wallowed, and with a long pike stood upon the one to be sacrificed and drove it to the spot whence it should climb to the altar: a long slope with an endless cable working above and below it. He made it fast with heavy dogs, with chains may be, and then spoke to one above who clapped the Friction on the Bull-Wheel and hove the log out of the water, as if it were a whale for flensing. It went up into the Mill and was rolled upon the skids, and waited. It trembled and the Mill trembled.

"Now, now, that log, boys. Hook in, drive her, roll her, heave and she's on! Drive in the dogs and she goes!"

Oh, but it was a good sight and the roar was filling. Pete's eyes sparkled: he loved it: loved the sound and the song and itched to be again on the log with the maul. Those who speak of sport—why, let them fell a giant, drive it, boom it, drag it and cut it up! To brittle a monarch of the forest and disembowel it of its boards: its scantlings: its squared lumber: posts, fences, shingles, laths, pickets, Oho! Pete knew how great it was.

"Oh, klahya, tilikum, my friend the log."

He spoke not now to Skookum, but strong Charlie, and lazy Charlie, understood him. At one hour of the day even the lazy surrendered to the charm of the song of the work and did their damnedest. So Skookum understood that his old friend (both being Sitcum Siwashes, or half breeds) loved the Mill and the work at that hour.

White, the chief Sawyer, the Red Beard, was at his lever and set the carriage for a ten inch Cant when the slabs were off and hurtling to the lath mill. Ginger White no one loved, least of all his Wedger-Off, Simmons (a man, like silent Paul of the Boom, from nowhere), for he too was gingery, with a gleam of the sun in his beard and a spice of the devil in his temper. He was the fierce red type, while White was red but lymphatic, and also a little fat under the jowl and a liar by nature, furtive, not very brave but skilled in Saws. Simmons took a wedge and his maul and waited for the log to come to him. The carriage moved: the saws bit: the sawdust squirted and spurted in a curve with strips of wood which were not sawdust, for they use big gauges in the soft wood of the West and would stare at a sixteenth gauge, to say nothing of less. Now Simmons leapt upon the log and drove in the wedge to keep the closing cut open for the saws. The lengthening cut gave opening for another and another. Simmons and Skookum played swiftly, interchanging the loosened wedge and setting it to loosen the last driven in. The Wedgers-Off on the six-foot log were like birds of prey upon a beast.

"Oh, give it her," yelled Skookum. It was a way of his to yell. But Ginger drove her fast, hoping to hear the saws nip a little and alter their note so that he could complain. Simmons knew it, Skookum knew it. But they played quickly and sure. They leapt before the end of the cut and helped to guide the falling cant upon the skids. Chinamen helped them. The Cant thundered on the skids and was thrust sideways over to the Pony Saw.

"Kloshe kahkwa," said Pete. "That's good!"

And as he sent the carriage backward for another cut, Ginger White looked up and saw Pete standing with his back to the wall. Ginger's dull eye brightened, and he regarded Simmons with increased disfavour. Pete he knew was a good Wedger-Off, a quick, keen man very good for a Siwash, as good as any man in the Mill at such work. He had seen Pete work at the Inlet. Oh, he was good, "hyas kloshe," said White, but as for Simmons, damn! He was red-headed, and Ginger hated a red man for some deep reason.

It was a busy world, but even in the rhythm of the work hatred gleamed and strange passions worked as darkly as the belts, deep in the floor, that drove the saws. Quin, the manager (and part owner), came in at the door by the big Saws, and he saw Pete standing by the open chute. He smiled to himself.

"Back again, and asking for work. Where's his wife, pretty Jenny?"

She was pretty, toketie klootchman, a pretty woman: not a half breed: perhaps, if one knew, less than a quarter breed, tenas Sitcum Siwash, and the blood showed in the soft cheeks. She was bright and had real colour, tender contours, everything but beautiful hands and feet, and they not so bad. As for her face, and her smile (which was something to see), why, said Quin, as he licked his lips, there wasn't a white woman around that was a patch on her. Jenny had smiled on him. But Pete kept his eye on her and so far as it seemed she was true to him. But Quin——

In the busy world as it was Quin's mind ran on Jenny.

"Yes, Sir," he used to say, "we're small but all there. We run for all we're worth, every cent of it, every pound of beef. If you want to see bigger, try the Inlet or Port Blakeley. But we cut here to the last inch. Thirty thousand feet a day ain't a hell of a pile, but it's all we can chew. And, Sir, we chew it!"

He was a broad heavy man, dark and strong and much lighter on his feet than he looked. If there hadn't been Skookum Charlie it might have been Skookum Quin. He was as hard as a cant-log.

"We're alive," said Quin the manager. They worked where he was, and, hard as they had worked before, White set a livelier pace and made his men sweat. Quin smiled and understood that Ginger White was that kind of a man. Now Mac at the Pony Saw always took a breather when Quin came in. Just now he walked from his saw, dropped down through a trapdoor into a weltering chaos of sudden death and threw the tightener off his saw's belt. The Pony Saw ceased to hum and whined a little and ran slow and died. The blurred rim of steel became separate teeth. Long Mac stood over the saw and tightened a tooth with his tools and took out one and replaced it with a better washleather to keep it firm. He moved slow but again descended and let the tightener fall upon the belt. The Pony Saw sprang to valiant life and screamed for work. Quin smiled at Mac, for he knew he was a worker from "Way Back," and the further back you go the worse they get! By the Lord, you bet!

So much for Quin for the time. The Stick Moola, as the Chinook has it, is the theme.

It was a beast by the water, that lived on logs. It crawled into the River for logs, and reached out its arms for logs. It desired logs with its sharp teeth. It hungered for Cedar (there's good red cedar of sorts in the ranges, and fine white cedar in the Selkirks), and for Spruce (the fine tree it is!) and Douglas Fir and Hemlock or anything to cut that wasn't true hardwood. It could eat some of the soppy Slope Maple but disdained it. It was greedy and loved lumber. Men cut its dinner afar off and towed it around to the Mill, to the arms, the open arms of the Boom with Paul helping as a kind of great kitchen boy.

At early dawn its whistle blew, for in the dark (or near it) the underlings of the Engineer stirred up the furnaces and threw in sawdust and woke the steam. At "half after five" the men turned out, came tumbling in for breakfast in the boarded shack by the Store and fed before they fed the Mill. The first whistle sounded hungry, the second found the men hungry no more, but ready to feed the Beast.

In winter it was no joke turning out to begin the day early, but when frost had the Fraser in its arms the Mill shut down and went to sleep. One can't get one's logs out of eighteen inches of ice and then a frozen log cuts hard: it shines when cut. But at this season, it was bright at five and sunny at six. The men came with a summer willingness (that is, with less unwillingness than in frost time, for, remember, it takes work to make work easy and your beginner each day hates the beginning) and they were drawn from all ends of the earth.

There were British Canadians:

And Americans: from Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Iowa and the Lord knows where.

And Spaniards: one a man of Castile, and one from Mexico.

There were two Kanucks of the old sort from the East or there was one at any rate.

There were Englishmen. Well, there was one Jack Mottram and he a seaman.

There was one Swede, Hans Anderssen, in the Mill. There were two Finns outside it.

And one Lett (from Lithuania, you understand).

There was a Scotchman of course, and, equally of course, he was the Engineer.

There was a French Canadian, not by any means of the habitant type but very much there, and he knew English well, but usually cursed in French as was proper.

There were two Germans. One was as meek as one German usually is unless he is drunk. But one was not meek. More of him anon.

It was an odd crowd, a mixed crowd at meal times in the Mill hash house. To add to everything Chinamen waited: Chinamen cooked.

"Now then, Sing, chuck the chow on!"

"Sing-Sing (that's where you ought to be), where's the muckamuck?"

"Sacré chien——"

"Der Teufel——"

"By the great Horn Spoon——"

"Holy Mackinaw!"

"Caramba—Carajo——"

"By Crimes——"

"Oh! Phit!"

"Oh, where's the grub, the hash—the muckamuck, you Canton rats! Kihi, kiti, mukha-hoilo!"

And the hash was slung and the slingers thereof hurried.

The hash-eaters talked English (of sorts), American (North and South), Swinsk, Norsk, Dansk, true Spanish (with the lisp), Mexican Spanish (without it and soft as silk). They interlarded the talk (which was of mills, lumber, and politics, and Indian klootchmen, and the weather, and of horses and dogs and the devil and all) with scraps of Chinook. And that is English and French and different sorts of Indian fried and boiled and pounded and fricasseed and served up in one jargon. It's a complete and God-forsaken tongue but Easy, and Easiness goes. It is as it were brother to Pidgin English.

The grub was "muckamuck" and luckily was "kloshe." But as it happened (it usually did happen) there was salmon.

"Cultus slush, I call it," said one. "Cultu muckamuck."

"That's Ned Quin's nickname up to Kamloops," said Jack Mottram.

"Our man's brother?"

"Him," said Jack. He picked his teeth with a fork and Long Mac eyed him with disgust.

"I know Ned, he's tough."

But Jack was tough himself: he had been salted in all the seas and sun-dried on all the beaches of the rough round world. He made short stays everywhere: passages not voyages: skippers were glad to give him his discharge, for after sixty days at sea he sickened for the land and became hot cargo.

"Oh, I'm tough enough," he would prelude some yarn with.

Now Shorty Gibbs spoke, he of the Shingle Mill. Lately the Shingle Mill had annexed half a thumb of his as it screamed out to him. "He's a son of a——"

He completed the sentence in the approved round manner.

They all admitted that Quin the Manager was Tough, but that Ned Quin of Kamloops was tougher admitted not a doubt.

They swept the food from the table. Just as the logs were divided by the Saws and fell into various Chutes and disappeared, so the food went here. Most of the men ate like hogs (the better Americans least like): they yaffled, they gurgled, they sweated over the chewing and got over it.

"I'm piled up," said Tenas Billy of the Lath Mill. He too was minus a thumb and the tops of some fingers, tribute to the saw. Especially do the Shingle Saw and Lath Saw take such petty toll. When the Hoes ask tribute or the Pony Saw it's a different matter.

"I'm piled up."

As to being piled up, that was a Sawmill metaphor.

"You've put the tightener on your belt!"

To be sure they all had.

But as to piling up, when things were booming and men were warm and feeling the work good, and when nothing went wrong with the belts or with the Engines and the logs came easy and sweet, it was the ambition of the Chief Sawyer to pile up the Skids of Long Mac who had the Pony Saw. Then it was Long Mac's desire to pile up the skids for the Chinee trimmer (not run by a Chinee) and it was that Trimmer's desire to pile up the man opposing. To be piled up is to have bested one's own teeth, when it comes to chewing.

"My skids are full," said the metaphorical.

At six the whistle blew again, with a bigger power of steam in its larynx. The Mill said:—

"Give me the logs, the boom is full and I'm in want of chewin'! Nika tiki hyas stick! Give me logs: I've new teeth this morning! I'm keen and sharp. Hoot—too—oot—too—oot! Give me Fir and Pine and Spruce—spru—ooce!"

The Hash-Room emptied till noontime, when next Hash-Pile was proclaimed, and the men streamed across the sawdust road and the piled yard to the open Mill. Some went in by the door, some by the Engine-Room, some climbed the Chutes. The sun was aloft now and shining over the Pitt River Mountains (where Pete came from) and over Sumach. The river danced and sparkled: scows floated on its tide: the Gem steamer got up steam. The Canneries across the big River gleamed white. The air was lovely with a touch of the breath of the mountains in it. The smell of the lumber was good.

The men groaned and went to work.

They forgot to groan in twenty minutes.

It was good work in an hour and good men loved it for a while.

But it was work that Pitt River Pete saw as he leant against the wall. It wasn't an English pretence, or a Spanish lie, or an Irish humbug: it was Pacific Slope work, where men fly. They work out West!

"Oh, Klahya!"

"I wonder if I can get a jhob," said Pete. And the job worked up for him under his very eyes, for Quin had a quick mind to give him work and get pretty Jenny near, and Ginger White was sore against Simmons.

Yes, Pitt River Pete, you can get "a jhob!" Devil doubt it, for you've a pretty wife, and White drove the carriage fast and faster still, drove it indeed faster than the saw could take it, meaning to hustle Simmons and have present leave to burst out into blasphemy. Things happen quick in the Mill, in any mill, and of a sudden White stopped the carriage dead and yelled to Simmons on the log:

"Can't you keep her open, damn you? Are you goin' to sleep there? Oh, go home and die!"

Simmons, on the log on his knees, looked up savagely. Though the big Hoes were silent there was row enough with the Pony Saw and the Big Trimmer and Chinee Trimmer and the Lath Mill and the Shingle Saw and the Bull Wheel and the groaning and complaining of the planing machines outside. So Simmons heard nothing. He saw Ginger's face and saw the end had come to work. He knew it. It had been coming this long time and now had come. But Simmons said nothing: he grinned like a catamount instead, and then looked round and saw Quin. He also saw Pete.

"To hell," said Simmons.

As he spoke he hurled his maul at White, and Ginger dodged. The head missed him but the handle came backhanded and smote Ginger on the nose so that the blood ran.

"Oh, oh," said Ginger as sick as any dog. Simmons leapt off into the very arms of Quin.

"I'll take my money, Mr. Quin," said Simmons.

"Take your hook," said Quin. "Look out, here's White for you with a spanner!"

White came running and expected Simmons to run. But Simmons' face was red where White's was white. He snatched a pickareen from the nearest Chinaman, and a pickareen is a useful weapon, a sharp half pick, and six inches of a pick.

"You——" grinned Simmons, "you——"

And White stayed.

"Yah!" said Simmons, with lips set back. And Ginger White retreated.

"Here, sonny, take your pick," said the Wedger-Off that had been to the Chinaman; "fat chops don't care to face it."

He turned to Quin.

"Shall I go to the office, Mr. Quin?"

"Aye," said Quin carelessly enough.

He beckoned to Pete, whose eyes brightened. He came lightly.

"You'll take the job, Pete?"

Would he take it?

"Nawitka," said Pete, "yes, indeed, Sir."

Nawitka! He took the job and grinned with Skookum, who fetched the maul and gave him the wedges with all the pleasure in the world, for Skookum had no ambition to be Chief Wedger-Off. White came forward, dabbing at a monstrous tender nose with a rag.

"I've seen you at the Inlet?" he asked.

"Yes," said Pete, "at Granville."

"You'll do," said White. He dabbed at his huge proboscis and went back to the lever. Pete leapt upon the log and drove in the first wedge.

"Hyas, hyas! Oh, she goes!"

She went and the day went, and Pete worked like fire on a dry Spruce yet unfelled. He leapt on and off and handled things with skill. But when he looked at White's growing nose he grinned. Simmons had done that.

"If he ever talk to me that away," said Pete, "I'll give him chikamin, give him steel!"

He didn't love White, at the first glance he knew that. But it was good to be at work again, very good.

At twelve o'clock the whistle called "Hash," and the engine was shut down. The Saws slackened their steady scream, they grew feeble, they whined, they whirred, they nearly stopped, they stayed in silence. Men leapt across the skids: they slid down the Chutes: they clattered down the stairs: they opened their mouths and could hear their voices. They talked of White (he grubbed at home, being married), and of Simmons and of Pete (he being a Siwash, even if not married, would not have grubbed in the Hash House) and heard the story. On the whole they were sorry that Simmons had not driven the pickareen through White. However, his nose was a satisfaction.

"Like a beet——"

"A pumpkin——"

"A water melon——"

A prodigious nose after contact with the Maul Handle.

"I knew Mr. White," said Jenny to Pete, "Mr. White bad man, hyu mesahchie."

"Sling out the muckamuck," said Pete calmly.

He fell to with infinite satisfaction, and Jenny came and sat on his knee as he smoked his pipe.

"She is really devilish pretty," said Quin, who had no one to sit on his knee.

The whistle suddenly said that it was half after twelve and that it would be infinitely obliged if all the working gentlemen from everywhere would kindly step up in a goldarned hurry and turn to.

"Turn to, turn too—toot," said the whistle as brutally as any Western Ocean bo'sun.

The full fed reluctant gentlemen of the Mill went back into the battle, waddling and sighing sorely.

"Wish to God it was six o'clock," they said. There's no satisfying everybody, and going to work full of food is horrid, it really is.

What happened in the morning happened in the afternoon, and all the saws yelled and the planers complained and the men jumped till six, when the Engines let steam into the Whistle high up against the Smoke Stack and made it yell wildly that work was over for the day. Mr. Engine-man played a fantasia on that pipe and hooted and tooted and did a dying cadenza that wailed like a lost soul in the pit and then rose up in a triumphant scream that echoed in the hills and died away across the waters of the Fraser shining in the peaceful evening sun.

And night came down, the blessed night, when no man works (unless he be in a night shift, or is a night watchman or a policeman or, or—). How blessed it is to knock off! But there, what do you know about it, if you never played with lumber in a Stick Moola? Nothing, I assure you. Go home and die, man.

II

There were times when the Mill ate wood all night long, but such times were rare, for now the City of the Fraser was not booming. She sat sombrely by her bright waters and moaned the bitter fact that the railway was not coming her way, but was to thrust out its beak into the waters of the Inlet. The City was a little sad, a little bitter, her wharves were deserted, dank, lonely. She saw no great future before her: houses in her precincts were empty: men spoke scornfully of her beauty and exalted Granville and the forests whence Vancouver should spring.

But for such as worked in the Mill the City was enough. They lived their little lives, strove manfully or poorly, thinking of little things, of few dollars, of a few days, and of Saturdays, and of Sundays when no man worked. And each night in Sawmill Town, in Sawdust Territory, was a holiday, for then toil ceased and the shacks lighted up and there was opportunity for talk. Work was over. 'Halo Mamook,' no work now, but it might be rye, or other poison and gambling and debauchery. The respectable workers (note that they were mostly American) went off up town, to the Farmers' Home or some such place, or to the City library, or to each other's homes, while the main body of the toilers of the Mill 'played hell' in their own way under the very shadow of the Mill itself. For them the end of the week was a Big Jamboree, but every night was a little one.

Pete was back among his old tilikums, his old partners and friends, and it was an occasion for a jamboree, a high old jamboree of its order, that is; for real Red Paint, howling, shrieking, screaming Jamborees were out of order and the highly respectable rulers of the City saw to it that the place was not painted red by any citizen out on the loose with a gun. British Columbia, mark you, is an orderly spot: amazingly good and virtuous and law-abiding, and killing is murder there. This excites scorn and derision and even amazement in American citizens come in from Spokane Falls, say, or elsewhere, from such spots as Seattle, or even Snohomish.

But even without Red Paint, or guns, or galloping cayuses up and down a scandalised British City, cannot a man, and men and their klootchmen, get drink and get drunk and raise Cain in Sawdust Town? You bet they can, tilikums! Nawitka, certainly! Oh, shucks—to be sure!

Pete and Jenny (being hard up as yet) lived in a room of Indian Annie's shack, and had dirt and liberty. In Sawdust Town, just across the road and on the land side of the Mill, were squads of disreputable shacks in streets laid down with stinking rotten sawdust and marked out with piles of ancient lumber. All this had one time been a swamp, but in the course of generations sawdust filled it to the brim. Sawdust rots and ferments and smells almost as badly as rice or wheat rotting in a ship's limbers, and the odour of the place in a calm was a thing to feel, to cut, even with an axe. It was a paying property to Quin and Quin's brother, for lumber costs next door to nothing at a mill, and the rent came in easily, as it should when it can be deducted from wages. It was a good clean property as some landlords say in such cases, meaning that the interest is secure. Life wasn't; and as to morality, why, what did the Quin Brothers care about their renters of the shacks, shanties, and keekwilly holes? They cared nothing about their morals or their manners or the sanitation.

Chinamen lived there: they were Canton wharf-rats mostly, big men, little men, men who lived their own odd secret racial lives hidden away from the eyes of whites. White boys yelled—

"Oh, Chinkie, kihi, kiti mukhahoilo——"

And it was supposed to be an insult. The Chinkies cursed the boys by their Gods, and by Buddha and by the Christians' Gods. "Oh, ya, velly bad boy, oh, damn." Stones flew, chunks of lumber, and boys or Chinamen ran. The Orientals chattered indignantly on doorsteps. If a boy had disappeared suddenly, who would have wondered?

It was a splendid locality for nature, the nature of Man, not for the growth of other things. There were few conventions green in the neighbourhood, a man was a man, and a hound a hound there, and a devil a devil without a mask. It had a fascination.

The Chinamen mostly worked in the yard: handling lumber as it came out, stacking it, wheeling it, carrying it. But there were others than Chinky Chinamen about. There was Spanish Joe in one shack which he shared with Chihuahua, who was a Mexican. Be so good as to pronounce this word Cheewawwaw and have done with it. Skookum Charlie and his klootchman (he was from S'Kokomish and was a Puyallop and she from Snohomish and was a Muckleshoot) lived in another. There's no word for wife in Chinook but only Klootchman, woman, so though there's one for marry, malieh, the ceremony is not much thought of. When a man's klootchman is mentioned it leaves the question of matrimony open for further inquiry, if necessary. But is it worth while?

A dozen Sitcum-Siwashes camped in other shanties; they were from all along the coast, even Metlakahtla and from inland, one being nearly a full-blooded Shushwap. But the only pure-blooded Indian about the place was Indian Annie. She was a Hydah from the Islands and had been as pretty as a picture once, as so many of the Hydah women were. Now she was a hag and a procuress and as ugly as a burnt stick and as wicked as a wild-cat. If she was ever washed it was when she was dead drunk in a rainstorm: she was wrinkled like the skin of a Rambouillet ram: she walked double and screeched like a night-hawk. As to her clothes and the worth of them, why, anyone but an entomologist would have given her a dollar to burn them—Faugh! Nevertheless it was in her shack that Pete camped with Jenny.

About nine o'clock that night, the night of Pete's getting a job, it was wonderful at Indian Annie's. If you don't believe it come in and see, tilikum! There are tons of things you don't know, tilikum, the same as the rest of us.

Oh, hyah, oho, they were enjoying themselves!

Such a day it had been, clear, clean-breathed, splendid, serene, and even yet the light lingered in the cloudless heavens, though the bolder stars came like scouts over the eastern hills and looked down on Mill and River.

But shucks, what of that in Indian Annie's? The room that was kitchen, dining room, hall and lumber room was reeking full. A wood fire smouldered on the hearth: a slush lamp smoked in the window against the dying heavenly day. Pete was there and Annie, and Jack Mottram, an English sailorman. He lived next door with a half-breed Ptsean (you can't pronounce it, tilikum) who was scarcely prettier than Annie, till she was washed. Then she was obviously younger at any rate.

Everyone was so far very happy.

"Hyu heehee," said Indian Annie. By which she meant in her short way that it was all great fun, and that they were jolly companions everyone. Besides Annie there were three other klootchmen in the room and their garments were not valuable. But it was "hyu heehee" all the same, for Jack Mottram brought the whisky in; Indians not being allowed to buy it, as they are apt, even more apt than whites, the noble whites, to see red and run "Amok."

"Here two dollah, you buy mo' whisky, Jack," said Pete, who was almost whooping drunk by now and as happy as a chipmunk in a deserted camp, or a dog at some killing, perhaps.

"Righto," hiccupped Jack, and away he Went. Pete sang something. There's bawdry in Chinook even.

Pete was a handsome boy if one likes or does not dislike the Indian cheekbones. For the features of the Sitcum-Siwash were almost purely Indian; his colour was a memory of his English father. He was tall, nearly five foot ten, lightly and beautifully built. He was as quick on his feet as a bird on the wing. His hands, even, were fine considering he was one who would work. His eyes were reddish brown, his teeth ivory: his moustache was a scanty Indian growth. Not a doubt of it but that Pete was the best-looking "breed" round about Westminster. And he wasn't as lazy as most of them.

Take his history on trust. It is easy to imagine it. He had half learnt to read at an Anglican Mission. His English was not bad when he talked to white men. In truth it was better and heaps cleaner than Jack Mottram's. But talk on the American side of the water is always cleaner. "If you don't like bawdry, we'll have very little of it," said Lucio to the Friar, who was perhaps American. Pete was a nice boy of twenty-three. But he had a loose lip and could look savage. His mind was a tiny circle. He could reach with his hand almost as far as his mind went. He had a religion once, when he left the Fathers of the Mission. He then believed in the Saghalie Tyee, the Chief of Heaven: in fact, in the Head Boss. Now he believed in the head boss of the Mill and in whisky and in his wife: all of them very risky beliefs indeed.

So far Jenny, Pete's little klootchman (and a sweet pretty creature she was) hadn't yet showed up in the shebang. She had been out somewhere, the Lord alone knows where (Quin would have wished he knew), and she was now in the inside room, dressing or rather taking off an outside gown and putting on a gorgeous flowered dressing-gown given her by a lady at Kamloops. Now she came out.

She was a beauty, tilikum, and you can believe it or leave it alone. She was little, no more than five feet three say, but perfectly made, round, plump, most adequate, which is a mighty good word, seeing that she was all there in some ways. She had a complexion of rosy eve, and teeth no narwhal's horn could match for whiteness, and her lips were red-blooded, her ears pink. She had dimples to be sworn by: and the only sign of her Indian blood (which was obviously Hydah) came out in her long straight black hair, that she wore coiled in a huge untidy mass. But for that she was white as far as her body went. As for her soul—but that's telling too soon.

Now she came out of the inner chamber in her scarlet gown, which was flaming with outrageous tulips, horribly parodying even a Dutch grower's nightmare, and she looked like a rosebud, or a merry saint in a flaming San Benito with flower flame devils on it in paint. And not a soul of her tilikums knew she was lovely. They envied her that San Benito!

Jenny was sober enough this time (and so far), and if no one knew she was lovely she knew it, and she eyed some of the drunken klootchmen disdainfully. This was not so much that they were pahtlum but because they had but ten cents worth of clothes and were not toketie or pretty.

"Fo!" said Jenny, stepping lightly among the recumbent and half-recumbent till she squatted on her hams by the fire.

"Where you bin, Jenny?" asked Pete, already hiccupping. And Jenny said she had been with Mary, or Alice, or someone else. May be it was true.

"Have a drink," said her man, handing her a bottle. She tilted it and showed her sweet neck and ripe bosom as she drank and handed it back empty.

Then Jack Mottram, English sailorman and general rolling stone and blackguard, came in hugging two bottles of deadly poison, one under each arm.

"Kloshe," said the crowd, "kloshe, good old Jack!"

The "shipman" dropped his load into willing claws and claimed first drink loudly.

"S'elp me, you see, pardners, I bro't 'em in fair and square: never broached 'em. I know chaps as'd ha' squatted under the lee of a pile o' lumber and ha' soaked the lot. S'elp me I do!"

It was felt on all hands that he was a noble character. Indian Annie patted him on the back.

"'Ands off, you catamaran," said Jack. In spite of being a seaman he believed the word was a term of abuse.

He was a seaman, though—and a first-class hand anywhere and anywhen. To see him now, foul, half-cocked, bleary, and to see him when three weeks of salt water had cleaned and sweetened him, would surprise the most hopeful. He went passages, not voyages, and skipped ashore every time he touched land. There wasn't a country in the round world he didn't know.

"I know 'em all from Chile to China, from Rangoon to Hell," said Jack, "I know 'em in the dark, by the stink of 'em!"

Now he jawed about this and that, with scraps of unholy information in his talk. No one paid attention, they talked or sucked at the whisky. The more Indian blood the more silence till the blood is diluted with alcohol. Every now and again some of them squealed with poisonous happiness; outside one might hear the sound of the screams and singing and the unholy jamboree. The noise brought others. Someone knocked at the door. The revellers were happy and pleased to see the world and they yelled a welcome.

"Come in, tilikum!" they cried, and Chihuahua opened the door against one klootchman's silent body and showed his dark head and glittering eyes inside.

"Where my klootchman? You see my klootchman? Ah, I see!"

She was half asleep by the fire, and nodded at him foolishly. He paid no attention for he was after liquor and saw that the gathering welcomed him. He knew them all but Pete, but he had heard of the row in the Mill and had seen the head that Simmons put on Ginger and he knew that a tilikum of Skookum's had been made wedger-off.

"You Pete, ah, I tinks."

"Nawitka, tilikum, that's me, Pitt River Pete. You have a drink. Ho, Jenny, you give me the bottle. She's my klootchman."

Chihuahua took the bottle and drank. He looked at Jenny and saw that she was beautiful.

"Muchacha hermosa," he said. She knew what he meant, for she read his eyes.

"Your little klootchman hyu toketie, Mister Pete, very peretty, oh, si," said Chihuahua.

"Mor'n yours is," hiccupped Jack Mottram. "But—'oo's got a smoke?"

The beady-eyed man from Mexico had a smoke: a big bag of dry tobacco and a handful or pocket full of papers. He rolled cigarettes for them all, doing it with infinite dexterity. Drunk or sober Chihuahua could do that. His own klootchman clawed him for one of them and without a word he belted her on the ear and made her bellow. She sat in the corner by the fire and howled as lugubriously as if her dog or her father had just died.

"Halo kinootl, halo kinootl, mika tiki cigalette!"

"Oh, give the howler one," said Jack, as she kept on howling that she had no tobacco and that her man was angry with her. Pete gave her his, which was already lighted. She giggled and laughed and began crooning a Chinook song:—

"Konaway sun
Hyu Keely
Annawillee!"

It was a mournful dirge: she sang and smoked and wept and giggled and tried to make eyes at Jack who must love her or he could never have given her a "Cigalette." He was heaps nicer than Chihuahua.

She set them off singing and more drink was brought in, and still Annawillee said she was very "keely" or sad. Indeed, she was weeping drunk and no one paid any attention to her, least of all Chihuahua. Jack sang a chanty about Dandy Rob of the Orinoco and a pleasing meal of boiled sawdust and bullock's liver, "blow, my bully boys, blow!" and wept to think of Whitechapel. An encore resulted in "My rorty carrotty Sal, who kems from W'itechapal," and then Jack subsided amid applause, and slept the sleep of great success.

But Pete was now "full" and could speak to Chihuahua and to Spanish Joe and Skookum Charlie who had come in together.

"Why you come here, Pete?" asked Skookum. "They say you have a good jhob up to Kamloops."

"I tell you, tilikum," said Pete. "Me and Jenny here was with Ned Quin, Cultus Muckamuck we call him up alound the Dly Belt. Ain't he a son of a gun, Jenny?"

Jenny nodded and took a cigarette from Chihuahua with a heavenly smile. They were all lying around the fire but Pete and Jenny. The other klootchmen were mostly fast asleep: Indian Annie was insensible. Pete went on talking in a high pitched but not unpleasant voice. His English was by no means so bad though not so good as Jenny's.

"Mary, my sister, she's Ned Quin's klootchman," said Pete, "and has been with him years, since his white woman died. I forget how long: nika kopet kumtuks, it's so long. So me and Jenny work there: she with Mary, me outside with the moos-mooses, wagon, plowin', harrowin', and scraper team. Oh, I work lika hell all one year, dollar a day and muckamuck: and old Ned he was Cultus Muckamuck, oh, you bet, tilikums: mean as mud. Him and me don't hit it off, but I lika the place, not too wet, good kieutans to ride, and, when I get sick and full up of Cultus, Jenny here she fond of my sister and when she was full up of Mary I just happen to pull with Cultus, so that's why we stay. Sometime the old dog he allow a dollar a day too much for me, and me workin' lika a mule. Oh, I work alla time, by God, velly little dlunk only sometime in Kamloops. And I say 'Look here, Cultus, I not care one damn, I can go. I can quit:—you pay me!' But when it came to pay out dolla he very sick, for sure. So I say, 'You be damn,' and he laughed and went away, for I had a neck-yoke in my hand, ha!"

Pete showed his teeth savagely, and the others grinned.

"We do that often: he damn me, I damn him, and mebbe Jenny and me would be there yet if he had not hit Mary with a club while I was away over to Nikola bringin' in the steers that was over the range. I come back, and I find Jenny cryin' and Mary sick and cryin', and sore all over, and Cultus hyu drunk. So I ups and say to Cultus, 'You swine, you hit my poor sister once mo' and I quit.' Then he began to cry and fetch mo' whisky and we both get drunk and very much friends, and I go to sleep, and he get ravin' and fetch a long-handled shovel and frighten Jenny here to death and he hit Mary with the flat of the shovel, and say, 'You damn klootchman, next time I give you the edge and cut hell out of you.'"

"He say those same words," said Jenny.

"And when I wake up," Pete went on, "they tell me, and I say it no good to stay for if I stay I kill Cultus and no taffy about it. So next day I say 'Give me my money,' and he give me an order on Smith over to Kamloops, and we came down here, and now I get the job wedging-off again and that's better'n workin' for old Cultus. Gimme the bottle, Skookum, you old swine."

They all had another drink.

"George Quin heap berrer'n Cultus," said Skookum.

"'E lika peretty girls," said Chihuahua, leering at Jenny. "'E look after klootchman alla day, eh, Joe?"

Spanish Joe said that was so. "Spanish" was a real Castilian, as fair as any Swede and had golden hair and lovely skin and the blue eyes of a Visigoth, and he was a murderous hound and very good at songs and had a fine voice and could play the guitar. He had no klootchman, but there was a white woman up town who loved him and robbed her husband to give him money.

"All klootchman no good," said Joe scornfully.

"You're a liar," said Jenny, "but men are no good, only Pete is good sometimes, ain't you, Pete?"

"Dry up," said Pete thickly, for the last drink had done for him. "You dry up. All klootchmen talk too much. You go to bed, Jenny."

"I shan't," said Jenny, sulkily.

So he beat her very severely, and blacked her eye, and dragged her by the gorgeous dressing-gown into the next room. As he dragged her she slipped out of the gown and they saw her for an instant white as any lily before he slammed the door on her and came out again. Joe and Chihuahua yelled with laughter, and even Skookum roused up to chuckle a little. He had been asleep, lying with his head on the insensible body of an unowned klootchman, who was a relative of Annie's. His own klootchman still sat in the corner, every now and again chanting dismally of the woes of Annawillee. Joe and Chihuahua spoke in Spanish.

"She's a beauty, and George Quin will want her," said Chihuahua.

"And he'll have her too, by the Mother of God," said Joe. "But klootchmen are no good. My woman up town she cries too much. And as for her husband——"

He indulged in some Spanish blasphemy on the subject of that poor creature's man.

They slapped Pete on the back when he sat down again, and said he knew how to serve a saucy muchacha. And Joe sang a beautiful old Spanish love song with amazing feeling and then went away. But the melancholy of the song haunted poor Pete's heart, and he went to his wife and found her crouched on the floor sobbing and as naked as when she was born. And Pete cried too and said that he loved her.

But she still cried, for he had torn the lovely dressing-gown with its gorgeous garden of tulips. She hugged it to her beautiful bosom as if it were a child.

In the outer room they all slept, and even Annawillee ceased moaning.

The night was calm and wonderful and as silent as death.

III

Nah Siks, ho, my friend, let me introduce you to George Quin: Manager and part owner of the Mill, of the Stick Moola which ate logs and turned out lumber and used (even as sawdust) the lives and muscles of high-toned High Binders from Kowloon and the back parts of Canton, and hidalgos from Spain with knives about them, and gentlemen from Whitechapel who knew the ways of the sea, and many first-class Americans from the woods, to say nothing of Letts, Lapps and Finns and our tilikums the Indians from the Coast.

Quin was two hundred pounds weight, and as solid as a cant of his fir, and his mind was compact, a useful mind when dollars were concerned. He was a squaw-man and was always in with one of them, for there are men who don't care for white women (though indeed he had cared very much for one) and so run after klootchmen just as water runs down hill. It is explicable, for the conduct of (or the conducting of) a white woman for the most part takes a deal of restraint. Quin hated any form of it: he was by nature a kind of savage, though he was born in Vermont and bred up in lower Canada. He went West early (even to China, by the way) and only kept so much restraint as enabled him to hang on and make dollars and crawl up a financial ladder—with that wanting he might have been:—

A Hobo,
A Blanket Stiff
or
A mere Gaycat,

and have ended as a "Tomayto-can Vag!" These are all species of the Genus Tramp, or Varieties of the species, and the essence of them all is letting go. We who are not such vagabonds have to hold on with our teeth and nails and climb. But the blessedness of refusing to climb and the blessedness of being at the bottom are wonderful. We all know it as we hang on. Now Quin, for all his force and weight and power of body and of mind was a tramp in his heart, but a coward who was afraid of opinion, where want of dollars was concerned. He turned himself loose only with the women. He hated respectable ones. You had to be civil and gentlemanly and a lot of hogwash like that with ladies.

"Oh, hell," said Quin. "Great Scott, by the Holy Mackinaw, not me!"

The devil of it all is that we are pushed on by something that is not ourselves, and for what? It's by no means a case of "Sic vos non vobis" but "sic nos non nobis," and that's a solid fact, solid enough to burst the teeth out of any Hoe that can cut teak or mahogany, to say nothing of the soft wood of the Coast.

Quin compromised with the Mournful Spirit of Push and gave his soul to dollars on that behalf, and his body to the klootchmen.

It wasn't often that he slung work and took a holiday, but in latitude 49.50 N. and longitude 122 W., which is about the situation of New Westminster, so far as I can remember, Mills themselves take holidays in frost time, and when the Mill was shut down the Christmas before, he had taken a run up to Kamloops to see his brother Ned or Cultus Muckamuck.

There he saw Jenny, the sweet little devil, who hadn't been married to Pete for more than six months and was just nineteen. He made up his mind about her then, but there were difficulties. For one thing Ned was always wanting him, and Indian Mary, Ned's klootchman, was a good woman and heartily religious in her own way, and she had a care for the pretty little girl when the Panther, or Hyas Puss-Puss, called George Quin, came nosing around. And Pete was but newly wed and hadn't beaten Jenny yet. And Jenny, the pretty dear, was fond of her Sitcum Siwash and loved to see him on horseback, all so bold and fine with one hand on his hip and a quirt in the other. Given favourable circumstances and enforced sobriety there's no knowing what the two might have been.

I shall have to own it wasn't all George Quin after all: I couldn't help liking George somehow. It's the most mixed kind of a world, and though the best we know, it might have been improved by a little foresight one would think. There's always something pathetically good in blackguards, something that redeems the worst. What a pity it is!

George Quin loved one woman who lived in far off Vermont. She was his mother. He sent her dollars and bear skins more than twice a year. He had his portrait taken in his best clothes for her. He looked so like a missionary that the good old lady wept.

There was something good in George one sees. But he kissed Jenny behind Ned's old shack before he went away. It might look like a coincidence for Pete to come down to the Mill to work for George after getting the Grand Bounce by Ned, if it hadn't been for the kiss. Women are often deceitful.

"I'll tell Pete," said Jenny in the clutches of the Panther.

Hyas Puss-Puss laughed.

"You tell him, you sweet little devil, and I'll blow a hole through him with a gun!" said he.

If he played up, that is! Sometimes they don't, you know.

"You give me a kiss without a fight, and I'll give you a dollar," said the Panther. Jenny still kicked. But she didn't squeal. Mary was inside the shack and would have heard her, if she wanted help.

"Not for two dolla," said Jenny, hiding her mouth with the back of her hand, with her nails out claw fashion.

"Three then," said Hyas Puss-Puss. He was as strong as the very devil, said Jenny's mind inside, three times, four times, ever so many times stronger than Pete.

"Oh, no, not for three, nor four, nor five," said Jenny, laughing.

He got it for nothing. But he got no more. Indian Mary came outside and called—

"Jenny!"

George sat down on a log and filled his pipe while Jenny went back. She ran fast so that her colour and her tousled appearance might be accounted for. George Quin saw it.

"The deceitful little devil, but I kissed her!"

He got no more chances. When he had hold of her with that immense strength of his she was as weak as water, as was only natural, but she wanted to be good (Mary and the missionary had told her it was right to be good, and Mary said that Ned was going to marry her some day, so she was all right) and she was really fond of Pete.

However, when Quin was going down to the Coast again he got a moment with her.

"If you want to come down my way, I'll always give a first-class job to Pete, my dear. Don't forget. He's a good man in a Mill. I saw him over at the Inlet before he married you. I wish I'd seen you before that, you little devil. Ah, tenas, nika tikegh mika! Oh, I want you, little one!"

When she and Pete pulled out from Cultus Muckamuck's six months afterwards, they naturally went on a Howling Jamboree in Kamloops, and it ended in their being halo dolla, or rather, with no more than Jenny had secreted for a rainy day. She was a little greedy about money, it must be owned. Some wanted Pete to go up to the Landing at Eagle Pass as the Railroad was getting there from East and West, though he wasn't a railroad man by nature, but a lumber man. The railroader is always one and so is the lumber man. Jenny suggested the Coast and New Westminster.

In the meanwhile Pete had beaten her several times and many had told her she was very pretty. She wasn't quite the little girl she had been at Cultus Muckamuck's ranche. She missed Mary, and her morals did, too. She remembered all about George Quin's, "I'll give you two dollars for a kiss!" For a kiss only, mind. She could take care of herself, she said. But they went to the Coast by way of the only way, Savona and the Cañon. At Savona, Jenny's eyes got a pass to Yale out of Mr. Vanderdunk, who had beautiful blue eyes and was a very good chap, take him all round. Jenny lied to him like sixty and said her mother was dying at Yale. Her mother was as dead as Washington long years before. She died, poor thing, because Jenny's father became respectable and renounced her and married a white woman in Virginia. He was a shining light in a church at that very time, and was quite sincere.

"Give the pair a pass down," said Vanderdunk, "of course they're lying but——"

Eyes did it as they always will. So they went down to Yale and by the Fraser steamboat to New Westminster, and they put up at Indian Annie's as aforesaid and the row in the Mill happened and Quin saw Pete and he knew Jenny had come, and he smiled and licked his lips.

The very next day after Pete's swift acceptance of that noble position in the hierarchy of the Mill, the Wedger-Off-Ship, and after the drunken jamboree at Indian Annie's, Pete and Mrs. Pete moved the torn dressing-gown, etc., into Simmons' vacated shack. For Simmons had gone to Victoria in the S.S. Teaser, that old scrap-heap known to every one on the Sound, or in the Straits of Georgia or San Juan de Fuca, by her asthmatic wheezing. Pete's and Mrs. Pete's etc. comprised one bundle of rags, and a tattered silk of Jenny's, and two pairs of high-heeled shoes (much over at the heel) and a bottle of embrocation warranted to cure everything from emphysema to a compound fracture of the femur, and a Bible. Pete had knocked Jenny over with that on more than one occasion.

The traps that Simmons left in his shack he sold to Pete for one dollar and two bits, and they were well worth a dollar, for they comprised two pairs of blankets of the consistency of herring-nets and a lamp warranted to explode without warning. He threw in all the dirt he hadn't brushed out of the place during a tenancy of eight months, and made no extra charge for fleas. But Jenny was pleased. It was her first home, mark you, and that means much to a countess or a klootchman. Pete had wedded her at Kamloops and taken her to Cultus Muckamuck's right off, for there were no other men around there but old Cultus, and his Mary looked after him if he needed it.

So now Jenny grew proud for a while, and felt that to have a whole house to herself and her man was something. She forgave him her black eye, the poor dear, and she mended the tulips carefully in a way that would have given the mistress of a sewing school a fatal attack of apoplexy. She worked the rent together with gigantic herring-boning like the tacking of a schooner up some intricate channel with a shifting wind.

Then she swept the shack and set out her household goods the boots and the Bible. The boots had been given her by a Mrs. Alexander, sister to the donor of the dressing-gown, and the Bible (it had pictures in it) was the gift of a Methodist Missionary who saw she was very pretty. So did his wife, so everything was safe there.

The bed belonged to the shack, that is, to the Mill, to the Quins, and as it was summer there was no need to get better blankets. Jenny laid the precious tulips on it and the bed looked handsome enough for Helen, she thought, or would have thought if she had ever heard of her, and Pete admired it greatly.

They set out to be happy as people will in this world. Jenny had a piece of steak cooked for Pete's dinner and she laid the newspaper cloth very neatly, and put everything, beer, bread and so on, as well as some prunes, quite handy.

"By gosh, I'm hungry, old girl," said Pete, as he marched in at noon.

"It's all ready, Pete," she said, smiling. The smile was a little sideways, owing to last night. "Sit down and be quick."

There was need, for the Mill only let up for the half hour.

"This is work here, Jenny," said Pete, "by the Holy Mackinaw, I almos' forgot what work was at old Cultus'. Now she goes whoop!"

But he felt warm and good and kind.

"I'm sorry I hurt you, gal," he said, "but you was very bad las' night. Drink's no good. I won't drink no more."

"You very good to me," said Jenny meekly. "Whisky always makes me mad. I'm glad we're here. Indian Annie's bad, Pete."

"Cultus' ole cow," said Pete, with his mouth full, "but now we have our home, Jenny, my gal, and plenty work and forty dollar a month. I'm going to be a good man to you, my dear, and buy you big shelokum, lookin' glass."

Jenny's eyes gleamed. There was only a three-cornered fragment of glass nailed up against the wall, and it was hardly big enough to see her pretty nose in.

"Oh, Pete, that what I like. Oh, yes, Pete, a big one."

"High and long," said Pete firmly.

"Very high," screamed Jenny joyfully.

"So you see all your pretty self," smiled Pete. "I see one two yard high. I wonder how much."

"One hundred dolla, I tink," said Jenny, and Pete's jaw dropped.

"Never min', we get a good one for five dolla," said Jenny, and she kissed Pete for that five "dolla" one just as he filled his pipe. Then the whistle of the Mill squealed "Come out, come out, come out o' that, Pete, Pe—etc!" and Pete gave his klootchman a hug and ran across the hot sawdust to the Mill.

"Pete very good man, I won't kiss no one but Pete," said Jenny. "I almos' swear it on the Bible."

She was a human little thing, and Pete was human, poor devil. And so was George Quin, alas! And the worst of it is that we all are.

"I almos' swear it on the Bible!"

The sun burned and the water glared, and the Mill, the Stick Moola, howled and groaned and devoured some twenty thousand feet of logs that afternoon, and over the glittering river rose the white cone of Mount Baker and up the river shone the serrated peaks of the Pitt River Mountains, where Pete came from, and all the world was lovely and beautiful.

And that poor devil of a Quin sat in his office and tried to work, and had the pretty idea of Jenny in his aching mind.

"I almos' swear it on the Bible!"

Even George wanted to do the square thing, very often. But Jenny's "almos'" was hell, eh? Tilikum, we both know it!

IV

But for the fact that there was too muchee pidgin for everyone, as the Chinaman said, or hyu hyu mamook as the Siwashes said, many might have run after Jenny.

"One piecee litty gal velly hansum, belongy Pitt Liber Pete," said Wong, who was the helper at the Chinee Trimmer. He said it with a grin, "Velly nicee klootchman alla samee tenas Yingling gal my know at Canton, Consoo's litty waifo."

She was as pretty as any Consul's little wife, that's a solid mahogany hard wood fact. But with twelve hours work of the sort of work that went on in the Mill who could think of running after the "one litty piecee hansum gal" but the man who didn't work with his hands?

Wong was a philosopher, and, like all real philosophers, not a good patriot—if one excepts Hegel, who was a conservative pig, and a state toady and hateful to democrats. Wong had fine manners and was a gentleman, so much so that the white men really liked him and never wanted to plug him, or jolt him on the jaw or disintegrate him, as they did most of the Chinkies. He returned the compliment, and sometimes quarrelled with his countrymen about the merits of the whites, as one might with Americans and others about the children of the Flowery Kingdom.

"My likee Melican man and Yingling man," said Wong. "Velly good man Melican: my savvy. Some velly bad, maskee oders velly good. If Chinaman makee bobbely and no can do pidgin, Melican man say 'sonny pitch'; maskee my can do, my savvy stick-mula mamook, so Melican man and Yingling man say, 'Good Wong, no sonny pitch, velly good.' Melican gentleman velly good all plopa. What ting you tinkee?"

Wong was an enigmatic mask of a man, wrinkled wondrously and looking sixty, though nothing near it, as hard as solid truth, fond of singing to a mandolin, great at Fan tan, but peaceable as a tame duck.

He had a kind heart, "all plopa that one piecee man" from Canton, and one day (not yet) he has his place here, all out of kindness to the "litty hansum gal belongy Pitt Liber Pete." May his ashes go back to China in a nice neat "litty piecee box" and be buried among his ancestors who ought to be proud of him. Blessed be his name, and may he rank with Konfutse! I preferred him to Hegel. And if any of you want to know why I refer to him, you must draw conclusions.

But, as we were saying, who could have full time to run after the "litty gal" but Quin?

To make another excursion, and explain, it may be as well to let Pappenhausen talk. There were two Germans in the Mill, and both worked in the Planing Shed. One was a man of no account, a shuffling, weak-kneed, weak-eyed, lager-beer Hans, with as much brains as would have qualified him to be Heir Apparent to some third-rate Teutonic Opera-House Kingdom. But Pappenhausen was a Man, that is to say, he didn't compromise on Lager or weep because he drank too much. And he could work like three, and he wasn't the German kind as regards courage. German courage is very fine and fierce when the Teutons are in a majority, but when they aren't their courage ranks as the finest discretion, that is, as cowardice nine times out of ten. Pappenhausen would fight anyone or any two any time and any where. He could fight with fists or a spanner, or a pickareen or a club, and he took some satisfying. He was an amazing man, had been in America thirty years. He said he was a "Galifornian" and fought you if you didn't believe it. Once he stood up to Quin and was knocked galley-west, for besides Long Mac there wasn't a man in Saw-Mill Town that could tackle the Boss. Quin got a black eye, but Papp had two and lay insensible for an hour. Quin was so pleased with that, that he put him to work again and stood him drinks. He actually did. After that Papp, as he was called, stood up for, and not to, George Quin, and said he was a man, and he asked what it mattered if he did run after the klootchmen?

"Dat's der Teufel," grunted the native "Galifornian," "dat's der Teufel, we all run avder der klootchmen, if we don'd avder trink. I'm a philozopher, I, and I notizzes dat if it arn'd one ding it's anoder. And no one gan help it, boys. One man he run avder dollars, screamin' oud for dollars, and if you zay a dollar ain'd wort' von 'ondred cents of drubble he tink you grazy. I zay one dollar's wort' of rest wort' a dollar and a half any day. On'y I cain'd help workin'. If I don'd I feel I braig somedings mit mein hands. Oders run avder klootchmen; if dey don'd dey feels as if dey would also braig somedings. I tinks the welt a foolish blace, but in Shermany (where my vater game from) I dinks it most foolish. And Misder Guin he run avder Pete's klootchman and bymby Pete gill her as like as nod and then Mr. Guin very sorry he spoke. I dell you I knows. Life is a damn silly choke, boys."

But it was (and is) only a joke to a Democritus of Papp's type. Even Papp said:—

"Bymby I ged a new sood of glose and fifdy dollars and I go back home to California."

He said it and had said it.

"Bymby——"

Poor Papp!

It was no joke to Jenny presently that "Misder Guin" ran after her. But then it is no joke at any time to be the acknowledged belle of any place, even if it is a Saw-Mill Sawdust Town, and the truth is that Jenny shone even among the white women, gorgeous in their pride and occasional new frocks from San Francisco, the Paris of the Coast. There wasn't a white "litty gal" in the City who was a patch on her: she was the "slickest piece of caliker" within long miles. Folks who were critical and travelled, said that there was her equal over at Victoria, but that was far off, and much water lay between. From the mighty white-peaked summit of the Rockies, and the wonders of the Selkirks, down through the Landing and Kamloops and Yale at the end of the Cañon away to Westminster, she was the prettiest.

Think of it and consider that she lived in a two-roomed shack with a decent-looking wedger-off who was a Sitcum Siwash! She got compliments on the street as she went up and down town.

"Great Scott, she's a daisy!"

"By the Great Horn Spoon, and also by the Tail of the Sacred Bull, she knocks spots off of the hull crowd."

Such things said openly have their effect. But the tulips on the dressing-gown did even more, and the high-heeled shoes. She hankered after things in the streets to which the dressing-gown was but a faded flower. Quin spoke to her once as she glared into a window.

"You like that, Jenny?"

"Oh, my," said little greedy Jenny.

Quin didn't care a hang if he spoke to the little klootchman in public. He wasn't in society, for even in the River City there was Society. They drew the line at squaw-men who went to dance-houses and so on. But for that, the Manager and Owner of a Mill (or half one or even a quarter) could have had entrance to the loftiest gaieties and the dullest on earth. He didn't "give a damn," not a "continental," for the "hull boiling," said Quin. Jenny was his mark, you can take your oath.

She was worth it in looks only, that's the best and worst of it.

"Oh, my," said Jenny.

"I'll give it you: it's my potlatsh," said the Manager, who cared little for dollars when the girls came in.

It was a "potlatsh," a gift indeed! To get Jenny, Quin would have done "a big brave's potlatsh" and given away all he owned, horses, mill, house, and all. That's a fact, and it must be remembered as Papp said, that "dey also veels as if dey would braig somedings!"

She got the gorgeous silk of tartan stripes that flared in the window like a light lightening the darkness, for Quin went in and bought what is known as a dress length and sent it down to her by his Chinese "boy." When he met Pete in the road at noon that day he stopped him.

"Oh, Pete——"

"Sir," said Pete respectfully, for the Tyee was so big and strong besides being a Tyee, which always counts.

"I have given your wife some stuff to make a dress. She was very good to my brother and to Mary," said Quin. "She's a very good little girl."

He nodded and walked on. He wished Pete would get killed on the top of a log, but his face was inscrutable and calm as that of any full-blooded Siwash. Pete was as innocent and as unsuspicious as any child. If he feared anyone it was Spanish Joe, with his guitar and his songs. He went home as pleased as Punch by the condescension of the Boss, and found Jenny laying out dinner.

The trouble came as quick as it could come. It came right there and then, when both were as happy as they could be. Jenny fairly shivered with pleasure to think of the silk she had hidden inside the inner room. Real silk it was and new, not a cast-off rag from Mrs. Alexander, of the Kamloops Hotel. The tulips of the dressing-gown faded clean out of sight: they died down in their monstrous array. She saw the Dress, saw it made up, saw the world admire it: heard the other klootchmen clicking envious admiration. But how was she to account for it to Pete? She had been kissed by Quin, and she knew he liked her, wanted her. The big man flattered her senses, he was a white man, rich and strong. She wouldn't have almost sworn on the Bible that she wouldn't lass him, now that this silk filled earth and heaven for her gaudy little mind. She would have to think how to tell Pete.

So in came Pete in excitement.

"Show me what Mr. Quin give you," he demanded. And her unlucky lie was ready. It fell from her lips before she had a moment to think.

"He give me nothing; why you say that?"

Pete's jaw fell and his eyes shut to a thin line.

"You damned liar, kliminiwhit," he said. "I know."

"It's not true, you dam' liar you'self," said Jenny. "What for you tink the Tyee give me tings? You tink me a cultus klootchman like Indian Annie?"

On his oath he would have sworn one happy moment before that he had never thought so. Now he thought too much.

"You show it me or I kill you," said Pete. "I know Mr. Quin he give you some stuff to make a dless."

In his rage his words grew more Indian, and his taught English failed, his r's became l's. So did hers.

"Damn lie, I have no dless," screamed Jenny. "You no give me no'ting, you make kokshut my dlessing-gown. I dless like one cultus klootchman, in lags."

He ran at her and she fled round the table. The newspaper and the dinner went on the floor, and she screamed. Then she slipped on the steak, and went down. As chance had it the table came over on top of her and she held it tight, so that he could not get at her to hurt her much. But he kicked her legs hard and then went into the inner room.

"No, Pete, no," she screamed. She knew that he must find the dress, the precious silk, and she forgot all else in her great desire that it should not be harmed. "I tell you the trut', Pete."

She crawled from under the table: her hair was down to her waist, her wretched every-day gown torn from her back: her bosom showed.

"Oh, Pete, oh, Pete!"

Her lips hung piteous for the lovely thing that Pete had found and now held up in horrid triumph. The roll unrolled: he had the crumpled end in his hand. It was a flag of blazing silk, a tartan to appeal to any savage. Now it cried for help.

"You damn klootchman, you," said Pete. "What for Quin he give you this?"

He kicked the roll with his foot. The stuff unrolled more and Jenny cried aloud as though it was her papoose that her savage man ill-used.

"I don' know why he give it me," she squealed.

"Him velly kin' man always. Oh, don' tear it, Pete, oh, oh!"

With his hands he ripped the silk in fragments.

"You damn bad woman, mesahchie klootchman," he roared. "You no take such a ting from Mr. Quin! You look at him lika you look at Spanish Joe the other day: I see you."

"You no see me do anyting wrong," Jenny cried, weeping bitterly. "I don' lika Spanish Joe. 'Tis a lie, Pete. And I no can help if Mr. Quin give me tings. I a very good woman, on the Bible I swear it. I quite virtuous; Mr. Quin he no touch me, I swear it. Don' tear it no more. Pete, oh, don'!"

He set his foot on the silk and ripped full twenty yards into fragments. The room was full of shining stuff, of red and yellow and green: the floor was gorgeous with colour, and as he exhausted his rage upon what he had found and was quite pitiless, her little flower of love for him seemed to die in her outraged heart, which loved beautiful things so much. Now she had nothing left, her visions passed from her. She sat down on the floor and howled aloud, keening over the death of the beautiful dress. She was no longer full of pride, and conscious of her beauty: she was no more than a poor dirty ill-used, heart-broken little klootchman, no more thought of than dirty old Annie and Annawillee, who mourned so sadly the other happy night.

"Aya, yaya, hyaalleha," she cried aloud. "Hyas klahowyam nika, very miser'ble, aya!"

And Pete ran out of the shack leaving her moaning.

"That make her know what, eh?" said Pete. He worked furiously at the Mill, without any food, and was very unhappy, of course, though he knew he had done quite right in tearing the silk to pieces, and in knocking thunder out of his klootchman. He didn't believe she had been "real wicked," but when it came to taking presents from Mr. Quin, and lying about them, it was time to look out.

"I teach her," said Pete; "give her what for, eh?"

But he wasn't mad with Quin. It was quite natural for Quin to want Jenny. Pete knew all the men did. She was so pretty. Even the Chinamen knew it and said so. Pete was proud of that. "Velly hansum litty klootchman," said Wong. Why should a man be angry because another man wants his "litty gal?" No need to "makee bobbely 'bout that" surely. But the litty girl had to be taught, Nawitka!

"I give her the stick by-by," said Pete, and he used the wedges and the maul as if he were giving poor wretched Jenny the stick then. He worked that day though he hadn't an ounce of muckamuck inside him. Ginger White said he was as quick as the devil: worth ten of that swine Simmons. White's nose was gradually resuming its natural shape, but when he thought of Simmons his hand went up to it.

Oho, but they all worked, worked like the Bull-Wheel, like Gwya-Gwya and "him debble-debble," said Wong.

"No Joss in British Columbia," said Wong; "spose wantee catchee Joss catchee Debble-Debble. Bymby Blitish Columbia-side an' Californee-side him allo blong China, then Joss he come, galaw!"

The "debble-debble"' was in Pete's heart for hours, but there's nothing like work to get him out, and by four o'clock he was getting sorry he had kicked Jenny and torn up the "dless." The little klootchman had been good, he was sure, and she cooked for him nicely and didn't get drunk often. If she did get too much, it was his own fault, he knew that.

"I tell her I'm sorry," he said.

Aya, yaya, what a cruel world it is, Pitt River Pete!

The little klootchman was "dying" now and telling the old hag Indian Annie all about it. And it's only four o'clock and the Mill runs till six.

Poor Jenny, with bare shoulders and bare bosom, howled upon the gorgeous floor of silken rags for a long hour after Pete ran out in a rage.

"Aya, yaya, nika toketie dless kokshut, no good. Pete him wicket man, aya!"

Oh, think of it! That beautiful green and yellow and red silk so fine and thick and soft and shining t That "dless" which it contained as a possibility, that her natural woman's eye put on her pretty self! Aya, Yaya! Even a dear white woman would be very cross indeed if her man came in and said, "You damn person, you have a roll of silk given you by Smith or Brown or Jones," and then tore it up. Aya, Yaya! How sad for poor Jenny, only nineteen, and so sweet to look at and with a love of colour. Aya, as I speak I feel "hyu keely." I could mourn with Jenny and say I'd get her another roll of silk, for a kiss, perhaps, for the devil's in such a pretty dear. Tut, tut, it's a sad world and a wicked, and the pretty ones are the devil, aya, yaya!

It was quiet enough in Shack-Town in the afternoon and a continual aya, yaya-ing soon attracted the attention of Indian Annie when she came from begging up-town past Pete's shack.

"Aha, oho," said the bundle of wicked rags, once a beautiful klootchman and a white sea-captain's darling, and yet another's and another's, ay de mi, as Chihuahua said when he was sad, and others still in a devil of a long diminuendo and degringolade and a sad, sad fall, just as if she had been an improper white. "Oho, why Jenny cly, kahta she cly?"

In she went, for she knew Pete was wedging-off, and in the inner room she found a pretty one half naked on the silken rag carpet.

"Oh, my toketie Jenny, kahta cly? Oh, Lejaub, the pretty stuff all tole up, yaya? Who done it, Jenny, real kloshe silk all assame white klootchman have in chu'ch? Who give him, aya?"

She was down on her knees gathering up the silk in whole armfuls.

"Dis Pete? Eh, Pete, pelton Pete, fool Pete, eh?"

Jenny sobbed out it was Pete who had torn it all up, and Annie nodded cunningly as she stuffed a good bundle of it into her rags.

"Aha, pelton Pete mamook si'k kokshut, but klaksta potlatsh mika, nika toketie, who give him you, my pretty?"

"Mr. Quin give him, and my bad man he say I mesahchie, no good, a cultus klootchman alla same you!" howled Jenny open-mouthed.

Annie showed her yellow fangs in a savage grin.

"Cultus, alla same nika? Oho, pelton Pete, fool Pete!"

"And he say," roared Jenny like any baby, "that I no good, not virtuous, and he beat me, and taka silk and tearum lika so! And I think I make a dless so pretty and now the pretty dless is all lags, all lags!"

She roared again and shook with sobs, and Annie got her by the shoulder.

"Pete is Lejaub, the devil of a bad man, my pretty. I get you ten new dlesses for that. I hear Pete no go to mamook but go up town and dlink whisky at Spanish Joe's white woman's. By-by he come back and beat you, Jenny."

Jenny clutched her.

"Oh, he kick me bad, see, nanitch!"

She showed her pretty knee with a black bruise on it.

"That nothin', tenas toketie, by-by Pete come back pahtlum and knock hell out of you, Jenny," said Annie. Then she bent and whispered in Jenny's ear.

"Oh, no, no," said Jenny. She clutched at Annie's skirt as the old wretch got upon her feet. But Annie turned on her and twitched her rags away.

"You pelton, too? Much better be live and with rich good man than dead with Pete and Pete with a lope on him neck. I go tell Mr. Quin, him very good man, kloshe man."

But Jenny implored her not to go to him. And as she sobbed that she was afraid of Quin the old hag gathered up more and more of the silk until she had nearly all that poor Jenny wasn't sitting on.

"You stay. I go see, go think what I do for you. I no go to Mr. Quin, I promise, tenas toketie."

And she got away and went straight to the office in which Quin was to be found, and asked to see him.

"Quit, you old devil," said the young clerk, "pull your freight out of this. No klootchmen wanted here."

She had her ugly old face inside the door and the boy threw the core of an apple at her.

"I want see Mr. Quin," she cried, as she dodged the missile.

"I want see him. You no kumtuks. Mr. Quin see me, I tell you he want see me. Ya, pelton!"

The boy knew very little Chinook and missed half the beauty of what she went on to say to him. But she told him much about his parents and a great deal about his sisters that would have been disagreeable even if translated with discretion. By the time she came to a climax, her voice rose to a shriek that might have been audible in the Mill itself, and Quin came out in a rage.

"Get to thunder out of this, you old fool," said Quin, "or I'll have you kicked off the place!"

She looked at him steadily and held up a long fragment of the silk before him.

"Mika kumtuks okook, you know him?" she asked with a hideous leer.

And Quin came off the step and went up to her.

"Where you get it, Annie?"

"You know," said Annie. "Tenas toketie have him, you give him, ah. But who tear him, makum kokshut?"

"Pete?" asked Quin with the devil of a face on him. But Annie walked a little away and beckoned him to follow. She got him round the corner and he went with her like a child. He thought he understood. Annie put out her claw and took his coat.

"I give you klootchman often, now you give me tukamonuk dolla, one hundred dolla, and I give you pretty Jenny."

Quin blew out his breath and bent down to her.

"You old devil," he said with a wavering grin.

"Me Lejaub? Halo, no, I give you pretty young squaw, that not like Lejaub. You give me one hundred dolla, see."

Quin sighed and opened his mouth.

"I give it. How you do it, Annie?"

"Now she hate Pete, him pelton," said the witch; "he beat her, kick her knee, kick her back, kick her belly too, and tear up si'k in tenas bits, Mr. Quin. She cly like any papoose, she scleam and make gleat latlah. He tear up si'k and tear her dless, now she half-naked on the floo'. That bad, and she pretty and say Mr. Quin give me dless, kloshe Mr. Quin. She love you, she tikegh mika, cly kahkwa the si'k yours. You come: she go with you. I make so no one know tings, if you take her yo' house."

His house was on the hill above them. There he lived with not a soul but his Chinese boy.

"How you make no one know?" he asked.

"Kloshe, I do it," said Annie. "I say to Pete she say to me she lun away, and not come back, eh?"

But as Quin explained to her, the first person Pete would think of would be the man who had given her the dress.

"Oh, ya, I know," said Annie. "Kloshe; I very clever klootchman, I know evelything. She lun away with Shipman Jack this very day and came tell me so I tell Pete. How that do, Mr. Quin? You tink, eh?"

But Quin was doubtful. Annie urged her scheme on him and still drew him further down the road.

"Pete him once jealous, hab sick tumtum about Jenny with Shipman Jack, because Jack pinch her behind and she cly out and Pete hear it. That the other night. I know, I know evelything. I tell him mo'. I say she often meet Jack befo'. Now you have fire Jack, and he goes away this day and he now go in Teaser piah-ship to Victolia, I see him. Ah, velly good, she go with him. I say klahowya to them. I get Annawillee for a dolla say she say klahowya to them. And alla time Jenny in yo' house. I bling her this night. You see, all light. You give me one dolla now?"

"You'll get drunk, you old harridan," said Quin, who was all of a shake, "and if you do you'll mamook pelton of me and no get the hundred dolla. No, I give you all to-night."

And knowing that it was true that she might get drunk if she had that dollar she went away without it, back to Jenny.

V

It was true enough that Jack Mottram, "Shipman" or sailorman, had been fired that day a little before noon. To be "fired" is to get the Grand Bounce, and to get that is to get what everyone understands when the sack is spoken of. Another way of saying it is to mention that "he got his time," or perhaps his Walking Ticket. So now it is understood. Before getting all these qualifications as a free unemployed seaman he had got drunk early in the morning. This is nearly always a fatal error and brings trouble anywhere. In a Stick-Moola running at full time it is liable to bring death. For death stands handy with his scythe, or perhaps his pickareen, uplifted in a Mill. Indeed, Jack the Shipman very nearly sent back to Bouddha, or maybe to Posa, one poor native of the Flowery Kingdom by landing him one on the "ear-hole." Poor Fan Tang (or something like it) up-ended and disappeared down a chute, and was so sadly disgruntled that he limped to the office and denounced Jack to Quin in a fine flow of Pidgin English and mixed Chinook.

"Muchee bad bad man belong Tlimmer pukpuk my! My fallee down chute allo same lumber. My muchee solly, you look see bluise!"

He exposed his awful injuries to Quin's view. He had parted with many patches of cuticle in his tumble down the chute.

"Dat shipman bad man, muchee dlunk," said Fan Tang spitefully, and when Quin went over to the Mill he found that Jack was indeed "muchee dlunk," and full of insolence and whisky.

"All ri', Mr. Quin, I quit. I'm full up of this work. You give me my money and I'm off to sea. What the 'ell I ever came ashore for, I dunno! What ho!"

Tom Willett, a young Englishman, went from the Chinee Trimmer to the Big Trimmer, and Wong the philosopher took the Chinee Trimmer.

"Out of this," said Quin, "or I'll smash your jaw."

That was to Jack, who wasn't so drunk as to take up the challenge. He went to the office quite meekly after all. He was almost as meek as one "Dutchman" among ten English.

"Righto, I'm off to Victoria this very day," said Jack. He drew fifteen dollars and three bits, rolled up his dunnage, and went to the wharf where the Teaser steamboat, or "piah-ship," was lying. He bade farewell to Sawmill Town with much contempt. But Indian Annie saw him go. He goes out of this history on his way to Hong Kong with lumber. He got well man-handled by an American mate and lost much insolence before he sighted Mount Stenhouse.

Annie went back to Jenny, now moaning sadly with a dirty face, striped with tear-channels, and told the poor pretty dear a dreadful tale. Pete was up-town, having got drink in spite of his being a Siwash, and was ready to kill, said Annie.

"Aya, I'm very much flightened," said poor Jenny. "What shall I do, Annie?"

The procuress stole a little more silk and dragged at Jenny's arm.

"You klatawa, go away, chahco with me. I hide you, toketie. Pete wicked, bad man, and get hang if he see you. Come hyak, hyak!"

She got her into her own den, and hid her in the inner room. Then she hobbled off to Annawillee, while Jenny sobbed herself to sleep on the dirty bed. Annie and Annawillee were old friends, for Annie liked her. When Chihuahua beat Annawillee too much she took refuge at Annie's till her man calmed down. For love of Annie and a dollar Annawillee would do anything.

"I say I see Jenny klatawa in piah-ship with Jack the shipman. Nawitka, I say it, and you give me dolla?"

"Ha, one dolla, and one dlink, Annawillee," said Annie, grinning. "Pete he much solly, and get pahtlum to-night, for I take Jenny away to Mista Quin. By-by I ask mo' dolla. Nanitsh?"

Oh, but indeed Annawillee was no fool and saw quick enough. To get money for helping Quin to Jenny and to get more for not telling was a fine business! "What you tink, eh?"

At five o'clock, Jenny dressed in a horrid yellow dress belonging notoriously to Annawillee, and with her head bound up as if she were indeed Annawillee after Chihuahua had booted thunder out of her in a jamboree, crawled with Annie up the hill, and sat behind a big stump close to Quin's house, which stood alone. Poor Jenny was scared to death by now, for Annie said terrible things of a drunken Pete, who was supposed to be sharpening a knife for a pretty throat.

"You very good klootchman to Pete," said Annie, "and he bad, oh, bad to you, tenas toketie. Mista Quin him good man, rich and very skookum. Pete kwass, afraid of Mista Quin. You alla same white klootchman, good dlesses, very pretty. You no forget poor Annie: you give her dless and dolla when you alla same white woman in chu'ch, in legleese."

Jenny wept bitterly. She still thought she loved Pete, and she was conscious that she was no beauty in her dirt and the dreadful yellow rags of Annawillee.

"I wicked klootchman," said Jenny, "no mo' virtuous, I have shem see Bible. And I not toketie now, very dirty. How I look now, Annie?"

"You always toketie, tenas," said the old witch truly enough. "I do up yo' hair, tenas. By-by you mamook wash yo' face, and be very pretty. Mista Quin mamook wash every day, him gleat man, skookum man, very lich, very lich, plenty dolla. Him love you mo' than one hundred dolla."

She did up Jenny's mass of tumbled black hair, and wiped her face with a rag. She wetted it in her mouth.

"Now you clean," said Annie. "What time Mista Quin come to him house?"

She peered from behind her stump, and presently saw Quin come up the hill. As he passed her she called to him in a low voice.

"Yahkwa, here, Mista Quin."

And Quin came across the brush to them. Jenny buried her face in her hands and her shoulders troubled.

"I bling her," said Annie. "She much aflaid, hyu kwass, of Pete. He say he makee her mimaloose, kill her dead, she muchee aflaid, and she tikegh you, love you always."

Jenny shook and trembled like a beaten dog.

"She now very dirty and bad dless, but you mamook wash, and she hyu toketie. No klootchman here like Jenny. Now, tenas, you klatawa in house quick."

She dragged the trembling child to her feet, and then held out her hand to Quin.

"You give me the dolla?"

And Quin gave her the money in notes. She knew well enough what each one was worth.

"Now I tell Pete she klatawa with shipman Jack to Victoly, ha!"

She scrambled down the hill and Quin took Jenny by the arm.

"Come, tenas," he said in a shaking voice.

But it was a kind voice after all, and Jenny burst into a torrent of sobs and clung to him.

"I have much shem," she said, "I have much shame."

Even Quin had some too, poor devil.

They went into the house.

VI

By the time that the evening sun, slanting westwards to the Pacific, which roared on wild beaches sixteen miles away, shone into the western end of the Mill, Pete had worked the anger out of his heart as healthy children of the earth must do. The song of the Mill was no longer angry or menacing: it became a harmony and was even sweet. Work went beautifully: the logs were sweet-cutting spruce for the most part, or splendid pine, or odorous red cedar, and one precious log of white cedar. The saws ran easy and their filed teeth were sharp: the Hoes said "We can do, we can do," and the Pony Saw piped cleanly and clear, while the Trimmers, though they cut across the grain, cut most swiftly, and said, "Gee whiz, gee whiz." Young Willett was pleased to get the Big Trimmer and Wong most proud to run the Chinee one, which by its name certainly belonged of old to some Chinaman, perhaps now in the country of Green Tea and Bamboos, and forgetful of his ancient toil in alien lands. The engines, too, ran well and the sawdust carriers did not break down, and no belt parted, and nobody but Ginger White said much that was uncivil, and if he went no further than that no one minded him any more than they minded the weather or the wind.

So as things went sweetly, Pete's heart grew sweet and he was sorry he had kicked at Jenny's legs as she lay under the table, and sorry he had torn up the pretty silk. After all it was natural enough that Quin should give her something, and it was natural he wanted her. But of course he couldn't get her, for she was virtuous and had a Bible, and knew religion, and believed that Lejaub, or the diable, would take anyone who was not virtuous. Both the Catholic and the English priests said that, so it must be true. And, if she had denied having the dress, he owned that he had often frightened her and it was natural for her to say she hadn't got it, poor toketie Jenny. He nobly determined to forgive her and say no more about it.

And then the exultant whistle declared with a hoot that the work was over for the day, and the engines stopped and the saws whirred and whined and drawled and yawned and stood still while the workers clattered out, laughing and quite happy.

Oh, but it's good to be strong and well and to have work, but to have none and thereby to get to cease to love it is very bad, oh, very bad indeed. Let the wise know this, as the unwise and ignorant who labour know it in their hearts and in their hands.

"Oho," said Pete as he strode across the yard, "oho!"

He was nobly determined to forgive. He would go in to Jenny and say, "Look here, Jenny, I forgive you because you tell that lie, that kliminwhit. I forgive you, but you be good, kloshe, tell your man no more kliminwhit."

He came to his silent shack and didn't notice that no smoke, no cooking smoke, came from its low chimney. He marched in bent on forgiveness, and found the front room empty.

"She still cly about that silk," said Pete uneasily. He hesitated a moment before he opened the inner door and called to her.

"Jenny, Jenny."

Silence answers you, Pete, silence and two empty rooms with a table upset, and some few rags of dirtied silk still left by the predaceous fingers or claws of the vulturine Annie.

"She velly closs, go out with some other klootchman," said Pete. "Damn, I beat her again."

It was very hard indeed that he, the Man, should come in ready for forgiveness and good advice with regard to future lies, and should find no one meekly ready to accept pardon and to promise rigid truth in future: it was very hard indeed, and Pete's brows contracted and his heart was outraged.

"Now I not forgive," said Pete. "She not here, no muckamuck ready and I so olo, so hungry."

He saw the steak that poor Jenny had cooked for his dinner. It lay upon the floor, as she had lain on it. It was trodden and filthy and Pete kicked it spitefully. He saw an old rag of a dress that was Jenny's. It was the one she had discarded for Annawillee's horrid yellow rag of quarantine, which said, "I'm Annawillee, be wise and don't come near me." She had changed at Annie's, but Annie brought it back and put it in sight. For she was a spiteful devil.

"What for?" said Pete. A dull fear entered his heart which did not dispossess his anger. "What for: kahta she leave dless?"

It was a "dless" indeed. But she did not need it then. There were certain beautiful garments at Quin's house, and there would be more.

"I'll kick her when I find her," said Pete. He ran out and went straight to the next shack, to Indian Annie's den.

He found her and Annawillee, and both were drunk, but not yet too drunk for speech, or for the discretion of the arranged lie.

"You see Jenny?" he demanded.

Annie lifted her claws to heaven and moaned.

"I so sorry, Pete, Jenny bad klootchman!"

"What you mean, you old devil?" roared Pete, in horrid fear.

"I tell you delate, I tell you, Pete. She klatawa with—with——"

His jaw dropped.

"She go with Shipman Jack to Victoly in piah-ship," said Annie, hiccupping. "I see her, Annawillee see her."

"I see, nika nanitsh Jenny klatawa with Jack," puked Annawillee. "She klatawa in piah-ship, she go Victoly."

She was hugging a bottle to her pendant breasts as she told her lie. But she believed it by now, and kept on repeating "to Victoly, an' to California in piah-ship with Shipman Jack, inati chuck; acloss water."

"Oh, God," said Pete. He was a dirty white colour. His lips hung down.

"She tikegh Jack velly much," said Annie, "love him very much, and cly and say him good man, not beat her and tear her dless. She much aflaid of you, Pete. She cly and go away."

"She cly and go away," chimed in Annawillee, weeping tears of awful alcohol. She was so sorry for everyone, and for herself and Jenny and Pete and all the world. "I cly, I cly!"

She sobbed and drank, and still Pete stood there, very sick at heart.

"My pretty tenas klootchman," he murmured, "oh, hell, what I do?"

"You hab dlink," said Annie, holding him up the bottle. He took it, put it to his mouth, and drank half a pint of fiery stuff that nearly skinned his throat. He dropped the empty bottle on the floor and turned away back to his empty shack.

"I will kill Jack," he said, "I, I, kill Jack!"

He saw the world in a haze: the Mill danced darkly before his eyes, dark against a golden sunset, his brain reeled, and when he came to his own door he fell inside and lay insensible.

"Pete dlink too much, he gleedy beast," said Annie. But Annawillee nursed her empty bottle to her bosom and said foolishly—

"I see—nika nanitsh Jenny klatawa, oh, hyu keely Annawillee."

And the night presently came down, and as the shacks lighted up it was told among all the Siwashes and the Chinkies and the White Men of ten Nations that Jenny, pretty Jenny, tenas toketie Jenny, had "scooted" with Shipman Jack across the water to Victoria, to California, to China, oh, to hell-an'-gone somewhere!

"To Hell and Gone out of this," they said. And Spanish Joe sang to the guitar a bitter little song about someone's señora who fled across the sea, and Chihuahua grinned at Jack's luck (Annawillee did not tell him the truth), and the Whites, Long Mac, and Shorty Gibbs and Tenas Billy and even young Tom Willett, who knew nothing about klootchmen, though some had their eye on him hopefully, said there was no knowing what any woman would do. They understood that men would do what they had a mind to.

"Anyhow," said Shorty, "she was a dern sight too pretty for a golderned Siwash like Pete. Someone wuz sure to kapswalla her sooner or later. If I wuz given to klootchmen, which I ain't, thank the Lord, I'd ha' put in for her myself."

But to think of such a coyoté as Jack Mottram picking up the Pearl of the River!

"It would sicken a hog," said Shorty Gibbs.

VII

Quin might be a Squaw-Man (as indeed he was in his irregular way) but he lived in comfort, and Sam, his "boy," aged twenty-five, was a wonder, worth more dollars by far than the days of the longest months and all he could steal as well. Sam was good-looking and as clean as a fresh-run quinnat, and he had the most heavenly and ingratiating smile, and the neatest ways, and a heaven-sent gift of cooking. He was pleasant to the world and to himself, and he sang little Chinese songs as he worked and made Quin's house as clean as heaven after rain. He didn't "hit the pipe," which Wong did, of course, and he only smoked cigars. They were Quin's and good ones. Not that opium is so bad as liquor, by the way, though the missionaries say it is. It is better to "hit the pipe" than to "dlinkee for dlunk," and that's an all-solid fact.

Sam was discreet, and he let no one rob Quin but himself. Indeed, he almost loved Quin, for Quin had good qualities. For example, he rarely swore in his own house, and he had a way of making little presents to Sam which were very encouraging.

"Boss he makee allo tim' litty cumshaw my," said Sam. "He givee my cigar: he givee my dolla. He givee my close: makee stlong cutsom givee me all ting he no wantshee. My catchee allo tim' good close, boot, tlouser, and he speakee my velly good: neber makee bobbely. Massa Quin velly good Boss, no can catchee better. Supposee klootchman no good, makee bobbely, he say 'hyack klatawa:' supposee klootchman good klootchman allo same wifo dat velly good: Massa Quin velly good and makee mo' cumshaw my."

And now there was a new klootchman.

"Ho," said Sam Lung, "ho, he bling 'nodder klootchman. My tinkee 'bout time he catchee new klootchman. He velly lestless, like he got water topside, clazy. What she like this new klootchman?"

He put his eye to the key-hole, and then drew up in disgust.

"Fo, velly dirty, cly allo tim'. She velly litty young gal. After las' wun he likee catchee young gal. Ha, my tinkee bymby she catchee wash and look velly pletty. She whitee gal my tinkee when she catchee washee."

But poor Jenny was on the floor, still crying as if her little heart would break. She was not yet able to look up and see the wonder of a nice clean house, such as she had never been in, in all her life.

"You're all right, Jenny, my dear," said Quin, "don't you cry. No one shall hurt you, my girl. I'll give you a good time, my dear. Now get up, Jenny, and look at your home, and then I'll take you into another room and find you a new dress. Come, tenas Jenny."

He spoke quite tenderly and touched Jenny's heart.

"Oh, but I have shem," she said.

"You come and mamook wash," said Quin, "and by-by we'll have muckamuck and then you'll be all right. Come now."

He lifted her to her feet, and when she felt his strong hands on her she felt a little better. It was like fate, though she knew not what fate was. He was strong and kind, and he said he loved her. She caught his hand.

"You no beat me?" she cried in a sudden passion of fear and helplessness. "You no beat me, Mr. Quin?"

"No, Jenny, no," he said. He turned her tearful dirty face round and kissed her.

"Oh, I too much dirty," she exclaimed in great distress. "No bebee me till I mamook wash."

She caught sight of herself in a big glass over the mantelpiece.

"Oh, Mr. Quin, I have shem: I so dirty. You forgive me, Mr. Quin?"

And Quin laughed a little uneasily.

"Of course, my dear, now I make a lady of you; you are so pretty, Jenny."

He went out of the room and told Sam to make a "plenty hot" bath in the bedroom. And he put out some clean clothes for her, which he took from a locked cupboard. Some were new. Most of them had been got for a Haida girl who had died of consumption two years before. But Quin had forgotten her. He spoke to Sam when the "boy" brought in the bath and water.

"Sam, you no fool, I think," he began.

"That same my tinkee, Sir," said Sam.

"I bring another klootchman here, Sam."

"Where you catchee?" asked Sam with great interest.

"You mind your own pidgin," said Quin. "Now look, Sam, I no wantshee anyone know who she is. When they ask you, you say she white woman, allo same wife, from San Francisco. If you tinkee that not true, that all right, but if you say so I fire you and give you no dolla. While she stay here and no one know who she is I give you five more dolla, moon-pidgin, every month. Now you savvy?"

Sam stood with his head on one side all the time his master spoke. He looked as intelligent as a sharp Chinaman can look, and he answered with decision and a perfect gravity.

"My savvy that plenty! You catchee one litty gal and no wantshee man savvy. Dat light, I plenty savvy. My say she numpa one pletty litty gal from San Flancisco. I savvy plenty and if litty gal stay you givee my mo' five dolla moon-pidgin. My savvy plenty. Now you washee her?"

"Fill the bath, you damn fool," said Quin.

"All li', savvy plenty," said Sam. "My cookee good dinner for Missus. Five dolla mo' velly good. My cookee velly good: makee litty gal stop allo same wifo."

And he went back to the kitchen, solemn and satisfied, but very curious to see the litty piecee gal when she was washed.

It was all an amazing dream for poor Jenny. If it had not been for the black bruise on her knee she would have thought herself in some new world. For the house was beautifully built and lined inside with red cedar. The furniture was as good as any in the City, for the tragedy of Quin's life was, that he had met a white woman, and had fallen in love with her three years ago. They were to have been married, but the woman found out about his past history, his character as a squaw-man, and threw him over. He had prepared the house for her. The dead Haida girl Lily had come instead. Jenny dreamed and wondered and half forgot that she was not good to be there. Quin was very strong, "hyu skookum," and his house was to be hers, and he would prevent Pete killing her. As she got into the hot water the tears ran down her face. But the bath was pleasant, and she was not too degraded to enjoy the cleanliness of things; and the hot water eased the tension of her mind, and it seemed suddenly as if her life with Pete was something very far off, hardly to be remembered.

And then she handled the clothes she was to wear, and the mere woman woke in her heart. Here was linen far better than that she had helped to wash for Mrs. Alexander before Pete had come and taken her from Kamloops! It was beautiful linen to her eye, and in spite of everything the pleasure she found in it was wonderful, for though she did not know it, her skin was tender and delicate and had always suffered from the stuff she had worn.

There were silk stockings!

"Mista Quin he very gleat man," said Jenny, awestruck. "Much better than any I ever see, never nanitsh any like 'em."

When she got them on she took up the dress. It was also silk, but not like the monstrous tartan the cause of all her woe. It was a dark red and fine and supple, for Lily had seen it in her last days at Victoria and Quin had bought it for her, knowing that she would never wear it. She died with it on her bed: her dead hand touched it. It made another klootchman nearly happy.

"I aflaid to wear it," said Jenny as she held it up, "it too beautiful for poor me. I don't know where I am: I feel silly, all like a dleam."

She looked at the big glass and saw herself white clad, and with the red silk in her hands. Her shoulders were white: her sun-tanned neck showed how white they were. And the red was lovely.

She put it on and she almost screamed with pleasure.

"I 'most like a lady, like Missis Alexander," she cried. And indeed there was no prettier lady within a hundred miles.

She stood and looked at herself and trembled.

"Oh, oh," said Jenny.

And then she found that the dress fastened up the back.

"I no savvy how can do it," said Jenny in great trouble. "If I do um up firs' I no get in and if I no do um up it fall off. How can white lady do, when she have no one help her?"

It was an awful puzzle which she could not solve. A worse trouble was at hand, however, for when she tried to put on the shoes meant for her they were too small.

"What I do?" asked Jenny of herself in the glass. "My ole shoes no good and my foot too big for this little shoe. I have shem go without shoe and with dless undone. I wis' I had someone help me. But alla same I very pretty I tink, but I have shame of everything. I no more good, no more virtuous—"

Her lip hung down preparatory to her bursting into tears. But Quin knocked at the door.

"Muckamuck ready, tenas Jenny," he said. And Jenny murmured that she would come directly.

"He very kind man I tink," said Jenny, "I ask him through the door if he mind I no have shoe."

The door led straight through into the sitting-room. In her turn she knocked on it timidly and opened it an inch.

"Mista Quin, I have shem—"

"Why, tenas Jenny?" asked Quin.

"I no can put on shoe," she said. Quin laughed and she shrank back.

"Come in, never mind," he said as he came to the door and pushed it open. She bent her head.

"And please, Mista Quin, I no can do dless up at back. I much aflaid it fall off."

Quin came into the room as Sam brought in the dinner. He shut the door and caught her in his arms.

"I have shem," she murmured, but he kissed her neck and mouth. "I have shem."

He did the dress up at the back and held her away from him at arm's length.

"By the Holy Mackinaw, you are a pretty girl, Jenny," he said thickly. "You bebee me now?"

The slow tears rolled down her face as she lifted it to him.

"Yes, Mista Quin, but I have shem," she said simply.

Sam banged on the door.

"Chow-chow, Sir and Missus," said Sam, who was much interested in the "love pidgin;" "Chow-chow all leady, Sir and Missus."

It was an amazing dinner for Jenny. She had never seen the like save in the kitchen of Mrs. Alexander's hotel, and if she had eaten anything half as good, it was when she was a tenas klootchman and sat outside on the wood-pile with a plate of food given her by the hotel cook.

But that Chinese cook wasn't a patch on Sam, who had been nerved to unwonted efforts by the new situation and by the extra five dollars while the new "Missus" stayed. He put out Quin's best cutlery and polished the electro-plate till it shone indeed. The glasses were like crystal and there was a bottle of champagne, made in San Francisco (and perhaps very little the worse for that, seeing the quality of western imported wines), on the full table.

Jenny gasped and sat down very humbly. But if she looked up she could see herself in a mirror opposite. It was a very strange and pretty and abashed creature that she saw, a creature who "had shame" but was too dazed to feel it greatly. For everything was so fine, and Quin was a big strong man and white-clad Sam was so polite. "You hab dis, Missus," or "my tinkee, Sir, Missus hab mo' wine." And the floor had a carpet, and there were red curtains at the window, through which she could see the shining mighty river and the far faint hills of Sumass, lighted by the sinking splendid sun.

"Oh, my dear, you are very pretty," said Quin when Sam was out of the room.

"I tink so too, Mista Quin," she said; "but I have shem to be here. I know not'ing. I velly foolish klootchman, cultus and halo good; I tink I very wicked to be here, but I like it allo same, Mista Quin."

He gave her more wine and her eyes began to sparkle. The world of yesterday, nay, even of to-day, was far off, further off than the pure faint hills.

"You be good to me, Mista Quin?"

His hard heart was touched.

"You bet, Jenny, I'll give you all you'll want."

"Ah, you very big boss," said Jenny. If he could give any human creature all she wanted he was a very big boss indeed.

"Yes, my kiddy, you forget all about everyone but me, and I'll act square to you, on my oath I will," said Big Quin. He pulled her towards him and kissed her mouth. She flamed scarlet.

"I lik' heem better'n Pete," she said. "Pete cluel to me; tear my dless. Now I have better, ah!"

The dinner came to an end and Sam brought in a lamp as the evening light faded.

"That will do, Sam. I don't want you any more," said Quin.

And when Sam had washed up he went down to a compatriot's in the City.

"My tinkee he makee love-pidgin now," said Sam, as he went. "Litty piecee gal velly pletty alla same lady, maskee she no savvy what for do with knife and fork. Dat not plopa: my tinkee her savvy velly littee. Bymby my talkee how can do with Missus. My tinkee she no flom San Flancisco. She makee hair not plopa, allo same lope. My tinkee my talkee her how can do, my savvy plenty."

But he told his gossips down below that Mista Quin had got a white woman up from San Francisco. Indeed he did not know that Jenny was no more than a quarter-breed Siwash, though he wondered at her knowing so much Chinook, of which Sam himself was very ignorant, though he savvied even how to do hair.

The world of the little Shack-Town by the Mill believed that Jenny had really fled with Shipman Jack and Pete got very drunk again that night.

VIII

"The Siwash'll be on Jack's tracks," said the Men of the Mill, "for sure he'll be after him, hyak koolie! What the thunder did the little klootchman see in Jack! Oh, hell, he warn't nothin' but a special kind of sea hobo, boys, allers on the go: a blanket-stiff at sea, that's what. And drink—we should say so! And mean, oh, there ain't words! If Pete runs into him——"

Pete wanted blood, that's a fact, but when a man wants blood and gets liquor the blood stays unshed unless the victim is right handy. That is also a fact, all wool, and a yard wide.

Another fact was of great importance, and that is that Pete owed the Mill dollars instead of the Mill owing him any, and to get across to Victoria in the Island took silver, t'kope chikamin, in the shape of dollars. And Pete couldn't swim, not so much as a hundred yards. He was no Fish Indian. And the Straits are some miles across.

Pete woke out of his drunk early in the morning and saw three facts in the light of dawn, saw them come out of the darkness and stand up before him, just as the Mill did and the tin-roofed shining Cannery across the River, where Chinamen wallowed in shining salmon for Eastern consumption. Pete saw the array of facts and at the back of his Indian brain he had a notion of destiny, as they all have. Jenny had run: he had "halo dolla," and it was a long swim across the Straits of Georgia, in spite of all the islands a man might rest at.

"She hyu bad klootchman," said Pete. "I no care one damn. I take another by-by. She too much pletty, no sit down, klatawa with Jack."

There wasn't a drink for Pete that morning, but he lighted a fire and made some "caupy" or coffee.

"I go work at Moola alla same," said Pete. "I no dlink, I make dolla: I get another good klootchman. By-by Jack go to sea, leave Jenny, she go hell. That all light. She damn bad klootchman."

So when the Whistle, the great prophet of the strenuous life, yelled the "Get up" in quick time, he was ready, and as determined as any Blackfoot at a Siwash stake to show nothing of his torment. The second whistle that shrieked "Get out" sent him off, and the day began with the usual preliminary jawing-match in the Engine-room where fiery monsters ate sawdust.

"Ha, Pete," said Skookum Charlie, whose big bulk was spread on a sawdust pile where the glare of an open furnace shone on him. "He come to wuk' alla same."

Long Mac with the blue eyes and keen clean American look was there. And next him was black-a-vised, beady-eyed Chihuahua, far more ancient Mexican than Spanish, and then Hans Anderssen and Johann Smit, both seamen. And with them showed the fair and devilish face of Spanish Joe with the beautiful voice and a soul fit for hell. And the Engineer, a little Scotty from Glasgow, went about his work with one Chinee helper as if they were not there, and only said "damn your jaw," if they got in his way.

The crowd looked at Pete, who swung in boldly enough with his head up.

"Hullo," said the crowd with sympathy. But Joe laughed.

"You' klootchman she pulled up her stakes and quit, eh?" he asked with a sneer.

"That so," said Pete quietly. "I tell her to go night befo' las' night. She no good in fac', bad klootchman, get dlunk, no savvy cook. Thlow my muckamuck on the floo'. I say go. I tink no klootchman any good. Jack Shipman soon tire of she."

"Perfectamente," said Joe, "you spik truth. All women are bad."

Scotty managed to jam Joe in the pit of the stomach with the handle of the huge wooden shovel with which he was feeding the greedy fires.

"Beg your pardon," said Scotty with a grin, "but they arn't all bad."

"Every damn one," said Joe, writhing.

"All klootchmen no good, I say," Pete cried once more.

"You had a mother, lad," said the Engineer severely.

Pete shook his head.

"That all light, Mr. Engineer, but she no good neither. She sell my poo' damn sister to the man at Kamloops that had the ranche Cultus Muckamuck Quin got now, sell her for two dolla, I tink. And now Cultus got her too."

Scotty having no more remarks to make, yanked the whistle lanyard. It was six o'clock.

"This is a hell of a country for a mahn wi' ony releegion in him," said Scotty.

He turned savagely on his Chinese helper.

"Now then, Fan, you wooden image, get a move on you: hump yersel', man, or I'll scupper you."

The gift of work to unhappy mortals is that they cannot work and be wholly unhappy, and Pete sucked a grim kind of pleasure out of the labour that was his, and found some anodyne in it for the aching wound he bore in his foolish childish heart. That day the labour was great, for Ginger White had a mind to set the pace and make it fiery. It was, as the men knew, one of his bad, his wicked days, such a day as that on which he had driven Pete's predecessor to a standstill. When Ginger's face was tallow against his fiery beard they knew what to expect, and got it every time. It was said that on these occasions he had quarrelled with his wife, but the truth is he had a vicious nature and a love of work together. It gave him pleasure to see the great saws do their work, and a greater pleasure still to see a man turn white and fail.

But now he had Pete, not Simmons, and the devil himself at the Saws would not have broken Pete that day. For there was a hard devil in his heart, and he grinned savagely as he saw White's motions get every minute quicker and quicker. He nudged Skookum Charlie.

"This Ginger White have one bad day. The debbel, how he go. You see!"

They saw. He cut them wicked slabs, slabs that had an unholy weight, with all of it in the butt. When they fell they dropped between the skids and got up and kicked. One struck Skookum on the nose and made it bleed, another threw Pete. But though they both knew that Ginger gave it them hot and heavy and wasted wood in slabs to do it, they made no sign. This was a day that no one would be beaten. All the men knew by instinct and by knowledge that this was to be a day of hell, when the cut would be great and Ginger would go home half dead with his endeavours to work them up. They set their teeth, even as the saws' teeth were set in another fashion, and prepared to chew the lumber that he hurled to them.

The atmosphere was strange, charged, electric, strained. There were days when the Tyee Sawyer left them slack, and went easy. Now they jumped, their eyes were bright, they sweated, got alive, moved like lightning. Each was an automaton; each a note struck by the Player. And he played, oh, tilikum, he played!

This was work, tilikum, such as even the Stick Moola hadn't known. The engines knew it, and the steam gauges told it and the fires, and the sawdust carriers. Chinamen knew it and shrieked horrid oaths at each other. The belts knew it and squealed. Scotty knew it and groaned, for he alone, bar accidents, could stop Ginger's drunken debauch of labour.

But the men he played on knew it best and almost cheered him when they got the pace and found it at first so easy. They were all young, not an old man among them, Ginger White himself was the senior of them all. They could love and work and fight and play hell, for they had youth in them. They had to show it to the song and dance of the Saw, the song and dance of the flying dust. The engines ran easy, and their muscles played beneath a glistening moist skin as with open shirts they did what came to their hands. "Go it, you devils," and "Let her scoot," and "Oh, hell," they said.

They smiled and were happy enough, but as the hum increased and the great skids got full over against the Pony Saw, you might have seen Long Mac's smile die down into a good settled seriousness, quite worth seeing. Long Mac had a way of dreaming as he worked, for he had a power of thought and was sadly intelligent, but when Ginger started trying them high, he had no time to think, well as he knew all things a saw-mill man may and shall know. The skids were piled high, you shall understand, you greenhorns, and he knew how it would rejoice Ginger White to see that they would take no more, while everything the wedgers-off tried to sling on the pile rolled backwards to the very rollers. That would please White: he would give a shrug of his shoulders as if to say—

"What a damned loafing lazy lot I've to do with!"

"To hell with Ginger," said Mac. He set his teeth. The lumber flew: he took risks: for swift running in a Mill means risks. Some of the lumber was shaky, ring-shakes and wind-shakes were in it, and in some of the wet-shakes fine white gum. When the saw strikes a shake the loose pieces work out: some are like to touch the teeth of the saw and get picked up! What that means is that the helper to the Pony Saw is shot at by jagged lumps of wood: they come by whizzing like a horrid bullet. Mac and his man watched and at times Mac lifted his hand and his helper ducked as the Saw said "Phit, phit," and threw things at him. It was exciting, it made the blood run fast in his veins to know that at any moment he might be killed, and be so quiet.

This was the battle of the lumber: for saws kill men and logs, kill them and maim them, oho, but the day was fine and the fight long! Down in the boom the man of the Boom, the man with the long pole, who made the logs swim to their ascent to the Temple, whence they were dragged by the Bull-Wheel, had his work cut out, but worked. If he kept Ginger waiting, Ginger would skip over the skids and come to the open way that led down to the Boom and use sulphurous language.

"What the—how the—why the—oh, hell, are we to shut down and go home? Hump yourself, Paul, hump yourself."

And much worse if it hadn't been that Paul, a thin silent dark man, was reputed dangerous, and was said to have killed a man in Texas, somewhere in the neighbourhood of El Paso, where not a few pass up the golden stairs on an unholy sudden. But the atmosphere down there is fine, in its way: you shall not believe otherwise, I entreat you.

It was towards noon when Mac had Ginger beat or near it. Or if not that, he saw that Mac wasn't to be overcome. The Trimmers, Wong, the Chinee, and Willett, the Englishman, had the thing down fine, for Wong knew his business and Willett was at hard as a keg of nails or a coil of barbed wire. He could claw and sling and work and sweat with any.

And still Ginger sent the thing going and again spurted, for Quin came in!

"Stand back, clear the track for Mr. Josephus Orange-Blossom," said the nigger, the coon, the "shiny" (not a Sheeny, by the way) of the song. That was the way Quin felt. He felt like someone in particular. Indeed he always did, but now with Jenny at his house, clad in beautiful clothes and looking "a real daisy," he was very proud of himself. That's the way the male has, if the truth be said, men or moose or wapiti, or a lion or a tiger for that matter: or, let us say, a tom-cat.

He was full of himself! And all he wanted to do now was to "fire" Pete and get him out of the place, as was natural.

Some men would have done it even without excuse, though that is difficult, but George Quin had some natural or unnatural notion of justice and couldn't go so far. He watched Pete with critical half-savage eyes. Was there a glint of pity in them? Perhaps, tilikum, for a man is hard to know.

If this was Ginger's day and Ginger's hour when Quin looked in, it was Pete's day too, for he threw his poor outraged Indian soul into labour and did, oh, he did very well. Quin saw that he did, he was pleased with the man, and seeing that he had to pay him, the work pleased him. Pete's face was hard now and his eyes glittered: his muscles stood up: his face and neck were wet: they glistened. He went like a machine: and never made a mistake. He climbed a five-foot log on the carriage close to the teeth of the saw (the sawdust was in his hair and it looked white and woolly) like a cougar, at one bound. He worked up Skookum Charlie in like manner and made the Siwash like it.

"Oh, he's good," said Quin approving and yet savage. "Oh, he's——" and then Scotty yanked the whistle lanyard and the whistle said, "Knock off, you galoots, galoots, galoo-oots!"

The men threw up their heads, and most wiped their brows as they straightened their backs and said "Oo!" They breathed and filled their lungs and then thought of their empty bellies and started for the Hash-house. But White, always polite and obsequious, stayed a while with Quin.

"We've cut a lot, Mr. Quin," said White; "the boom's nigh empty."

"More in to-day," replied Quin. "How's your wedger-off doin'? If he don't suit you, fire him, White."

"He's the best man I've had this year," said White. He did not understand why Quin grunted and turned his back on him. If he had known Pete would have gone that day.

"What's wrong?" asked White. "Well, I made 'em skip to-day."

So the men thought as they piled into the hash, and said what they thought of him and grubbed in anticipation of an afternoon the equal of the morning.

"He's a swine but a first-class sawyer, and no mistake, no fatal error, eh, what? He made us skip and sweat to-day, but never piled us up! That was what the tallow-faced swine was after, eh?"

"You bet! Here Fan Tong, or Hang Chow, more chow this way! White's a swine; oh, he made us skip."

"'E's a 'oly terror," said Willett.

"A tough from Terror Flat!"

"No razor in his boot, though! There ain't no real fight in Tallow-Chops. Pass the mustard."

What a good life it was! And the chewing was good enough for a boss hobo, death on three fine squares or set-downs, and don't you forget it!

But Pete grubbed silently in Indian Annie's, who moaned to him about Jenny.

"Damn klootchman, I forget her," said Pete. Yet many days passed and he did not forget.

When they were all out of the Mill, Quin stood and stared at the dead saws without seeing them.

"It's hard lines: but I can't fire him," said Quin.

IX

For the workers, these Bees in a Wood Hive, the days passed swiftly. Oh, it was wonderful how they passed! The dawn broke up night's massed army and chased it into the Pacific Ocean, and round the quick little world, and again fled. The days went round like a wheel, like a saw. They came up and flowered: they died down and were not. Only Sunday stayed like a monstrous month, an oppression as all workers find it, an unnecessary day when every muscle and nerve ask for the habit of big work. We cursed and groaned on Sunday, tilikum, and if you don't like to believe it, there's no one will plug you for doing the other thing. Sunday wasn't an Oasis, it was a desert. On Monday it was, however, desirable: Tuesday pined for it: Wednesday yearned for it: Thursday screamed for it: Friday sickened for it and Saturday hallooed joyfully with it in sight. And by ten on Sunday the Workers loathed it.

But the swift days of work were the days. They streamed past like a mountain torrent. Even sad and sorry Pete found it so. He smote his wedges with his maul and, lo and behold! a day was dead; and the stars sang above the hills and the starlight gleamed on the Fraser's shining flood. He laid his head, his cabeza, on a pillow (unwashed) and it was day. Again it was night.

Yet for one the hours were strange and slow. She looked out from the house on the hill-side and saw the slow sun wheel his team into the West, as if his horses drew innumerable thousands and hundreds of the world's big freight. Poor Jenny, now plump and sweet and beautifully clad, and learned in the delights of hot water (of which Sam was a kind of prophet, for he loved baths as if he were a Japanese), found the days slow in spite of baths and clothes and cleanliness. The poor dear pined a little, as one might who had lived wildly, for the ruder joys of her earlier life. Things were onerous. She wanted at certain hours to sit down, to "squat upon her hunkers" and suck at a pipe, perhaps. A yarn with wretched Annie or Annawillee would have been pleasing. She even thought of Pete, though she was getting very fond of her conqueror Quin, who dominated her wonderfully. That was her nature; for if some conqueror of Quin had come along she would have gone with him, very likely, as a wapiti hind will follow a conquering wapiti. And yet who can say? I cannot; for I think she loved Quin very well indeed, though he denied her the trivial consolations of Indian bawdry with Annie or mournful Annawillee.

Somehow I think Jenny was very good. One can't say. She grew prettier and gentler every day, every hour. Sam admired her frankly and was very polite. It was his nature. He told Quin quite openly what he thought, and sometimes gave him good advice.

"My tinkee Missus heap pletty, Mista Quin," said Sam, "evely day mo' pletty, maskee my tinkee she velly sad, hab noting to do. Missus wantche flin, Mista Quin, t'at what she wantchee. No can lead, no can lite, my tinkee, no can makee dless allo tim'. T'at velly sad. No likee cookee chow-chow, she say."

He shook his head. She wanted a friend ("wantchee flin"), that was a fact, and all Quin could do was to order her more dresses and linen from Victoria. He got her picture-books (for, as Sam said, "she no can lead") and talked to her about what she saw there. When he was with her she was happy.

"I velly happy at night-time, Tchorch," she said meekly. "But daytime velly keely, very sad."

"Tchorch" Quin picked her up in his arms and set her on his knee.

"Litty gal, I love you, tenas," he answered, mixing the lingoes. Perhaps he did love her. Quien sabe?—as Chihuahua said about everything uncertain.

"You love me, Tchorch?" she asked flushing, "velly much?"

"Tenas, hyu, hyu, very much indeed, little one."

"I not mind if the day is sad, then," said Jenny. She regarded him with big sad eyes, and then looked down.

"But I not a good woman, Tchorch."

Quin frowned and grumbled.

"Damn nonsense, tenas."

But it wasn't damn nonsense to Jenny. And most especially it wasn't so on Sundays, though on that day she had George Quin all to herself and the greedy Mill stood quiet. On Sundays she heard the tinkling church bells, and when the wind blew lightly from the east the sound of distant singing came up to her as she stood at the open window. She remembered what the good Missionary, the "kloshe leplet," had said about goodness, and badness, and the Commandments. There were ten of them, Jenny remembered, though she had been to no service ever since she lived at Cultus Muckamuck's ranche.

"I velly wicked, Tchorch," she said mournfully. "I blake the Commandments!"

"Humph," said George Quin, "don't cry about it, kiddy. I've kicked 'em all to flinders myself. If you go to Lejaub's hyas piah, I go with you, tenas."

He kissed her. His bold and ready undertaking to go to hell with her was really very consoling. His statement that he had broken all the Commandments comforted her: it showed his good faith. Jenny had a wonderfully material view of hell, and her imagination showed it to her as a sawmill in flames. She had seen the Mill at Kamloops on fire, that is why. Now George Quin was the Manager of the Mill and the owner and a big strong man. She had a kind of dim notion that he would be able to manage a good deal even in hell.

And besides she loved him really. There's no doubt about it, and even he knew it.

The big strong brute of a man was very gentle with her, and let her "cly" a little when she thought of the good missionary (who happened to have been a very bad man, by the way, though many of them were splendid) and the wood fires of the diabolical saw-mill of which Lejaub the devil was manager.

But he never knew how her feelings worked on her when he was away, and indeed if he had known there might not have been the trouble that there was. And he had entirely forgotten that he had a Bible in the house: the gift of his old mother who still lived in Vermont, far away to the East.

The Bible was the source of all the woe that followed when a big deal in lumber took Quin over to Victoria and kept him there three days. He had more than half a mind to take her with him, and if her speech hadn't betrayed her origin he would have done it like a shot. And when he went Jenny cried as if he were going to cross the Big Salt Chuck or the Pacific. Though her mother had been a Hydah she knew nothing of the waters.

"I much aflaid of Pete," she thought.

But Quin gave great directions to Sam and he believed he could trust him.

"My look see evely ting," said Sam. "Missus all light: my givee good chow-chow, hot wata, blush dlesses, t'at all light. My no lettee Missus go out? No, good, my no lettee."

But he played Fan-tan of course, and couldn't be expected to stay in all the time, or to understand that the Missus was upset in her mind about morality. And he knew nothing and cared less about the Bible. There wasn't the making of a rice Christian in him unless rice was very scarce indeed, and now he lived on the fat of the land of British Columbia.

So the day after she had cried herself to sleep, she came across the Bible.

It was not quite a family Bible, and only weighed a pound or so, but it had a biblical cover of sullen puritanical leather which suggested that the very bookbinder himself was of the sourest disposition, a round-head, a kill-joy, with ethics equal to the best Scotch morality. This binding alone, however, would have had comparatively little effect on the childish mind of Jenny. But the book had in it dour and savage pictures of so surprising a lack of artistic merit that they struck her down at once, poor child. In spite of the lack of colour the dreadful draughtsman made very effective curly-whirly flames in a hell which was remarkably like a study of a suburban coal-cellar, and the victims of his fire and ferocity expressed the extremest anguish as they fried on eternal grids! Oh, horrors, but the pictures brought back to the fearful mind of the tenas klootchman all the dread with which the good (or bad) minister, Alexander Mickie, had inspired her when she attended Sunday School at Kamloops and heard him preach in Chinook. For Chinook is no more than a few hundred words and most of them are very material. So was Mickie's mind, whether he preached openly or drank in secret, and the hyas piah of Lejaub, or the great fire of the Devil (Lejaub being equal to Le Diable), was a hot wood fire to Jenny. She believed naturally enough in Lejaub much more than in God, for her Indian blood helped her there, or rather hindered her, and the English God was a far-off notion to a mind not given to high abstractions.

So Jenny when she got the picture Bible sat with it in her lap and trembled.

"I a bad woman, I go to hell; very wrong for me to love Tchorch!" was her mind's commentary as she turned the blind pages for some other picture.

And every now and again she turned back to the curling flames and elaborate grids of hell. She traced in some anguished lineaments a remote likeness to herself. Then she fell to weeping, and weeping Sam found her. He was sympathetic. On the whole Sam was a very good sort.

"Why you cly, Missus?"

It was in vain for her to say she wasn't crying.

"Oh, yes, you cly, Missus, but what for you cly? Mista Quin he come back to-molla."

He might even be back that night, as Sam knew, though he would not be till late. But Jenny sobbed and the Bible slipped from her knees upon the floor. Sam picked it up and recognised it at once. He snorted as he gave it her back.

"My tinkee no good lead dis," he said solemnly. "My tinkee all the stolies in it lies, Missis. My savvy one, two, tree, piecee Joss-pidgin-man Chinaside, what you callee leplet, my savvy Yingling word, miss'onary, and he talkee no good. My tinkee him got wata topside, clazy, pelton you say."

Out of this difficult hishee-hashee of words Jenny extracted the notion that in Sam's opinion missionaries were fools, for "leplet" and "pelton" put together mean that. She shook her head and sobbed.

"My tinkee no good makee littee Missus cly," said Sam. "T'at book makee nicee litty gal cly allo time. My see um. No good littee gal cly: my say it damn foolo book. Mista Quin him velly good man: plenty chow-chow, dlesses and Sam for washee evelyting. Missus, you no lead Bible. Him no good. Damn foolo stoly, my savvy."

But what good was it for a Chinaman to tell her that?

"Him velly good book, I tink, Sam," she said earnestly.

"My no tinkee," returned Sam.

"It belongs to Mista Quin," urged the "Missus."

"Him never lead him," said Sam triumphantly. "My putty him away and Mista Quin him never savvy."

Perhaps that was true. But then was not "Tchorch" wicked too?

Her lips trembled and she opened the book again at the fiery picture.

"What t'at picture?" asked Sam, quite eager to see.

"It's hell," said Jenny, trembling.

"Ah," said Sam, "t'at Debelo's house. T'at all light. Wong him velly clever man, him say Debble-Debble here all light, but only China-side belong God. My tinkee too. Wong say one time no food, no licee, and evelybody hungly, and makee player to Posa, allo same God, and nex' day one foot licee all over. T'at China-side, galaw. But my no can stay: my cookee chow-chow: Missus no cly, Debble-Debble never take litty gal, Missus."

But the fact remained that even Sam believed the devil was in British Columbia (and all America, of course), even if God only thought of China. On the whole Sam's cheerful intervention did harm rather than good. Jenny did put the book away and tried not to think of the "hyas piah," but as the evening came on there was a gorgeous sunset and even that brought fire to her timid mind. When it was dark she shivered and was glad to see a light. Then she got out the book again.

She was living a very wicked life, oh, yes, the missionaries would say that. She was Pete's wife and was living with Tchorch! That was very wrong, it was against the Commandments.

What ought she to do?

What was right?

If only George were back! That is what her heart said, for now she hungered for him very bitterly, because she felt she would see him no more. The little girl had gone so far on the burning path of repentance. She must see him no more: and what she saw in the gloom was the glow of the Pit itself. She ran to the window and looked down on the quiet world and the few shining lights of the quiet city and the star-shine on the great river. But all these were as nothing to her loneliness and her sudden fear and all the awful threats of hell that came back to her in such an hour. She fell upon her knees and tried to pray and found herself murmuring, "Tchorch, dear Tchorch." He was coming back to her that night and was glad to come back, for he had no notion, no adequate notion of what a bad man he was. He loved the tenas klootchman, loved her far better, perhaps, than the white woman who had scorned him because of dead Lily's predecessors.

But Lily was now no more than a dead flower unremembered in some spring garden. He was going back to Jenny.

She cried as she prayed to God and said "Tchorch!" George was the little foolish woman's prayer, and it may be a good one. The name of the Beloved is for ever a prayer, tillikum.

It was nearly ten o'clock when Sam looked in. He did not think Quin would come now. It was late for the S.S. Yosemite.

"You all light, Missus?" he asked.

And she said that she was all right and Sam went away down to Wong's shack for an hour's Fan-tan. He hoped to make a few dollars easily, so that he could go back China-side and buy one "litty piecee waifo" for himself so that he could have children to attend to his ashes and his kindly paternal spirit.

But Jenny saw her spirit, her soul, her body, in the flames.

She must go back to Pete, and ask him to forgive her. He would beat her badly, she knew, and he would tear her "dless" from her and speak things of shame.

"I have shem," she said. She heard Sam go down the path singing a high-pitched quavering Chinese song. When he was quite gone she began to weep, and wept until she was ill. She stumbled blindly round the room, and went into the bedroom and kissed things of George's, and the very bed itself, and then went out into the darkness. In that hour, the poor child forgot how beautifully she was dressed. She stumbled in light shoes down the path, and as she went she wished she were dead. For Pete would be cruel. He would beat her and take her back.

"I'm very wicked," she said, weeping. George would be unhappy. She turned with her empty arms outstretched to the hill above her, to the empty house. George had been very good to her.

She passed Wong's shack. Sam was in there with half a dozen others, and they were hard at it gambling. After Wong's came Skookum Charlie's and then Indian Annie's. The next shack was Pete's. She sank down in the darkness between the two shanties in a state of fear and stupor. In front of her was shame and cruelty and behind her the fires of hell. But she wanted to be good.

There was no light in Pete's shack. When she saw that, she hoped for one despairing moment that he had gone away. Yet she knew that if he had gone George would have told her. Most likely he was with Indian Annie. He would be at least half-drunk. She felt dreadfully beaten. There was a roar of bestial silly laughter from Indian Annie's.

From down the river almost abreast of Lulu Island there came the sound of a steamer's whistle. It meant nothing to her and Sam did not hear it. Annie's door opened and Annawillee ran out reeling. She was going home to Chihuahua and had to pass Jenny, crouching on the sawdust in silks and fine linen.

"Oh," groaned Jenny as Annawillee came along crooning in mournful tones her old ballad that said she was "keely." When she was close to Jenny she reeled and recovered and stood for a moment straddle-legs. She hiccupped and in the clear darkness saw Jenny without knowing her.

"Who you?" she hiccupped.

Then she saw who it was, and burst into idiotic laughter.

"Oh, Jenny klootchman," she screamed. And Pete came out of Annie's to go home.

"What's that, Annawillee?" he asked in the thick voice of liquor. "What you say, eh?"

Annawillee forgot there was money and drink in Pete's not knowing, and she stood there laughing—laughing as if her sides would split.

"Your klootchman Jenny she come home," said Annawillee. And Jenny groaned as Pete came running.

Before he spoke a word, he kicked her.

"You damn klootchman," he said. He took her by the hair and dragged her along the ground while Annawillee still laughed. And Jenny screamed.

"Where's your man now, ha?" said Pete, thickly. "I tink I kill you now."

The Yosemite came alongside her wharf as if it were bright day and Quin leapt ashore.

As Pete dragged her, Jenny got upon her knees and fell. And again she half-rose and again fell, and under his brutal grip of her hair her scalp seemed a flame of agony. She was sorry she had determined to be good and to repent. She screamed dreadfully and many heard. Some shrugged their shoulders, for screams in Shack-Town were only too common. Yet some came out of their houses. Among them was Chihuahua. Indian Annie came too, and before Pete had got his wife to his own door, there were others, among them two Chinamen from an overcrowded shanty further up the road. And still they did not interfere. Jenny was Pete's klootchman and she had run away. Like a fool she had come back, and must suffer. There was none among them that dared to interfere: for they feared a knife.

And as George Quin came ashore he heard Jenny's screams. "Another drunken row," he said carelessly as he faced the hill to his lonely house. He was very glad to get back home to his tenas klootchman, for he hated loneliness. He said "poor little Jenny" as he walked.

There was now a crowd about poor Jenny, for more came running, more Siwashes, among them Skookum Charlie, and more Chinamen. But still no one interfered, though Annawillee shrieked even more than Jenny. She implored Chihuahua to kill Pete. But Chihuahua booted Annawillee and made her howl on her own account.

"She run way and come back," said Chihuahua. "If she mine I kill her, carajo!"

And Pete started kicking Jenny. Once and again she cried out, and then the last of all who looked on came like a fury at Pete. The bleared and haggard and horrible old Annie was the one who had the courage, and the only one.

"Aya, you damn Pete," she screamed. She got her claws in Pete's long black hair and pulled him down. She was a bundle of flying rags with a savage cat in them. If Jenny were killed she would be nothing to Annie, but while she lived she was worth drinks. And perhaps Annie loved the little klootchman. Who can tell?

She and Pete rolled together on the dusty road, and the onlookers shrieked with laughter. Quin heard it as he climbed.

"The row's over," said Quin.

More came out of the huts, and this time Wong, old Wong, the philosopher was among them. And with him came Lung and Wing, and at last Sam. The Chinamen stood outside the circle of the Siwashes and chattered. The first told the others that Pete had killed his wife, and now was killing someone else. The devilish twisting bundle in the dusty road revolved and squealed. But Annawillee howled by the side of Jenny, who lay insensible. Skookum struck a light, and it shone upon the poor girl. It showed her dress of scarlet, and Sam's quick eyes saw it. He ran in quickly towards her, though the wise Wong held him back. Chinamen never join in alien rows if they can help it. It is wisest not to, and they have much wisdom. Skookum's match went out. Sam lighted another and knelt beside Jenny.

"'Ullo, Chinaman," grinned Skookum, "you tink she dead, you tink mimaloose?"

Oh, said Sam, this was Mista Quin's Missus right enough. What did she want here? He called to Wong, who came calmly, unhurriedly. Sam spoke to him in their own tongue, and then Sam, who was as quick to catch as Wong was wise to suggest, cried out suddenly that the tenas klootchman was dead. He took her in his arms and ran with her to Wong's shack. And as he ran Pete got up from Annie, whom he had choked into stillness. But his torn face bled and one eye was nearly on his cheek. He kicked Annie as she lay, and then turned to where he had left Jenny.

"Where my klootchman go?" he demanded.

They told him in a dreadful chorus that she was dead, and he staggered back against his shack.

"Where is she?"

"Wong take her."

They believed wise old Wong a physician, for Chinamen have strange gifts.

"I go see," said Pete.

"No, you run 'way," said Skookum urgently. He believed Jenny was dead.

"Mus' I run?" asked Pete with a fallen jaw.

"Dey hang you, Pete," screamed Annawillee joyfully. Old Annie sat up in the road.

"Where I go?" asked Pete. "I wis' I never see Jenny."

He burst into tears. They brought him a bottle, and told him to "dlink." They gave him advice to go down the river, up the river, to the Inlet, to the Serpentine, oh, anywhere from the Police.

"I go," said Pete. He drank.

"I—I—go," said Pete. He drank again, and fell and lay like a log.

"Now they catch Pete and hang him," screamed Annawillee. Annie staggered across to him and kicked him in the face.

"Pig Pete," said Annie.

Quin came to his empty house and called to tenas Jenny. And then to Sam. When no answer came he ran through the hall into the empty room where the lamp was. On the floor he saw the Bible. He understood. He quite understood.

X

There was no doubt at all in George Quin's mind as to what had happened, and perhaps he was not wholly surprised. What did surprise him was his own ferocious anger, and the wave of pity that even swallowed up his wrath.

"My God!" said Quin.

There wasn't a man in the City who knew him a little but was prepared to swear that Quin was a brute, and a devil without any feeling to speak of. It was said that he had killed Lily, the Haida girl, when, as a matter of fact, it was his brother, Cultus Muckamuck as the Siwashes called him, who had done a deed like that. He had treated Lily well. Her people said so. He had treated them well, the greedy brutes!

Now Quin was full of pity, and of jealousy. This Bible had hurt her poor weak mind, no doubt of that: and it had driven her back to Pete, perhaps.

"My God," said Quin again, "where else?"

He remembered the screams he had heard coming from Shack-Town as he landed. And as he remembered he found himself running down the hill in the starlit gloom. He wasn't a very young man either. Quin was nearly forty: hard and set: at times a little stiff. Now he went recklessly.

"If Pete——"

It didn't bear thinking of, so Quin wouldn't think of it. He was jealous, hideously jealous. He could have torn Pete asunder with his powerful hands. He felt his nerves in a network within him, and in his skin. They thrilled like fire.

"My poor little Jenny!"

Why, the fact was that he loved her! When one comes to think of it, this was a monstrous discovery for him to make. He had really never loved anyone, certainly not dead Lily, more certainly not that white woman over in Victoria, though he thought he had. What he felt for Jenny was a revelation; it made him a saint and a devil at once, as passion does even the best and worst of men. And Quin had force and fire, and bone, and muscle and a big heavy head and hands like clip-hooks. Now passion shook him as if he were a rag in the wind.

He came down to Shack-Town, and stopped. He was hot but again he sweated ice. He looked down the road and saw figures moving.

"Which is the shack?" he asked himself.

He went past Wong's house, where Jenny lay on a table with ten jabbering Chinamen around her. He heard a high-low sing-song of their chatter and cursed his boy Sam for leaving the house as he had done.

"I'll kick the damn stuffin' out of him," said Quin savagely.

He passed Indian Annie's and saw the group beyond it, standing about Pete's recumbent body. Skookum Charlie was almost in tears to think that Pete would be hanged. Annie wiped her bloody face with her skirt. Annawillee, howling curses at Pete, sat by her.

"What's all this?" said Quin, coming out of the darkness. He saw Pete, or rather saw a body. He spoke hoarsely.

"Mista Quin, oh!" said Skookum, scrambling to his feet.

"What is it?" asked Quin again. "Kahta mamook yukwa? What do you do here?"

"Pete him kill Jenny," screamed Annawillee. Quin staggered back.

"He, he——"

He pointed at the drunken man.

"Not mimaloose, him dlunk," said Annawillee, "Jenny with Chinaman."

Skookum led Quin, the big Tyee, to Wong's shack.

"If she's dead——" said Quin, looking towards Pete. He opened Wong's door.

The room was eight feet by twelve by ten: it reeked of fierce tobacco and the acrid fumes of "dope." Some of them "hit the pipe," smoked opium. The smell was China; Quin, who had been there, knew it. With the odours of Canton were the odours of bad oil. Three lamps ate up the air. Quin saw a row of whitish masks about the table: some excited, some stupid, one or two villainous. At the head of the table was the quiet majestic head of the old philosopher Wong. He had a great domed skull and a skin of drawn parchment over wide bones. With a sponge he wiped blood from Jenny's face. Sam held a bowl of water. He looked anxious and strange. And Jenny's body, in white linen and crimson silk, fouled with sawdust and blood, lay there quietly.

"Is she dead?" asked Quin.

The philosopher, whose shiny skin declared his love of opium, said she was not dead.

"My tinkee she all light bymby," said Wong, "She belongy you, Tyee?"

"Turn the others out," said the Tyee, and at Wong's word they fled out of the door, and stood in the dark jabbering about Quin having taken Jenny.

Quin turned on Sam.

"Why did you leave the house, Sam? My tell you stop, you damn thief!"

Sam, now as pale as Jenny, threw out his hands in urgent deprecation of Quin's anger.

"My no go out," he lied, "my stay allo tim' with Missus, maskee she go out and my no findee. I lun down here, Mista Quin, lun queek, findee damn Pete hurtee Missus. T'at tlue. My tellee Missus no cly: maskee she lead Bible and cly. My no can do."

He wrung his hands. Perhaps what he said was true. Quin felt Jenny's pulse and found it at last. He saw she breathed.

"I'll have her home," he said.

They took the door off its hinges, and Sam with the others carried her up to the house. Wong went into town to ask the doctor to come to Quin's at once "chop-chop," and Dr. Jupp came. He found Jenny on the bed moaning a little.

"What's this, Quin?" asked Jupp, who knew Quin well enough.

Quin answered sullenly and told the truth.

"Tut," said Jupp, "some day you'll get knifed, Quin; why can't you get married and leave the klootchmen alone?"

He was a white-bearded old boy, who knew how ignorant he was of medicine. But he knew men. He went over Jenny carefully.

"Two ribs broken," he said, "and the small bone of the left arm. And a little concussion of the brain. I think she'll do, Quin."

"Thank you," said Quin.

Between them they made her comfortable after Jupp had sent for splints and bandages.

"She's very pretty," said Jupp, For Pete hadn't kicked her face. "She's very pretty."

"She's as good as gold, by God!" said Quin.

"Humph," said Jupp. "I'll come in to-morrow morning early. Shall I send you a nurse?"

"I'll sit up with her," said Quin. "You'd only send some cursed white woman with notions."

"Maybe," said Jupp, "they frequently have 'em incurably."

Quin's face was white and hard. He stood up and looked across the bed.

"I tell you this little girl is as good as any white woman in town, Jupp."

Jupp took snuff habitually; he took some now.

"Who the devil said she wasn't?" he asked drily. He left the room.

It was early morning before Jenny became conscious, and even then Quin had great trouble with her. For she was very sick. There was no end to his patience. Nor was there any to Sam's. The boy sat outside on the mat all night.

"My askee Missus no tellee Boss my go playee Fan-tan," he said nervously.

At bright dawn Jenny found Quin half-dozing with his head on the quilt under her hand. She touched his hair tenderly, and he woke up.

"Tchorch," she said feebly, with a heavenly smile, "Tchorch!"

"Yes, little girl," said George.

"I tink I no go away again, Tchorch. I no want to be good, I want to stay with you. What you tink, Tchorch?"

The tears ran down George's face. That's what he thought.

"I'll kick that damn Pete's head in," said George to himself.

"I no want to be good. I jus' want Tchorch," said Jenny.

She closed her eyes and slept.

XI

His friends, even including Skookum Charlie, left Pete where he lay. If a man killed his klootchman and then got pahtlum, or "blind-speechless-paralytic" on something cousin-german to methylated spirit, what could be done with him but let him alone till the police came for him by daylight? Don't forget, tilikums, that none of the officers of the law could come in Sawdust Shack-Town after dark. They would as soon have gone to Cloud Cuckoo Town. It was as much as their cabezas were worth, and that's a hard-wood truth, without knots or shakes. The last time a constable (under the influence of a good but uninstructed superior and some bad whisky) did go into Shack-Town after dark he stayed there in a pool of blood (or what would have been a pool but for the convenient sawdust) till it was broad daylight, and he took much patching-up before he got into running again. After dark we had it to ourselves, Whites, Reds, and all colours who were of the order of the Mill, or the disorder of it. The "bulls" or "cops" or "fingers," as hoboes say, kept order in the orderly uptown streets.

Skookum "quit" and went home. So did Annawillee, whom Chihuahua hauled off as he was doubtful of her morals in the dark. But Annie, whose windpipe was exceedingly sore, went out several times and booted Pete in the ribs where he lay, as a kind of compensation or cough lozenge. However, she let up on him at last and went home to "pound her ear" in the sleep of the just and virtuous. It never even occurred to her that Pete didn't know anything whatsoever about Quin being the man who had kapsuallowed or stolen his dear Jenny. Everybody else knew, Chinamen, Swedes, Lapps, Letts, Finns, Spaniards and a number of whites of the rougher kind who camped in Shack-Town. I knew myself. But the man who ought to have known didn't. It was a sign that life is the same everywhere.

Pete woke up before dawn, as it seems to be a revenge of nature to make drunken men wake when they can't find a drink, and when he woke he hadn't the remotest notion of what had happened to him. He knew that he had a thirst on him of a miraculous intensity, and when he moved he was aware that he had a pain in his side which almost made him forget his thirst. For Annie wore a man's shoes, with heavy soles to them. And when a man is helpless and his ribs open even a woman's kicks can do mischief.

"Oh," said Pete, "ah!"

He rolled over and groaned, poor devil. And, just as the secret dawn began to flame, so the red deeds of the night before began to come up to him. He sat up and his jaw fell.

"Ah," said Pete, "I tink I—I kill Jenny!"

There's a crowd of virtuous ones who will imitate Annie and boot him in the ribs, poor devil. He drank and gambled and played hell and beat his wife and drove her into the arms of Quin. Even a missionary, who ought to know something about such humanity, would disapprove of him. And those whites of high nobility and much money and great station, who are ready, in like cases, to drag their own wretched women by the hair of the head through the bloody sawdust of the Divorce Court, and who hire (at so many guineas and one or two more) some gowned ruffian to boot her in the ribs, will objurgate Pete perhaps, poor chap. He had no chance to know better and now the terrors of the rope and the gallows had hold of him.

Pete was brave enough, even if he did kick klootchmen. As Ginger White knew, he was the best wedger-off thereabouts, and could have got a job at any of the big Mills of the Sound or the Inlet. He could ride a horse and fight a man of his own weight quite well enough. Indeed there was nothing wrong with him but the fact that he was a Sitcum Siwash and given to drink when it was handy. Up at Cultus Muckamuck's, where it wasn't handy, he was as sober as any judge and a deal more sober than some out West. He was brave enough.

But when he thought of being hanged he wasn't brave. He sat up and wondered why he wasn't in the Calaboose or cooler or jail already. He looked round fearfully as if he expected to see Jenny's body there. Then he groaned and felt his ribs. It was odd he should be so sore. But the oddest thing was that he wasn't already jailed.

"I don' b'lieve I kill Jenny after all," said Pete. And as soon as he didn't believe it, he very naturally determined to do it as soon as possible. He staggered to his feet, and made for his shack, thinking that Jenny perhaps was there. Of course it was as empty as an old whisky bottle, and Pete scratched his head. Then the dawn came up, and just about the time that Jenny was murmuring that she didn't want to be good but only wanted "Tchorch," he went out again and ran against Annie, who had also waked up with a thirst and with an idea that it would ease her throat and her mind if she went out and had another go at Pete's ribs.

"Yah, you pig Pete," she said with her jaw out at him and her skinny throat on the stretch.

"Why you call me pig, you damn Annie?" demanded Pete, savagely.

"Because you halo good, no good, damn bad man, try to kill you tenas klootchman," yapped Annie raucously as she spat.

"You a damn fool," said Pete. "Jenny she been away from me——"

"Yah," yelled Annie, "she find a good man, and Mista Quin, he give her good dlesses, he velly kind to Jenny."

It was a blow between the eyes for Pete, and he staggered as if he had been struck. His jaw dropped.

"Mista Quin, kahta mika wau-wau, what you say?" he stammered.

"I say she now Mista Quin's klootchman: he velly good to her. By-by he come and kill you, because you kick his klootchman. Las' night he say he mamook you mimaloose, kill you dead, you pig Pete," she squealed, withdrawing into her house, so that she could slam the door on him if he made a rush. But truly it was the last thing he thought of.

"The Tyee take my klootchman!" he said with a fallen jaw, "the Tyee——"

The boss had taken Jenny!

"Dat tlue, Annie?" he asked weakly.

"Dat tlue, you pig," said Annie.

Pete made a horrid sound in his throat like a strangled scream and Annie slammed and bolted her door and got a bar of iron in her hands as quick as she could move.

"I kill Mista Quin," screamed Pete. "I kill heem!"

He ran to his shack on the instinct to find something then and there to kill the boss with. But he had no weapon, not even a good knife.

"I kill him all same," said Pete. As the men in the South would have said he was "pretty nigh off his cabeza."

He started to work on his shack, and smashed the windows and their frames and then all the wretched furniture in both rooms. By the time the house was an utter wreck he felt a little calmer. But though many heard him none came near. It might be dangerous. Then at last it was daylight: there was a pleasant golden glow, and the river was a stream of gold. The tall Mill chimneys began to smoke, for Scotty's helper fed the fires early.

"I go to work all same," said Pete, "and I see Quin."

He ground his teeth and then took a drink of water, and spat it out. There was nothing that he wouldn't have given for some whisky, but who ever had whisky in Shack-Town early in the morning? He had to do without it. And at last the whistle spoke and the sun shone, and the working bees came out of their hives and went to the Mill.

There was a devil of a wau-wau going on that morning in the Engine-Room, for the place was crowded. Some Chinamen even were allowed to come inside, for they had news to give. The patriarch and philosopher Wong was interrogated by Mac and Shorty Gibbs and Tenas Billy (white man in spite of Tenas).

"Quin—eh, what?" said Tenas Billy with open eyes.

"He took Jenny! Well I'm damned," said Gibbs.

"I never reckoned that slabsided cockeyed roust-about Jack Mottram took her," said Long Mac. "But I own freely I never gave a thought to Quin."

"Oh, he was always a squaw-man," said Ginger White. "What was that talk of a gal called Lily? Wasn't she from Coquitlam?"

"She was a Hydah, but I never seen her," said another. Papp the German intervened.

"She was a bretty gal. I zeen her mit Quin at Victoria; no, at Nanaimo. She died of gonsumption, boys."

They had heard Quin had killed her, kicked her when she was going to be a mother.

"It ain'd drue," said Papp. "Thad was the odder Quin, him dey galls Gultus Muckamuck. When I was ub to Gamloops I saw her grave. Gultus kigged her in the stomag, poor thing, and she died."

"Is it true Pete killed Jenny last night?" asked young Tom Willett, who had just come in.

Wong had told Long Mac all about it and he had told the others. They all told Tom Willett all about it at once.

"Pete hadn't better run up agin Quin this day," said Ginger. "I've lost the best wedger-off I ever struck."

He saw Skookum Charlie grinning in a corner.

"And now I've got to put up with Skookum. I guess Pete has lighted out."

"Pulled his freight for sure," said Tenas Billy. Then Scotty yanked the whistle lanyard and the men sighed and moved off.

And as they moved Pete came in.

"Oh, hell," said those that saw him. They scented trouble quick.

There was no doubt there would be trouble. By all accounts Pete had only just failed to kill the little klootchman, and that he showed up afterwards, when he knew that Quin had cut him out, was proof enough of coming woe.

Ginger White didn't like it. He had no nerve for rows, in spite of his nasty temper, and to have a murderous struggle between the wedger-off and Quin, with guns shooting it might be (though gun-play is rare in B.C.), made him shake. Even if no "guns" came in there would be blood and hair flying, and mauls and wedges and pickareens, and perhaps a jagged slab or two. Ginger remembered the huge nose with which outraged Simmons had decorated him.

"I ain't goin' to let Quin come in ignorant," said Ginger. At the very first pause, while they were rolling a mighty five foot log on the carriage, he shoved his head through the wall to the Engine-Room.

"Say, Scotty, send over to the Office and let Mr. Quin know that that swine Pete has turned up to work."

Scotty nodded.

"And say he looks mighty odd, likely to prove fightable," added Ginger. He went back to the lever.

It was one of his off-days, when he couldn't drive the Mill or the Saws for sour apples. It's the same with everyone. It's no sacred privilege of artists to be off colour. And yet in his way Ginger was an artist. He played on the Mill and made an organ of it: pulled out stops, made her whoop, voix celeste, or voix diabolique. Or he waved his bâton and made the Stick Moola a proper old orchestra, wind and strings, bassoon, harp, lute, sackbut, psaltery and all kinds of raging music. Now he was at a low ebb and played adagio, even maestoso, and was a little flat with it all.

The quick men of the Mill loafed. Long Mac flung off the tightener and put new teeth into his saw with nicely-fitting buckskin. He took it easy. So did everyone. The very Bull-Wheel never groaned. Down below the Lath Mill chewed slowly. The Shingle Mill, though it had all the cedar it could eat, said at slow intervals, "I cut-a-shingle, ah," ending with a yawn instead of a "Phit."

The truth was that everyone was waiting. They loafed with their hands but their minds were quick enough. Tenas Billy of the Lath Mill every now and again climbed up the chute to see if bloodshed was imminent. Shorty Gibbs, the Shingle Sawyer, did the same. The very Chinamen sorting flooring underneath bobbed up like Jacks out of Boxes.

Only Pete never raised his head from his work. When he drove a steel dog into a log he did it with vim and vice.

He smashed Quin's big head every stroke. Quin's head was a wedge under the maul. And it was nine o'clock. Before ten Quin always came into the Mill and stood as it were on deck, looking at his crew as they sailed the Mill through forests, making barren the lives of the green hills fronting the Straits.

As ten drew on the work grew more slack and men's minds grew intense. But a big log was on the carriage, one nigh six foot in diameter. The slab came off, and Pete and Skookum Charlie handled it. Ginger set her for a fifteen-inch cant and sent her at it. Just as the log obscured the doorway Quin came in and no one saw him but Skookum. Pete drove a wedge, and reached out his hand for a loose one. Then he saw Quin. As he saw him he forgot his work, and the saw nipped a little and squealed uneasily. Ginger threw up his angry head and stopped her and saw that Pete saw Quin.

"Here's trouble," said the men. The Pony Saw stopped dead. The Trimmers ran back into their casings. There was silence. The Lath Mill stayed and the Shingle Saw and men's heads came up from below. They heard Quin speak.

"Get off that log," said Quin.

Pete dropped off on the side away from Quin, as quick as a mud-turtle. As he fell upon his feet he grabbed a pickareen lying on the skids and ran round the end of the carriage.

"Look out, Sir," yelled Ginger. A dozen men made a rush.

Long Mac came over two skids at a time. The only man who was near enough to do anything was Skookum Charlie, but he feared Pete and had no mind for any trouble. He was safer on the top of the log. Ginger took a heavy spanner in his hand and went round the other end of the log. He was in time to see Pete rushing at Quin, who had nothing in his hands. Quin was the kind of man who wouldn't have, so much can be said for him.

Now Quin was standing at the opening of the great side chute, down which big cants and bents for bridge-work were thrown sideways. It was a forty-foot opening in the Mill's wall. It was smooth, greasy, sharply inclined. At the foot of it were some heavy eighteen-foot bents for bridge repairing.

"Ah," said Pete. It seemed to Quin that Pete came quick and that the other men who were running came very slow. Perhaps they did, for Pete was as quick on his feet as any cat or cougar. He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and light bone. Quin weighed two hundred at the least. He wasn't quick till he was hot.

But Pete's quickness, though it caught Quin, yet saved him.

Had he been less quick Quin would have stopped his sharp downward pickareen. But Pete delivered his blow too soon. He aimed for Quin's head, but Quin dodged and the blow was a little short: instead of catching him inside the collar-bone and penetrating his lung, the steel point grazed the bone and came down like fire through the pectoral muscle. And Quin struck out with his right and caught Pete on the point of his left elbow. The Sitcum Siwash went back reeling and Ginger White flung his spanner at him. It missed him by a hair's breadth and Pete recovered. Before he could make another rush Mac was within a yard of him. But something passed Mac and struck Pete on the side of the head. It was an iron ring from an old roller. The philosopher Wong had flung it. Pete went over sideways, grabbed at nothing, lost his pickareen, caught his feet on the sill of the chute and pitched out headlong. He shot down the ways into the bents below and lay there quiet as a dead man.

"Are you hurt?" asked Ginger White. Quin's hand was to his breast.

"A bit," said Quin, as he breathed hard.

"It was a close call," said Ginger. The men stood round silently.

Skookum clambered down from the log. He was a dirty-whitish colour, for he wasn't brave.

"Pick that chap up," said Quin, "and see if he is hurt. If he is some of you can carry him up to the hospital."

Though he pressed his hand tight to the open wound in his breast he bled pretty fast, and presently sat down on one of the skids.

"I'll help you over to the Office," said Ginger White, ever ready to be of service to the Tyee. They went across together while Long Mac and some of the boys picked up Pete. If it had been a close call for Quin it had been even a closer one for the Sitcum Siwash. He was as near a dead man to look at as any man could be. The iron ring had only caught him a glancing blow and cut his scalp, but when he slid down the chute head-foremost his skull came butt on solid lumber. Then he had turned over and struck the edge of a bent with his arm. It was broken. When Long Mac and three Chinamen carried him to the hospital, on a door borrowed from the Planing Mill, the surgeon there found his left collar-bone was in two pieces as well. He had serious doubts as to whether his skull was fractured or not. On the whole, when he had made his examination, he did not think so. But he had every sign of severe concussion of the brain.

"How did it happen?" asked Dr. Green when they had turned Pete over to the nurses.

Mac told him.

"Humph," said Green, who knew something about Quin, "it is lucky for Quin that the chap went for him first."

"You think he'll die then?" asked Mac.

"He might," said Green. "But he has a skull that's thicker than paper. They can stand a lot, some of em'. And others peg out very easy. It's diseases fetch 'em, though, not injuries."

So Mac went to the Mill again, leaving Pete on his back in a fine clean bed for the first time in his life. He was very quiet now.

While Mac was at the hospital they had sent for Dr. Jupp to look after Quin. When the old doctor heard what had happened he shook his head.

"What did I tell him?"

He found Quin pretty sick, but smoking all the same. He was partially stripped and he had plastered the wound till help came with a large pad of blotting paper, which was nearly as primitive as spiders' webs.

"Well, I got it, doc'," said Quin.

Jupp shook his head again.

"You'll never learn sense, I suppose. Let's look. What was the weapon?"

They showed him a pickareen, a half-headed pick of bright steel some six inches long.

"Lucky for you it wasn't an inch nearer," said Jupp, "or you would have had froth in this blood!"

Quin knew what he meant. In any case it was a nasty wound, for part of it was ripped open. Nevertheless Quin smoked all the time that Jupp washed and dressed it, and said "Thank you" pleasantly enough when the job was over.

"Go home and lie down," said Jupp. "I'll be up in an hour and see the cause of the war."

So Quin, with the help of a clerk in the office, found his way home to Jenny. As he went he saw Mac coming down the road with long strides and waited to hear what they said of Pete.

"Will he go up the flume?" asked Quin, using a common Western idiom.

"Mebbe," said Mac. "The doc' allowed he couldn't give me a pointer. He said it was a case of might or mightn't."

"Damn," said Quin.

When he got back to Jenny he never told her he was hurt. He didn't even squeal when she rose up in bed and put her arms about his neck and hurt his wound badly.

"I love you, Tchorch. You are velly good to me," said Jenny.

XII

In a place like the City on the Fraser, the time being years ago, years I count mournfully, one can't expect to run against genius in the shape of surgeons and physicians. But most of the medicine-men had queer records at the back of them, even in B.C. Now Green, for instance, though he had some of a doctor's instincts, didn't really know enough to pass any English examination. He read a deal and learnt as men died or got well under his hands, and the hands of the nurses. As a result of this Pete had a long solid time in bed. Even when he apparently came to there was something very wrong with him. He didn't know himself or anything else. It took Green part of a month to discover that he had better ask old Jupp to come and see his Siwash patient.

As the result of the consultation they put Pete on the table and shaved his head and trephined him and raised a depressed patch in his skull. It was the bit with which he had put a depressed place in a bridge bent. And then true intelligence (of the Sitcum Siwash order) came back into Pete's dark eyes, and he was presently aware that he was Pitt River Pete, and that Jenny his klootchman had run away with Quin and that he had gone for Quin in the Mill. So far as Pete was concerned this had happened a minute ago and he was very much surprised to find himself opening his eyes on two strange gentlemen in white aprons, and his nose to the scent of chloroform, when an instant before he had seen Quin in front of him among the finer odours of fresh sawdust. Pete made a motion to get up and finish Quin, but somehow he couldn't and he closed his eyes again and went to sleep.

When he woke once more he was in a nice bed with a white lady looking after his wants. He wondered vaguely what a white klootchman was doing there and again went to sleep. On the whole he was very comfortable and didn't care about anything, not even Jenny.

When he woke again, he made the white klootchman explain briefly what had happened to him. The white klootchman did her best to follow his wau-wau and gave him to understand that he had had an accident in the Mill and an operation. And it gradually dawned on Pete that all these occurrences had caused a lapse of time almost miraculous. Nothing that the white klootchman said convinced him, however: it was the scent of the keen autumn air coming down the river from his own home mountains, the Pitt River Mountains. It was now October and nearly the end of it, and there was already a winter garment on the big hills. From his window he could see the far cone of Mount Baker, white and shining. When he looked a little round the corner he saw his own hills. The air was beautiful and keen, fresh as mountain water, tonic as free life itself. To smell it brought him strength, for there is great strength in the clean scent of things. He snuffed the air of the upper river and recalled the high plateaus of the Dry Belt.

"By-by I go back to Kamloops," said Pete, as he sat in a chair by the window with a blanket round him. He was still weak, and didn't feel jealous about Jenny. "By-by I go to Pitt River or Hallison Lake."

He used to work when a boy for an old storekeeper at Harrison Lake. That was before he took to the Mill: before he had been to Kamloops. Old Smith was a pioneer, one of the Boston Bar Miners, one of those who had hunted for the mother and father of Cariboo gold in Baldy Mountain. He had been rich and poor and rich again, and even now, though poor enough, he grub-staked wandering prospectors on shares of the Dorado Hole they set out to find.

"Not a bad old fellow, old Smith," said the grubstaked ones. Pete said the same.

"Jenny she can go to hell," said Pete. And when he was well enough to leave the hospital he took a month's wages from the Mill, or nearly a month's, and went up-river to Harrison Lake. He never asked for Quin, and didn't even know that he and Jenny had both been laid up.

"She can go to hell," he told himself. "I go to Hallison Lake and by-by to Kamloops, see my sister Maly. Cultus Muckamuck much better man than Shautch Quin."

After all Cultus had never stolen his klootchman and smashed his skull.

Pete was still very weak when he left New Westminster behind and paid a dollar or so to go upstream to the mouth of Harrison River's blue waters. And Smith gave him "a jhob" at small wages but with good hash.

Then the East wind blew out of the hills, from the serried dark Cascades, and from the monarchs of the Selkirks on the Big Bend of the Columbia and from the giant Rockies beyond that swift clear stream. Nature closed up her wonderful store, and the Mills shut down, for the Lower Fraser was fast in heavy ice from way-up down to Lulu Island and even beyond, and no man and no Bull-Wheel, though it grunted in its frictions, could get logs out of the Boom. So Long Paul of the Boom as well as Long Mac of the Pony Saw and Ginger White of the Great Hoes and all the whole caboodle shut up shop and took to winter work, which meant growling and groaning and gambling and grumbling and playing Old Harry, and raising Cain and horrid crops besides, till frost unlocked the stream and booms again.

Oh, but the days when the East wind held up and the frost was clean and clear! The cold clean sun shone like pale fire in a pale blue sky and the world was hard and bright and white with fierce snow. It was fine enough in the City, and the boys went coasting down the hill streets across the main one, and the kiddies thought of Christmas with such joy as those elders, who had heaps of kids and little cash, could not feel. Nevertheless even a burdened father of many hoped while he could when the frost burned in the still air and fetched the blood to his face. There was health in it: health for Jenny, determined to love "Tchorch" always, and health for "Tchorch," whose poisoned wound healed up though it left a horrid scar on his left pectoral. If only it hadn't meant health for Pete too!

But it did. If it was fine in the City, how much finer, how much cleaner, how much more wonderful it was by the edge of a frozen lake, full of trout, and under the snowy feathery foliage of the firs and pines and the high pagodas of the majestic antique spruces. Pete sucked in health and strength like a child and ate his muckamuck with the determination of a bear at a discovered cache. He put on muscle and fat, and could leap again. And as he fattened, his mind grew darker. He missed his klootchman and woke of nights to miss her. The smile, that was his when he was weak, left him; it was put out by darkness. And under old Smith's wing in a little shack there was another Sitcum Siwash, one called John, who had a young klootchman of his own, and his young klootchman had a young papoose, and they were all as fat as butter and as happy as pigs in a wallow. This hit lonely Pete very hard. He was "solly" he hadn't killed Quin, and took to telling John his woes.

These woes on being told grew bigger, till they became huge once more. They were like a drift in a bitter norther, where a log can begin a mountain that stays all progress.

"I tink I burn his Mill," said Pete as he lay awake. It was a great idea. It grew like a fire, and would have come to something undoubtedly if by an accident old Smith hadn't put a pail of cold discouragement upon the flame as it twisted and crackled in the hot mind of Pete. The news came that Thomas Fergusson's store at Yale had been burnt down, and Smith explained to John and Pete and some store loafer (there always are store loafers everywhere: if there's a cracker cask at the North Pole some loafer holds it down against any South wind) that possibly Fergusson had made money out of the fire by the means of some very queer magic known as insurance, or "insoolance" as John and Pete said. They scratched their heads, for they knew nothing of "fire-bugs," not having read the comic New York papers. But the fact remained that according to old Smith, to burn down the Mill might mean to make Quin richer.

"I won't burn down his damn Moola," said Pete crossly.

Yet couldn't he do something else? Pete lay half one Sunday thinking over it, and came to the conclusion that there was a very reasonable revenge to be had fairly cheap. When he worked at the Mill at Kamloops he had been told of what one man had done at Port Blakeley.

"I do it," said Pete savagely. He heard John's klootchman laugh, and thought again of Jenny. The stronger he grew the more bitterly he missed her. And yet if she had come back to him now he would have thrust her out into the frost.

In this unhappiness of his heart it was natural he should turn to his sister Mary, up at Kamloops or the back of it, who was Cultus Muckamuck's klootchman. And after all old Cultus wasn't such a bad sort. Hadn't they got drunk together, as "drunk as boiled owls in a pan of hot water"? Cultus was a mean old hunks, and a bit rougher than his younger brother, but there was none of the high-toned dandy about Cultus. He would sit on a log with a man, and yarn and swap lies, and fetch out a bottle and say, "Take a drink, Pete." Oh, on the whole Cultus was a good sort. If he did whack Mary, perhaps Mary deserved it. The klootchmen wanted hammering at intervals and a good quirting did them good.

"Firs' I go down to the Moola," said Pete, "and I go back to Kamloops. I make it hot for George Quin when the Moola starts up. I spoil heem, ah, I spoil heem and Shinger White."

The hard frost lasted a month and then a quiet and insidious Chinook came out of the Pacific, a wandering warm West wind, and the ice relented and released the River. It was not very thick and soon departed on the ebb and flood of the tides, swaying in loose floes back and forth. And then the rain began and it looked like a strange soft winter for a little while.

"I go now," said Pete. He spoke to old Smith, asking for a day or two to go down to the City.

"You ain't thinking of killing Quin or your klootchman, sonny?" said Smith, who knew all about it.

"Not me, Mista Smith," said Pete. "She no good, by-by he velly solly he have her."

He got an old dug-out and paddled down to the City, and past it in the dark, when the town was nothing but a gleam of lights in the heavy rain. In the dugout Pete had a few things borrowed from Smith's store that Smith did not know he had borrowed.

"I fix heem," said Pete savagely, as he touched a bag which, held many pounds weight of ten-inch spikes. "I fix heem and his logs!"

He went past the City with the ebb, and taking the South Arm was soon abreast of Lulu Island. There he knew that a big boom of logs for the Mill was anchored to the shore, ready to tow up when the Mill boom was cut out. Besides his spikes he had a heavy sledge-hammer.

"Dat fix heem," said Pete. He knew what he was about.

"I hope it cut Shinger's beas'ly head off."

He knew that Ginger had thrown a spanner at him that last day in the Mill, and, indeed, he believed that it was Ginger, and not old Wong, who had keeled him over and chucked him down the chute.

Now the rain let up and some stars shone out. He got close inshore and felt his way in the shadow of the trees. He let the canoe float, for he came near where the boom should be. A big patch of sky cleared and a wedge of the new moon glimmered under rack. His eyes were keen, and presently he saw the darker mass of the assembled boom of logs anchored in a little bay. He grinned and went alongside and made the canoe fast. Then he filled his pockets with spikes and, taking the sledge, scrambled on the boom.

Outer log was chained to outer log with chains and heavy clamps. Inside, an acre of water was covered with round logs, all loose, logs of fir and pine and spruce. Some were six feet and more in diameter: some less than a foot. As he trod on one it rolled a little and then rolled more: he stepped upon it lightly, balancing himself beautifully, as if he had been a driver on the Eastern Rivers of wooded Wisconsin or Michigan. The motion he gave to one log as he sprang communicated itself to others. The logs seemed uneasy: it was as if he had waked them. He looked for the best, the biggest, with a pleasure akin to that of the hunter, or some trapper sorting peltry. He found a splendid spruce and stood on it in triumph.

"I make heem bad," grinned Pete. He took a spike and set it into the log with a light tap of the sledge held close to the heft. Then he stood up and swung the sledge double-handed. He had driven spikes on a railroad once, though he hated railroading, being by nature a millman or a ranche hand. The sledge fell on the spike clean and plumb. The dim forests echoed and he stood up as if the sound startled him. But after all no one could be near and the City was far off. He drove the deadly spike home into the beautiful log and smiled.

Into that one he put three spikes, then he leapt lightly on another, a Douglas Fir, and spiked that too. He grew warm and threw off his jacket. It was a great pleasure to him to work, to feel that his strength had come back, to feel himself active, lithe, capable. And revenge was very sweet.

"Mebbe the saw cut off Quin's head," he murmured. He knew what he was doing and what would happen. He saw it quite clearly, for once in a saw-mill, when he was a kiddy, he had heard what happened when a saw cut on a hidden spike. The wedger-off had told the others how the great saw struck fire with a horrid grinding squeal. With the sawdust from the cut came fiery sparks, and then the saw, split in huge segments, hurtled from the cut. One piece went through the roof, another skimmed through the Mill like a piece of slate hurled by some mighty arm.

Pete knew what he was doing as he killed the logs. He spiked two dozen before he let up upon them.

"I fix heem," said Pete. "I fix heem lik' hell!"

He put on his jacket again and with the sledge in his hands went towards the dug-out. There were still many spikes in his pockets, for twice he had renewed his supply of them.

"I think I drive one more," said Pete, who was drunk with pleasure. "I tink one more for luck."

He set the spike in and started to drive it home. Now he was careless and suddenly he slipped. As he tried to recover himself, the sledge flew one way and he flew the other. He dropped between two logs: the one he had been standing on, and one on the boom of logs. That is, one of the boom logs saved his life, for the heavy spikes would have pulled him down if he had had to swim for a minute. As he let a yell out of him and felt a sudden fear of death his hands caught a chain between two of the outer boom logs. He pulled his head out of the water and hung on. The stream was bitter cold, for there was still ice in it. He gasped for breath, but presently got a leg across the chain. With a great effort he clawed the upper edge of the log and clambered back to safety.

"Oh," he grunted, as he lay flat and caught his breath, "that a very near ting, Pete."

It was a very near thing indeed.

But before dawn, as he paddled hard on the flood tide, he was back at Smith's and fast asleep.

Next day there was a mighty row about the missing sledge-hammer.

"I tink some damn thief kapsualla heem," said Pete.

That week the frost returned once more. This time it lasted till the early spring.

XIII

B.C., as the boys call it, or British Columbia, is most undoubtedly a wonderful place, a first-class place, even if the bottom falls out of it periodically and booms die down into slumps and the world becomes weary. But the odd thing is that it is a country which is, so to speak, all one gut, like a herring. The Fraser Cañon is the gate of the lower country and the gate of the upper country. There's only one way up and down, tilikum, unless you are a crazy prospector or a cracked hunter. Though the great River itself comes from the North past Lillooet and by, and from, Cariboo, yet the main line of men and railroads and wanderers to and fro lies rather by the blue Thompson than the grey Fraser.

You meet Bill and Charlie and Tom and Jack and Dick and Harry on the road. You liquor with them at Yale, where the Cañon opens: you toss for drinks with them at French Charlie's, you climb Jackass Mountain with them (or meet them there) and again discuss work and railroading and sawmills and Mr. Vanderdunk, the Contractor, at Lytton. You run against your partner or the man you quarrelled or fought with at Savona. You see Mrs. Grey or Brown or Robinson at Eight Mile Creek. Very likely you get full up at Oregon Pete's with the man you last met at Kamloops, or the son of a gun who worked alongside you at the Inlet. On the Shushwap you tumble up against your brother, maybe, in a sternwheeler, and at Eagle Pass you give cigars (5 cents Punches!) to a dozen whose nicknames you know and whose names you don't.

Properly speaking there are few ways into B.C. Perhaps there are none out. It is a devil of a country for getting to know every man jack in it. From the Columbia Crossing, or even from the summit of the Rockies down to the Inlet, and the City of Vancouver (in Pete's time mere forest and as thick as a wheatfield), it's the Main Street.

The fact of the matter is that the whole of the Slope, the Pacific Slope, is only one Main Street. It begins to dawn on a man on the Slope, that in a very few years he might know everyone from the Rocky Mountains down to Victoria and to Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and San Francisco. Men wander to and fro like damned souls or migratory salmon or caribou.

Pete, you know, knew everyone in B.C. by sight, more or less. There wasn't a shebang on the road he wasn't familiar with. He came on chaps here and there who said "Klahya" or "What ho!" or "Hell, it ain't you?" or "Thunder, it's old Pete, so it is." He felt familiar with the road, with the Cañon, with every house, every loafer, every bummer, every "goldarned drifting son of a gun" who went up and down like a log in the tide-way, or round and round like one in a whirlpool, betwixt the Victoria beginning and the Rocky Mountain End. When he had been full of Mills and Canneries he used to mosey off up-country. When he was soaked by the Wet Belt and the wet rains he pined for the Dry Belt. When the high dry plateaus of the Dry Belt dried him up, he thought of the soft days lower down, or higher up in the Upper Wet Belt of the Shushwap. One can swap climate for climate in a few hours.

Now the frost of the lower country, of the lower Fraser, with its intervals of warm Chinook wind and rain, sickened Pete. He put in a lot of time at old Smith's, but by the end of February he was keen on climbing higher. Old Smith got on his nerves, good old soul though he was, and of course Pete couldn't stick to one "jhob." Old Cultus seemed so good a chap, and Pete thought it would be a fine thing to put his legs across a cayuse once more and go a-riding, whooping hell and thunder out of the steers. And he had come nigh to forgetting Jenny. When he thought of her his face looked devilish, but he thought of her seldom.

"She bad klootchman, yah," said Pete. But he couldn't go yet. He waited for the harder frost to go, for the big ice, then two feet thick, to break again in the lower river. Then the Mill would start, and he would hear of the spiked logs.

"That make Quin sick," said Pete. So he hung on and waited, knowing he would hear. It couldn't be long. Men from the City said that things had been tough that winter in Shack-Town. He heard at intervals about this chap or that: about Skookum, good old Skookum, and Chihuahua, who had been jailed for a jag which was of portentous dimensions, leading him to assault a policeman Up Town. The "bulls" yanked Chihuahua in and he got it hot, officially and otherwise, as a man will in the calaboose.

Then the River cracked loudly: the ice roared and broke, and piled itself up in bars and ridges and grumbled and swung and went away with the ebb and up with the flood, roaring all the time.

"Now they start up the Moola queek," said Pete as day by day he saw less ice. The rain poured down and the river was almost in flood already, though the winter held up-country, of course. When the frost broke in the wet Cascades and up in Cariboo, and in the head waters of the forking Thompson, there would be a proper amount of water in the Cañon.

And still he waited.

But in the Mill they started at last, and came nigh to the end of the Mill boom before they could get a steamer to tow them up the new boom. Then they got it, and Pete heard that it was there.

"I make heem sick," said Pete, still waiting. And the spiked logs waited. Their time must come.

It came at last, and of that day men of the Hills still speak.

It was one of Ginger White's devilish days, when he hated himself and his kind and was willing to burst himself if he could make others sigh or groan. He ran the crew of the Mill almost to death, and death came at last as the day died down and found them running the saws screaming in logs still cold within. For the winter left the men soft: they had been half-fed, many of them: they had lived idle lives, and found work hard on their hands, hard on their muscles. But Ginger never failed when the devil was in him. The winter was over: he wanted to work, for he was all behind with money.

"I'll make 'em sweat, I'll make 'em skip," said Ginger.

That day Quin was much in the Mill, and he was there when the lightning struck Skookum Charlie: when the saws spouted fire. He, too, was glad to get back to labour: to the doing of things. And he loved the Mill, as many did.

It was a great log of spruce that carried death within it. High up above the Saws hung a lamp so that Skookum and his partner could see the cut as well as feel it. The whole Mill squealed and trembled: every machine within it ran full blast: the song of the Mill was great.

"Oh, heave and roll," said the Bull-Wheel. They got the log on the carriage, drove in the dogs and Ginger sent her at the eager saws. He cut the slab off, and then set her for an eight-inch cant and got her half through, when the lightning came.

There was a horrid rip, a grinding, deafening crash and streams of fire came out of the cut log. On top of it was Skookum driving home a wedge. He drove it deep and deeper, and as the crash came, Quin stood where he had stood when Pete went for him. There was another horrid scream as the smashed saw broke and hurled a jagged quadrant upward from the cut.

"Oh, Christ!" said those who saw. At Quin's red feet, a bloody corpse lay, for the saw had sliced Skookum nigh in two, shearing through flesh and bones, ribs and spine. For one moment he was helped to his feet by the thing that cut his life out, and he stood upon the log, with a howl torn out of his very lungs, and then pitched headlong on the floor.

There came screams from the far end of the Mill, for another segment of the saw had flown out straight, and, striking a roller, came up slanting from it, and disembowelled a wretched Chinaman. He stood and squealed lamentably and then looked at himself and lay down and died.

And all the Mill ceased and men came running even from below.

"My God," said Quin.

But Ginger said nothing. Terror had hold of him. He leant against the deadly log and vomited. Every lamp in the Mill was held up in two circles, one about Skookum and the other about the Chinaman. Faces as white as the dead men's looked at the dead.

That night Skookum's klootchman sat with loosed hair howling over the body of her good and stupid man. And by her Annie and Annawillee mourned.

And many thought of Pete. Among them were Quin and his klootchman Jenny, who understood the nature of the man who had been her man and was now no better than a murderer.

"I done it, I," said Jenny; "if I stay with Pete this no happen!"

She cried all night and "Tchorch" could not comfort her. Nor could he sleep till in his rage he cursed her, and came nigh to striking her. Then she crept into his arms and tried to soothe him, and wept no more.

The next day Pete started up-country, for Kamloops.

"I never mean to kill Skookum," he said with a white face. "I never mean to keel him. I lik' Skookum."

The poor fool cried.

XIV

The story of the disaster at the Mill followed Pete and passed him as he made his way to Yale, having screwed a dollar or two out of old Smith. Indeed he got more than he had a right to, for old Smith wasn't a man to squeeze a dollar till the eagle squealed, by any means. The day after the news came of the split saw Pete had boarded the boat for Yale and was put out at the mountain town in a storm of rain. And Pete hated the wet as a saw-mill man must, or as one who had worked in the Dry Belt where the rain is scarce and the fattening grasses dry.

At this time the Railroad, the Railroad of all Roads, the longest on earth, gentlemen, partners and tilikums, was being put through the hills, through the Rockies and the Selkirks and the Eagle Range. The woods were full of Contractors, small and big, good and measly, generous and mean, men and pigs. But above them all towered the genial, blue-eyed Andy. The men said "Andy" here and "Andy" there. Andy was responsible if the bottom fell out of the sky, or if the earth blew up. He was held to account for floods and wash-outs, for land slides and snow slides, and he took 'em all as they came. The men said "damn Andy" or "Andy's all right." They got drunk and denounced him, and perhaps got sober and blessed him. On the whole they loved his blue eyes even if they damned them. But while he held the road which he had built, and before it was turned over to the men in Montreal, the good men and the great scoundrels (there always being talk of railroad boodlers) who thought the thing out and financed it, he charged a devil of a rate for passage on it. So everyone who went East or West went to Andy or some underling for a pass. Pete did it. There was only one tale to tell.

"I want to go up to Ashcroft to get a job, Mr. Vanderdunk," said everyone. Pete said it, and Andy being in a heavenly temper (as he wasn't when I struck him for a pass) let the Sitcum Siwash through easily, just as he had done before when Jenny was with him.

"I want to wu'k on the railroad, Sir," said Pete. When he went off with the pass he said he didn't want to "wu'k" on any railroad. He spent a dollar in drink and went on board the train drunk. It was the first time since the night when he had nearly killed Jenny that he had been very "full." The smoking car was crammed with men who had passes: men who wanted to work at the Black Cañon and those who didn't. Some were bound for Kamloops, some for the work on the Shushwap, some for Eagle Pass and Sicamoose Narrows, and there was one farming Johnny or mossback for Spallumcheen. They were all lively—some full up, some half-full. They yelled and laughed and yarned and swore and said—

"Oh, what are yer givin' us, taffy?"

They declined to swallow taffy—but they swallowed whisky. An old prospector gave Pete drink. Then he heard them tell the tale of the accident at the Mill.

"Some rotten son of a gun spiked the logs," said the man behind Pete.

"I heerd they'd found ten logs spiked," said another. "They bin over 'em with an adze."

"If they corral the kiddy wot done it, he'll wear hemp," said another.

"Serve him right, damn his immortal," returned the first speaker.

Pete begged another drink and drank so heartily that the old prospector said he was a hog. Pete was indignant, but he was nearly speechless and saw two, nay, three, prospectors, gaunt and hairy men, who looked very angry. He decided not to fight, and went to sleep, and slipped down on the floor. The prospector wiped his boots on him and expatiated on hogs in a whining monotone for forty miles.

They dragged Pete out at Ashcroft and put him and his bundle on the dry prairie, where the depôt was. He woke late at night and found his throat so parched that he could not speak to the darkness that closed about him. There wasn't a soul in the depôt, and not a shack or shebang handy. The dread collection of wallows described as a town was a mile off across the prairie, and Pete groaned as he set out for the lights of the biggest grog shanty there. He hadn't a red in his sack, to say nothing of a dime or two-bits, but some charitably disposed railroader, a Finn it was, gave him a drink, and he sat down in a corner along with a dozen others and went to sleep. In the morning he raised another drink, and set off for Kamloops, just as the railroad work began. He was asked to stop a dozen times, but he wasn't keen. "I go to Kamloops," he answered.

He humped himself and got to Sayona's Ferry in quick time, for someone gave him a lift on the road. He found a sternwheeler on the point of starting for Kamloops, and knowing the engineer and the fireman, who was a Siwash too, they shoved him in the stokehold and made him work his passage. Two hours of mighty labour with billets of firewood sweated the drink out of him, and by the time they were alongside the Kamloops shore he was something of a man again.

He found some tilikums in the town and recited his woes to them, telling them all about Jenny having quit him to go with Quin, who was Cultus Muckamuck's brother. He asked about his sister Mary, and about old Cultus.

"Cultus pahtlum evly sun, dlunk all the time now," said a Dry Belt Indian named Jimmy. "Nika manitsh Mary, I see Mary. She very sad with a black eye."

Pete was furious. Mary was older than he by five years and had been a mother to him when their mother went under. If he loved anyone he loved Mary.

"I wish I had a gun," said Pete. "I tell Cultus if he bad to Mary I kill heem."

He was almost bewildered by a sense of general and bitter injustice. Hadn't he been a good man to Jenny? Hadn't he been a good worker in the Mill? But Jenny had left him for the man he had worked for. Then instead of killing Quin or Ginger White he had killed poor old Skookum. He hadn't meant to kill him, but if the law knew he would be hanged all the same. And now poor Mary was having a bad time with old Cultus. When Cultus got mad, he was very dangerous, Pete knew that.

"Mary's a damn fool to stay with him," said Pete. "I tell her to leave heem. I get wu'k here, in the Mill. She live with me."

He went to the Kamloops Mill to look for work. They were full up and couldn't give him a show. But one of the men who knew him gave him a dollar and that made Pete happier. He raised a drink with it, a whole bottle of liquid lightning, and he didn't start for Cultus's ranche that day.

It was an awful pity he didn't. For Cultus had been in town that morning and had taken two bottles back with him. He had been drinking for weeks and was close upon delirium tremens. He had horrid fits of shaking.

Ned Quin was ten years George's senior, and had been in British Columbia for thirty years. He had been married to a white woman, whose very name he had forgotten. For the last ten years, or eight at least, he had lived with Mary, whom the previous owner of his ranche had taken from the kitchen of the Kamloops Hotel when she was twenty. Now he lived in a rude shanty over toward the Nikola, "nigh on" to twenty miles from Kamloops. He had a hundred and fifty steers upon the range, and made nothing out of them. The Mill, in which he had an interest, kept him going. He wanted nothing better. He was very fond of Mary, and often beat her.

Mary was a tall and curiously elegant woman for an Indian or a half-caste. By some strange accident, perhaps some inheritance from her unknown white father, she was by nature refined.

She had a sense of humour and a beautiful smile. She talked very good English, which is certainly more than her brother did, who had no language of his own and knew the jargon best of all. Mary was a fine horse-woman and rode like a man, straddling, as many of the Dry Belt women do. She could throw a lariat with some skill. She walked with a certain free grace which was very pleasant to see. And she loved her white man in spite of his brutality. For when Ned was good, he was very good to her.

"Now he beats poor me," she said. Perhaps she took a certain pleasure in being his slave. But she knew, and more knew better, that she lived on the edge of a precipice. More than once Ned had beaten her with the flat of a long-handled shovel. More than once, since Pete left, he had threatened to give her the edge and cut her to rags.

It was a great pity Pete had that dollar given him at the Kamloops Mill. He got drunk, of course, and only started for the ranche a little before noon next day.

It was a clear and cloudless sky he walked under as he climbed the winding road up from the town by the Lake. There was a touch of winter in the air and the road was still hard. The lake was quite blue, beyond it the hills seemed close: the North Fork of the Thompson showed clear: the Indian reservation on the other side seemed near at hand. But of those things Pete thought nothing. He wanted to see his sister, he groaned that he hadn't a cayuse to ride.

He was five miles out of Kamloops and on the upper terraces of the country, when he saw someone coming who had a cayuse to ride. Pete could see the rider from afar: he saw the cattle separate and run as the man came nearer to them. He saw how the steers, for ever curious, came running after him for a little way as the rider went fast. The man was in a hurry. Indeed he was in a desperate hurry. Pete, who knew everyone between the Thompson and the Nikola, wondered who it was, and why he was riding so fast.

"He ride lik' hell," said Pete, as he stopped and filled his pipe.

Every man has his own way of riding, his own way of holding himself.

"He ride lik' Cultus," said Pete curiously. "Jus' lik' Cultus."

For all his thirty years in a horse country Cultus Quin rode like no horseman. He worked his elbows up and down as he went at a lope. He usually wore an old ragged overcoat, which flew behind him in the wind.

"It is old Cultus," said Pete. "What for he ride lik' that?"

A little odd anxiety came into Pete's mind, and he held a match till it burnt his fingers. He dropped it and cursed.

"What for he make a dust lik' that? I never see him ride lik' that!"

The rider came fast and faster when he reached a pitch in the road. He was a quarter of a mile away, a hundred yards away, and then Pete saw that it was Cultus, but no more like the Cultus that he knew. The man's face was ashy white and his eyes seemed to bolt out of his head. As he swept past Pete he turned and knew him, and he threw up one hand as if it were a gesture of greeting. But it might be that it was rather a gesture of despair, for he threw his head back, too. He never ceased his headlong gallop and disappeared in dust on the next pitch of the descending road.

Pete stood staring after him.

"What for he ride lik' that?" he whispered. He wouldn't speak to himself of Mary. He walked on with his head down. Why did Cultus Muckamuck ride like that? Why did he ride like that?

The answer was still miles ahead of him, and if there was any answer he knew it was to be found where Mary was. There was no light in the sky for him as he went on.

And the answer came to meet him before an hour was past.

He saw others, on the far stretched road before him, and he wondered at the pace they came. They did not come fast, but very slow. As he held his hand above his eyes he saw that there were many men coming. They were not on horseback but on foot. Why did they come so slow?

"Why they walk lik' that?" asked Pete. He sat down to think why a crowd of men should be so slow. There were eight or ten of them. If they went so slow——

"It lik'——" said Pete, and then he shaded his eyes again. The men in front were carrying something. It looked like a funeral!

But Pete shook his head. There was no burial place nearer than Kamloops, and if a body were being taken there they would have drawn it on a wagon.

"They're toatin' something on their shoulders," said Pete, with a shiver. It was as if there had been an accident, and men were carrying someone to the hospital. Pete had seen more than one carried. He turned a little sick. Was Cultus riding for the doctor? Was there anyone the old devil would have ridden to help?

"When he wasn't pahtlum he was very fond of Mary," said Pete shivering.

He started to walk fast and faster still. Now the melancholy procession was hidden behind a little rise. He knew they were still coming, for a bunch of steers on a low butte were staring with their heads all in one direction. Pete ran. Then he saw the bearers of the burden top the hill and descend towards him. His keen eyes told him now that they were carrying someone on a litter shoulder high. He knew the foremost men: one was Bill Baker of Nikola Ranche, another was Joe Batt, and yet another Kamloops Harry, a Siwash. He named the others, too.

And some knew him. Pete saw that they stopped and spoke, turning their heads to those in the rear. One of the men, it was Simpson of Cherry Creek, came on foot in front of the others. Pete watched his face. It was very solemn and constrained. He nodded to Pete when he was within twenty yards. When he came up he put his hand on Pete's shoulder.

"We're takin' your sister to Kamloops, Pete," said Simpson.

Pete stared at him.

"Mary?" he asked.

Simpson nodded and answered Pete's wordless question.

"No, she ain't dead——"

Pete turned towards Kamloops.

"Ole Cultus passed ridin' lik' hell, Mr. Simpson."

The procession halted within a few yards.

"Damn him," said Simpson, "he's cut the poor gal to pieces with a shovel."

XV

They said to Pete—

"Come into Kamloops with us."

Pete shook his head and said nothing. But his eyes burned. Kamloops Charlie urged him to come with them, and talked fast in the Jargon.

"You come, Pete, no one at the house now, Pete. By-by she want you. She often talk of you with me, want to see you."

Charlie had worked for Cultus since Pete went away.

"I come by-by," said Pete. They left him standing in the road. When some of them turned to look at him before they came where they would see him no more, he was still standing there.

"Tell you Pete's dangerous," said Simpson. He was a long, thin melancholy man from Missouri, with a beard like grey moss on a decayed stump.

"He'll hev' a long account with the Quin brothers," replied Joe Batt.

"Many has," said Bill Baker. Cultus owed him money. Baker chewed tobacco and the cud. He muttered to himself, and the only audible word was "dangerous." Above his shoulder the hurt woman moaned.

And even when they had disappeared Pete stood staring after them. They had time to go more than a mile before he stirred. Then he walked a little distance from the road and cached his bundle behind a big bull-pine. He started the way his sister had come, and went quick. He had seen some of his sister's blood on the road.

In two hours he was at the ranche, and found it as the others had found it, when Kamloops Charlie had come to tell them that Cultus had killed Mary. The door was open, the table was overturned, there was broken crockery on the floor. There was a drying pool of blood by the open fire which burnt logs of pine. Scattered gouts of blood were all about the room: some were dried in ashes. The dreadful shovel stood in the corner by the fire. Pete took it up and looked at it. Many times he had heard old Cultus say he would give Mary the edge. Now he had given her the edge. Pete's blood boiled in him: he smashed the window with the shovel. Then he heard a bellow from the corral in which some of the best of Cultus' small herd were kept up, some of them to fatten for the railroad.

"I do that," said Pete. In the stable he found Mary's horse, a good old grey, but past quick work save in the hands of a brute, or a Mexican or an Indian. Pete put the saddle on him and cinched up the girths. He found a short stock whip which he had often used. He led the horse out, and going to the corrals, threw down the rails. Going inside he drove thirty cows and steers out. On the hills at the back of the ranche about fifty more were grazing. Pete got on the horse and cracked his whip. He drove them all together up the hills and into a narrow valley. It led towards a deep cañon. There was little water in the creek at the bottom, but there were many rocks. From one place it was a drop of more than two hundred feet to the rocks, and a straight drop too. The mountain path led to it and then turned almost at right angles. The valley in which the cattle ran grew narrow and narrower and Pete urged them on.

Cultus loved his steers and had half-a-dozen cows that he milked himself when they had calves. Whenever Pete came near one of these he cut at her with the whip, and urged them all to a trot. They were lowing, and presently some of the rowdier steers bellowed. They broke at last into a gallop, and then Pete shrieked at them like a fiend and raced the old pony hard.

"I fix 'em," said Pete.

Now they were in thickish brush, with no more than a big trail for a path. Pete lashed the grey till he got alongside the very tail of the flying herd and made them gallop faster still. They were all dreadfully uneasy, alarmed, and curious, and as they went grew wilder. They horned each other in their hurry to escape the devil behind them, and the horned ones at last fairly stampeded as if they were all wild cattle off the range in the autumn. They went headlong, with a wild young cow leading. Pete screamed horribly, cracked with his whip, cut at them and yelled again. The brush was thick in front of them on the very edge of the cañon. The little thinning trail almost petered out and turned sharply to the left. The leader missed it and burst through the brush in front of her. The others followed. Behind the maddened brutes came Pete. He saw the leader swerve with a horrid bellow and try to swing round. She was caught in the ribs by a big steer and went over. The ones who came after were blinded, their heads were up in the crush: they saw nothing till there was nothing in front of them. They swept over the edge in a stream and bellowed as they fell. On the empty edge of the cañon Pete pulled up the sweating grey, who trembled in every limb. Below them was a groaning mass of beef. They were no longer cattle, though one or two stumbled from the thick of the herd and the dead and stood as if they were paralysed.

"I wis' Ned was there," said Pete, as he turned and galloped back down the beaten, trampled trail. "I wis' I had him here. I serve him out."

He rode as hard as the wretched grey could go to where he had left his bundle. He picked it up and turned the horse loose. Perhaps it was hardly wise to ride it into Kamloops. It was night before he got there. He found Kamloops Charlie in town, drinking, and reckoned that no one would find out for days what had happened to the cattle. He told Charlie that he had stayed where he was left, and had at last determined to come into town.

"Kahta ole Cultus?" he asked.

But Cultus had taken steamer, having caught it as it was on the point of leaving. Pete saw Simpson at the hotel and spoke to him.

"Your sister says as it warn't Cultus as done it," said Simpson. "That's what she says: she allows it was a stranger, poor gal!"

They said she would live. But those who had seen her said it would be best if she died. One side of her face was dreadfully injured.

"She must ha' bin' mighty fond of Ned Quin," said Simpson. "She's the only one araound ez is, I reckon."

He stood Pete a drink. Pete told what he had told Kamloops Charlie.

"I tho't you'd kem along bymby," said Simpson. "I'm sorry for the poor gal, so I am. There's them as don't hanker after any of you Siwashes, Pete, but I maintain they may be good. But dern a nigger, anyhaow. You'll be huntin' a job, Pete?"

Pete owned sulkily enough that he was hunting a job.

"Then don't you stay araound hyar," said Simpson. "Barrin' sellin' a few head o' measly steers there ain't nothin' doin'. When the railroad is through, the bottom will fall out of B.C. fo' sewer. You go up to the Landing: things is fair hummin' up to the Landing, an' Mason hez gone up there to start up a kin' o' locomotive sawmill at what they calls the Narrows. You hike off to the Landing and tackle Mason; say I named him to you, Pete, and if he ain't full-handed you'll be all hunkey."

He stood himself another drink, and grew more melancholy.

"A few measly steers in a Gawd-forsaken land like B.C.! Don't you hanker arter revenge agin Ned for mishandling Mary. Revenge is sweet to the mouth, Pete, but it's heavy work on the stummick, ondigestible and apt to turn sour. If it hadn't been that I hankered arter revenge (and got it) I'd ha' bin now in Mizzouri, Gawd's kentry, whar I come from. A few head o' weedy miserbul steers! You leave Ned alone and I'll be surprised if he don't leave you and Mary alone. To half cut off a gal's head and her not to squeal! I calls it noble. Ned will be sorry he done it, I reckon. You go up to the Landing, boy."

And Pete did go up to the Landing.

And Ned, the poor wretch, was very sorry "he done it."

XVI

Ned Quin hadn't been down in the coast country for years. Indeed, the last time he had been in New Westminster he had gone there by coach. Now it was a new world for him, a world of strange hurry and excitement. B.C. was in a hurry: the people of the East were in a hurry: the very river in the roaring Fraser Cañon seemed to run faster. And he, of all the world, was the one thing that seemed to go slow, he and his train. He was sober now, and in terror of what he had done.

"By God, they'll hang me," he said. They hanged men for murder in British Columbia, hanged them quickly, promptly, gave them a short quick trial, and short shrift.

"I wish I was over the Line," said Ned, as he huddled in a corner seat and nursed his chin almost on his knees. Across the Line they didn't hang men quick, unless they stole horses and were exceedingly bad citizens who wouldn't take a clean cut threat as a warning. "I wish I was over the Line."

And the 49th Parallel wasn't far away. Yet to get to it wasn't easy. He had galloped from what he believed a house of death with no money in his pocket. He had borrowed from the skipper of the sternwheeler, which took him from Kamloops to the Ferry, enough to pay his fare down to Port Moody. He must go to George's to get more.

"They'll catch me," said Ned Quin, "they'll catch me: they'll hang me by the neck. That's what they say—'by the neck till you are dead'—I've heard Begbie say it, damn him!"

Yes, that was what Judge Begbie said to men who cut their klootchmen to pieces with a shovel.

"I—I was drunk," said old Ned. "Poor Mary."

She had been as good a klootchman as there was in the country, sober, clean, kind, long-suffering. He knew in his heart how much she had endured.

"Why didn't she leave me?" he whined. Whenever the train stopped he looked up. He saw men he knew, but no one laid his hand on his shoulder. Few spoke to him: they said that it was as clear as mud that he was rotten with liquor and half mad. They left him alone. He wanted them to speak to him, for he saw Mary on the floor of his shack. He saw the shovel.

"Pete will find her," said Ned. "He said he'd kill me if I hurt her. He'll take her horse and ride to Kamloops and tell 'em, and they'll telegraph and catch me, they'll catch me!"

At Port Moody he saw a sergeant of police and felt a dreadful impulse to go up to him and have it all over at once. He stopped and reeled, and went blind. When he saw things again the sergeant was laughing merrily. He looked Ned's way and looked past him.

"They don't know yet," said Ned. He got a drink and took the stage over to New Westminster. A postman with some mail-bags sat alongside him. A postman would naturally hear anything that anyone could hear, wouldn't he? This postman didn't speak of a murder. He told the driver bawdy stories, and once Ned laughed.

"Good story, ain't it?" said the pleased postman.

They came to the City late, and as soon as they pulled up Ned slipped down on the side away from the lights, and went down the middle of the street towards the Mill. He knew that George now lived in a new house and wondered how he should find it. He didn't like to speak to anyone. But by the Mill he found an old Chinaman and spoke to him.

"Boss live up there," said the Chinaman. "You tee um, one plenty big house, velly good house."

He pointed to George's house and Ned followed the path he indicated. Ten minutes later he knocked at the door and it was opened by Sam. But he was not let in till Sam had satisfied himself that this was really the brother of the Boss. He went to the door of the sitting-room, opened it just enough to put his head in, and said——

"One man, alla same beggar-man my tinkee, say he wantee see you, Sir. My tinkee him velly dlunk. He say your blother. My tinkee t'at not tlue."

But George ran out and found the beggar man shivering on the steps.

"Ned, why, what's brought you?"

The hall was dimly lighted and he couldn't see Ned's face. But by his voice he knew he was in trouble. He trembled.

"George, I've—I've killed Mary," he said in a dreadful whisper, "help me to get away."

"You—my God," said George. He took the wretched man by the sleeve. "You've done what?"

"Killed Mary," said Ned shivering. "For God's sake help me over the border or they'll hang me."

He broke down and wept. George stood and looked at him in the dim light. Sam could not pass them to go back to the kitchen, and waited. The sitting-room door was ajar. Someone inside moved.

"Who's with you?" asked Ned.

He knew nothing about Jenny. But George forgot that he knew nothing.

"Go in," he said, "it's Jenny."

He thrust Ned inside and turned to Sam.

"Sam, boy, you savvy no one has come. If anyone ask you say no one. You savvy?"

"My savvy all light, my savvy plenty," said Sam doubtfully. "My tinkee him your blother all light, Sir?"

"Yes," said Quin. He stood with his hand on the handle of the door after Sam had returned to the kitchen.

"My God," said George again. He went into the room.

When Ned had gone in he failed to recognise Jenny, and thought she was a white woman. She was nicely dressed, and now her hair was done very neatly. Sam had taught her how to do it. When she stood up, in surprise at the unexpected entrance of Ned, it was obvious even to his troubled eyes that she was near to becoming a mother. She gasped when she saw him.

"Oh, Mr. Ned," she cried. He looked dreadful: his clothes were disordered, ragged; his grizzled beard and hair unkempt and long. He looked sixty, though he was no more than fifty, and his eyes were bloodshot.

"Who are you?" asked Ned sharply.

"I'm Jenny," she murmured, looking abashed and troubled.

And then George came in. When Jenny saw him she cried out—

"What's the mattah, Tchorch?"

There was matter enough to make her man pallid. But he was master of himself, for he had to look after the poor wretch who now fell into a chair by the fire and sat huddled up in terror.

"I'll tell you by and by," said George. "Give him a drink, Jenny girl, and give me one. I've got to go out."

She brought the whisky to him. He poured some out for Ned, who swallowed as a man, who had thirsted for a tropic day, would swallow water. George took some himself.

"Sit quiet, Ned," said George. "I'll be back in half an hour, Jenny!"

She followed him to the door.

"Don't let him move. If anyone calls, say I'm out, dear."

"What's the mattah, Tchorch? He looks very ill," she murmured, with her hand on his shoulder. George told her what Ned had told him, and Jenny trembled like a leaf.

"Poor, poor Mary!" she sobbed. "Oh, the cruel man!"

"Oh, hell," said George, and Jenny controlled her tears.

"What you do, Tchorch?"

"I'm going to get someone to take him across the other side," said George. "I must, I must."

He ran out and down the hill path, and Jenny went back reluctantly to the room where the murderer sat. He was shivering, but the liquor had pulled him more together for the time. He wanted to talk. How was it that Jenny was here? He remembered he had seen Pete on the road.

"I saw Pete to-day," he said suddenly.

Jenny stared down at the floor and answered nothing.

"I'm a wretched man, girl," said Ned; "did George tell you?"

Jenny did not reply, and Ned knew that she knew. He burst into tears.

"I've killed Mary," he said. His face was stained with the dust of the road and the tears he shed channelled the dirt. He looked dreadful, ludicrous, pathetic, hideously comic. "I—I killed her with a shovel. She was a good woman to me, and I got mad with drink. I'll never touch it again."

He looked eagerly towards the bottle on the table. He had taken some more when the others were out of the room.

"I've killed her, and they'll hang me, Jenny! Where's George gone?"

The tears ran down Jenny's face.

"He's gone to get someone to take you away, Mr. Ned!"

They might come any moment and take him away! There was quite a big jail in the City.

"I—I saw Pete this morning, no, yesterday. I don't know when," said Ned. "When did you come here, Jenny?"

Jenny said it was long ago. She dried her tears for shame was hot within her. And yet joy was alive within her. She loved Tchorch!

"I couldn't leave Tchorch now," she said to herself, as Ned went on talking. "I'd rather he killed me. Poor Mary!"

If Pete had been brutal, Mary had always been kind. She hated Ned suddenly.

He took another drink and sat crouched over the fire. Every now and again he looked round. At any noise he started. Perhaps the police were trying to look into the house. Jenny could have screamed. It seemed hours since George went away. Ned muttered to the fire.

"Mary, Mary," he said in a low voice. He and Mary had been lovers once, for when she first went to him he was a man, and she was quite beautiful. Across the dark years he saw himself and her: and again he saw her as she lay in blood upon the earthen floor of his shack, what time he had run out and taken his horse for flight.

"They'll hang me," said Ned, choking.

And there were steps outside. He sprang to his feet and hung to the mantel-shelf.

"What's that?" he asked. The next minute they heard George enter the house with some other man.

"It's the police," screamed Ned thinly. He believed George had denounced him. And George put his head inside the room and beckoned to him. Ned ran to him stumbling. The door closed on them and Jenny fell upon her knees. Then she sank in a heap upon the floor. She had fainted.

In the hall was someone Ned did not know. But George knew him and knew that he was a capable strong man. He was Long Mac of the Pony Saw, as strong as he was long. In the winters he hunted, and knew all the country round about.

"Take him across the river to-night, and away by Whatcom to-morrow, Mac," said George; "do your best."

Mac never did less, whether it was for evil or for good. On the balance he was a good and fine man. But he cared nothing for the Law and had a curious respect and liking for George Quin.

"I'll do that," said Long Mac. He took Ned by the arm, and Ned without a backward glance shuffled into the darkness.

George went in to Jenny and found her unconscious on the floor. He sprinkled cold water in her face, and she moaned.

"Poor little woman," said George. "Oh, but it's hard lines on these poor squaws. If I died what'd happen to her?"

He knew their nature and knew his own.

"But Mary's dead," said Quin. "Better for her."

Yet Mary wasn't dead, though Mac was dragging a whining, puling wretch of a man on a dark trail to a country where there's a very poor trail indeed cut for the slow and burdened army of the Law.

XVII

Next day the Pony Sawyer was wanting at the Mill and no one knew what had become of him, the finest and steadiest man in the place. George White was pleased to hear of it, for it was always his notion that Quin would some day fire him and put Long Mac at the lever of the Hoes.

"Ah," said Ginger, "we never can tell: some crooked business, I dessay! They crack up M'Clellan 'sif he was a gawd-a-mighty, but to my tumtum he ain't nothin' extra."

He put Shorty Gibbs from the Shingle Mill in Mac's place, and found his usual pleasure in piling poor Shorty up. For of course Gibbs, though he understood the Pony, couldn't run that lively animal at Mac's pace. When Ginger stood up and groaned publicly at Shorty, the new man was cross. It led to a scene at last, but one which only puzzled the others. For Shorty Gibbs was one of the very quietest men who breathed. He said he hated rows like "pison." When Ginger came round to him the second time and said "Oh, hell," Shorty had had enough. He stopped the Pony carriage and walked over to Ginger. He nodded to him and said—

"Say, see here, Ginger!"

Ginger was an uninstructed man, he was very hard to teach.

"Get on with your work," said Ginger.

Shorty was up to his shoulder. He lifted an ingenuous face to the sawyer.

"Ain't you bein' rather hard on a new hand, Ginger?" he asked politely. And Ginger White mistook him, altogether. He swore. What happened then the other men missed; it was all so quiet.

"Look here, you red-headed bastard," said Shorty in a conversational tone, or as near it as the clatter of the Mill would allow, "look here, you slab-sided hoosier, if you as much as open your head to me agin I'll rip you up from your fork to your breast-bone. See!"

And Ginger saw.

"You can't bull-doze me," said Shorty, becoming openly truculent, "any more than you can bull-doze Mac, you white-livered dog!"

White was never brave, but since the saws had killed Skookum his nerve was bad indeed. There were spikes in every log for him by now. He went back to the lever without a word and ran so slow that Gibbs got a chance to clear the skids.

By the time Gibbs knew what was what with the Pony, Mac returned. He had taken Ned somewhere to the neighbourhood of Seattle and left him there. He went to see George Quin the moment he got into town. And by that time there was news from Kamloops.

"I've planted him with an old partner of mine that runs a hotel back o' Seattle," said Mac. "Jenkins will keep him away from too much liquor. I rely on Jenkins."

George thanked him.

"But after all," said George, "I hear that the woman isn't dead, Mac, and what's more she lets on that it wasn't my brother that hurt her."

He looked at the sawyer.

"Good girl," said Mac, "but he did it right enough, Sir; he talked of nothing else all the way across."

"But if she dies what she says won't be everything," said George. "It's best he should stay. Thank you for going with him. Gibbs is taking your saw."

"Hell he is," said Mac pensively; "has he had trouble with White?"

But Quin hadn't heard of it. Just of late White hadn't gone to the office with so many complaints. Since the spiking of the logs Quin had been less easy to deal with. He was troubled in his mind about Pete, and about Jenny. If Pete had spiked the logs, as Quin believed, he was capable of anything. And poor little Jenny was about to be a mother. It wouldn't be more than a month or two now.

Until Jenny had come into his life in real earnest, the Mill, the Stick Moola, had been the man's whole desire. He loved it amazingly: there wasn't a plank in it he didn't love, just as there wasn't a job in it that he couldn't do in some fashion, and no fool's fashion either. He had run the old Moola "good and strong," caring for everything, seeing that it had the best of everything. There wasn't a makeshift in it: it was a good Mill and Quin was a good manager. An accident of any kind hit him hard. For accidents there must and will be when saws are cutting lumber. To have a man killed troubled him, even if it were a sheer accident. But to have a man killed by a spiked log was very dreadful to him. It was the more dreadful that he had provoked the spiking. It shook Quin up more than he had ever been shaken. It broke his nerve a little, just as it had broken Ginger's. And by now he was very fond of Jenny, even if he cursed her, as he sometimes did. He dreaded this devil of a Pete, who wasn't the kind of Siwash that one found among the meaner tribes, the fishing, begging Indians. He had some red and ugly blood in him. He got on Quin's nerves.

And then Mary was Pete's sister. If she hadn't been he would never have known Jenny, and if he had given Pete a job it would have been like giving it to any Siwash. Now Pete would be more than ever down on them both. George began to think it worth while to find out where Pete was. He sent up to Kamloops to ask. At the same time he sent word to the hospital that Mary was to have anything she wanted. There was a deal of good in George Quin, and somehow little Jenny brought it out.

The poor girl in the hospital knew there was good in him. And in the old days there had been good in Ned. Even now she loved him. When they asked her how she had come to be injured, she declared that it was not Ned who had done it. She said that as she lay swathed in bandages before she knew how much she had been hurt. She said it with white lips that trembled when she had seen herself for the first time in the looking-glass. Perhaps few women would have been so brave, for she knew that henceforth no one would look on her without strange white bandages to hide the wound which her mad-man had made. For she had been beautiful, and even now there was beauty in her eyes and in the sunken cheek and curved chin that had been spared. But henceforth she went half covered in white linen, since none but a doctor could bear to look upon her without it.

"It wasn't Ned that did it," she said to the Law when it came to her. "It was a stranger."

And everyone knew better than that, unless indeed too much liquor had made Ned a stranger.

"I want to see Ned," she murmured. And yet she was very strong. A weak thing would have died. But she loved life greatly, though she wondered why. She made one of the nurses write to her man saying that she wanted him. That brought Ned back from Seattle. George received him sullenly. Jenny refused to see him.

"Watch out for Pete," said George when his brother went up-country.

"Pete, oh, to thunder with Pete," replied Ned.

"Look out for him," repeated George.

"You ain't wanting me to be scared of a Sitcum Siwash, are you?" asked Ned angrily. "Perhaps you're scared of him yourself. You took his klootchman anyhow. It's more'n I did."

George Quin was afraid of him. Many who knew his record would have said that he was alike incapable of fear or love, but some might have known that love for the mother of his first and unborn child took the courage out of him and made him full of fears. Now he was always "watching out."

XVIII

Difficult to think of anything at the Landing, Sir, but what was going on! Give you my word it was hurry; it hummed, and hissed and sizzled and boomed. The forest fell down before the axe and saw: felling axe and cross cut; and shacks arose, shacks and shanties and shebangs, drinking shanties, gambling shanties, stores which sold everything from almonds to axes, and all that comes after A right down to Z.

The Landing's in the Wet Belt. It rains there, it pours there, the sky falls down. Sometimes the Lake (it's on the Shushwap, you know, close to the head of it) rises up in dancing water-spouts. It was once a home and haunt of bears (and is again by now likely), but when Pete stepped ashore from the hay-laden lake wagon called the s.s. Kamloops, it wouldn't have been easy to find a bear or a caribou within earshot. The Street, the one Street, was full of men. There were English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, Finns and Letts, mixed with autochthonous Americans with long greasy hair (Siwashes who lived on salmon) and other Americans of all sorts. It was a sink, a pool, a whirlpool, it sucked men up from down country: it drew them from the mountains. To go East you had to pass it: going West you couldn't avoid it.

Men worked there and drank there and gambled there. There were Chinamen about who played the universal Fan-tan. There were Faro tables: Keno went there: stud-horse poker had its haunts and votaries. The street was a mud channel: men drank and lay in it. By the Lake they lay in piles, and more especially the Swedes did. They are rousing drinkers "and no fatal error."

There was night there, of course, for the sun couldn't and wouldn't stay to save them oil, but as to peace or quietness, the peaceful quiet of a human night, there was no such thing. Sunday was rowdier than other days, if any day could be rowdier. If a man wanted work he could get it. Devil doubt it, work was to be had at fine prices. Bosses employed men to come and pretend even for two and a half a day. They dragged men in and said, "Take my dollars, sonny, and move some of this stuff." Men worked and took the dollars and gave them to the stores and gamblers. It seemed impossible that there could ever be a lack of work. You could get work on the grade, tilikum; you could have a little contract for yourself, my son. You could drive a team if you could handle horses and mules over a toat road that would make an ordinary driver weep: why, there were all kinds of work, with axe and saw and pick and shovel, and bar and drill and wedge and hammer, and maul and all sorts of other tools. It was a concert truly, a devil's dance of work, and of hurry and scurry and worry.

Why, tilikum?

Because the railroad was being put through and coming to an End, to two ends, to two Ends of Track, now closing up rapidly. Once the work had been spread over four thousand miles, away by Montreal and Quebec and the Lake of the Woods and the Great Lake Side, and away to Winnipeg and Medicine Hat and Calgary and the Rockies. Now the work narrowed to a few hundred miles, to a hundred; to-morrow, perhaps to fifty. All the world of the road was rammed and jammed and crammed into a little space, as if it were but the Gulf of Athlone. Men thrust each other aside, it was elbow work, jostling, it was a high old crowd. Betcher life, tilikum, it was a daisy of a time and place that dark-eyed Pete stepped into out of that old scow of a stern-wheeler.

The Town scooted: she hummed: she sizzled. What ho, and let her rip! That was the word. The soberest men grew drunken on mere prospects: there was money in everything: no one could miss it: dollars grew on trees: they lined the roads: they could be caught swimming in the Lake. Men lived fatly: hash was good and none too dear, after all. "For hayf a dollar" one could get piled up, get stodged, pawled.

"Oh, come in and Eat," said one house.

"We give the best Pie," said another. Pie fetched the men every time. Your worker loves his pie: there's a fine lumberers' song about Pie which is as popular with the men of the Woods as "Joint Ahead and Centre Back" is with Railroaders. They all gave good pie at the Landing. You bet, tilikum.

Pete, in all his born days, had never seen or heard or dreamt of such an astonishing hubbub, such go, such never-let-up, as he saw at the busy Landing. He was a stunned, astonished Siwash for a while and wandered around with his eyes out of his head, feeling lonely, stranded, desolate. And then he found that he knew men here and there and everywhere. Some of them slapped him on the back: some said "Howdy": some said "Hev a drink, sonny!" Men were generous: they felt they were millionaires or on the way to be: it was a fine old world. Pete smiled and smoked and drank in this house and that and forgot for awhile all about Mason, who was supposed to be running a little saw-mill in the woods, that Missouri Simpson had told him of. Pete put his woes into the background; he couldn't hear or see them at the Landing for quite a while. There was truly a weakness of revenge in him. If either or both of the Quins had followed him up and said:

"Look hyar, Pete, come and hev a drink and let's talk about these klootchmen——"

Why, it is at least possible that Pete would have drunk till he wept and have taken dollars to forgive them about Jenny and Mary. He had a weakness in him, poor devil, as so many have.

But when finally he did get work in a big stable helping the head stableman who looked after some of the C.P. Syndicate's horses, he found many who remembered or had heard, or had just learned all about Jenny and Mary. That's the best or the worst of B.C., as I said some time ago, everyone knew everyone and all about them. They talked scandal like a lot of old or young women: told you about this man's wife or that: they raked up the horrid true story of Ned Quin's killing one poor klootchman by kicking her. They asked Pete for information about Mary. When some were drunk they mentioned Jenny. They never gave poor Pete a chance to forget, and over and above the mere mischief of drunken scandalous chatter, there were one or two who hated the Quins. Neither of them hesitated about downing a man by way of business, though of late years Ned had been no more than a shooling no-good-sort of man all round. So one or two said:

"Say, Pete, you ain't let up on them Quins, hev you? Them Quins are two damn smart-alecks, that's what they are! I say they're mean, oh, mean ain't the word. I hear Ned Quin cut your sister to slivers with an axe. Is it true?"

They got him crying about Mary and Jenny, and presently it was understood that Pete had forgotten nothing. All he was after was a few dollars. Why? "Well, to tell the trewth, tilikums, I believe, straight, that the boy's idea is to kill one or both o' them Quins and then skip across the forty-ninth Par'lel and away."

They put that into Pete's head: told him it was easy to skip out. They knew better. But one man, named Cumberland, who had been done in a deal by George and done pretty badly, cheated, in fact, and outfaced, egged the boy on daily. Cumberland had all the desire to be "a bad man" without the pluck, or grit, or sand to be an imitation of one. But he never forgot.

In all the fume and roar of this short-lived Town it was easier to get money than to save it. Everything cost money, cost dollars; "two bits" was the least coin that went, and that's a quarter of a dollar. Pete had an Indian's thirst, and drank more than was good for him. If it hadn't been that the rush of work handling hay-bales, sacks of oats, maize, flour, mats of sugar, cases of dynamite, and tools and all the rest, sweated the alcohol out of him he would have got the sack promptly, the Grand Bounce. As it was he stayed, being really a worker, and as nice a boy to work alongside as one could wish.

"Pete's a clever boy for a Sitcum Siwash," said the Boss. For clever in the vernacular of the West means nice. They quite liked him, even though the real white men looked down on him, of course, as real Whites will on everyone who isn't White. But he had his tilikums even there, an Irish Mike who hadn't learned to look down on anyone and would have actually consorted with a nigger, and another half-breed, originally from Washington Territory and by his mother a D'wamish, or Tulalip, of the Salishan, but educated, so to speak. They both looked down on the Indians of the Lakes, who caught salmon and smelt wild and fishy, like a bear in the salmon-spawning season. Oh, yes, Pete had his friends. But no friend that was any good. For D'wamish Jack was a thick-headed fellow and the Micky always red-headed for revenge on everyone.

"I'll stick 'um," he used to say. He was going to stick everyone who disagreed with him. He had an upper lip almost as long as an American-Irish caricature. When he was drunk he moaned about Ireland and Pete's woes and his own.

With such partners in the hum of the Town it wasn't a wonder that Pete didn't accumulate the shekels, or pile in the dibs or the dollars, or the t'kope chikamin. He had as many cents to his name by the time it was high summer as when he came to the Landing. And then he struck a streak of luck, as he said, and as D'wamish Jack said and as the Mike said. He went one Sunday into a Faro lay-out, run by an exceedingly pleasant scoundrel from Arizona, who was known as Tucson Thompson. You will kindly pronounce Tucson as Tewson, and oblige.

There wasn't another such a man as Tucson in the Town, or the Wet Belt, or the Dry Belt, or all B.C. He was born to be a gambler and was really polite, so polite that it was impossible to believe he had ever killed anyone when you were with him and quite as impossible to doubt it when you went away and thought of him. He was nearly fifty, but as thin as a lath, he could talk like a phonograph, tell stories like an entertainer, and the few women in the town held the belief that he was exceedingly handsome. He wasn't, but he had a very handsome tongue. When he lost, if he did lose, he didn't seem to mind. When he won, he appeared to take the money with some regret. At the worst he did it as a pure matter of business: he gave you so many cards, and you gave him so many dollars. He said he ran a straight game. There wasn't a man in the Town equal to saying he didn't, and when one understands that no one is allowed to kill anyone else in British Columbia for saying he is a liar, it will be understood that there was more to Tucson Thompson that lay on the surface. He inspired respect, and required it with a politeness which was never urgent but never unsuccessful.

He had his lay-out in the back-room of the Shushwap House, where they sold "Good Pie," and said so outside in big letters.

It was there that Pete acquired what he looked on as a competency. It was two hundred and fifty dollars, a very magnificent sum. Whether Tucson really ran a straight game, or thought it was about time to give himself a great advertisement, cannot be said, but this time Tucson or the straight cards let Pete in for a mighty good thing, which turned out a bad thing, of course. The only point about it was that Tucson didn't get the cash back again, as he might very reasonably have expected, seeing that gamblers are gamblers, and that a Sitcum Siwash doesn't usually hang on to dollars till the eagles on them squeal in anguish.

And the reason of this was that someone from Kamloops, a storekeeper on the look out for business at the Landing, was in the gambling shanty when Pete raked in his pile. He slapped Pete on the back first of anyone and took him on one side.

"Say, Pete, old son, hev you heard about your sister?" he asked.

"Heard what?" asked Pete.

"She's outer the hawspital."

"Have you seen her?"

The storekeeper nodded.

"She's dreadful hurt, Pete," he said with horrid unction. "I saw her the day she kem out. She's wropped up all one side of her face, like a corp, all in white. They say Ned Quin cut half her face off."

Pete's face was as dreadful as his sister's.

"Where is she?"

"She's gone back to Ned," replied the storekeeper. "She would go back: it warn't no good arguin' with her. Mrs. Alexander offered her a job in her kitchen, bein' a good old soul, but Mary would go back to him, she would."

Pete stood him a drink and then took one himself and then another. He flatly refused to play any more. But he spent ten dollars on the crowd. The more he drank the soberer he seemed to grow. The liquor hid the tension in him, and the excitement of the game. Mary was cut to bits and was back with Ned! He chewed on that as he drank. The storekeeper got hold of him again.

"Some enemy o' Ned's got home on him, Pete, and no fatal error," said he, with his eyes fixed on the young fellow; "some enemy got home on him and no fatal error."

"What?" said Pete.

"They ran his cattle, some fine fat steers and a few good cows, into the cañon back of his place, and killed most of them."

Pete grunted and looked on the floor.

"He allows you done it, Pete. But there ain't no evidence you done it, boy. The men araound Kamloops allows it sarves him right, Pete. Ned Quin ain't a single friend araound Kamloops. The poor girl! She used to be so pretty. I reklec' her as a little girl: there warn't a tenas klootchman araound ez' could hold a candle to Mary, bar your wife Jenny. I heerd George Quin hez give her dresses and rides her araound in a carriage, Pete."

There were many times when the Kamloops steamer left the Landing at night. She couldn't keep to times: she came and went when she was full or empty. The owners of the cranky old scow, turned into a sternwheeler, coined money out of her, though her steam-chest leaked and she shook as she went. Now she tooted her horn, blew her whistle. It was nigh on to midnight, but there was a high white moon above the hills, and on the quiet lake a moon's wake shone. Pete thrust the storekeeper aside and went to the door.

"Hullo, Pete, old chap, where you goin'? Halo klatawa, you son of a gun!" said many. But Pete paid no attention. His wife was riding around in carriages with George Quin, and Mary had gone back to Ned. He ran down to the wharf where the steamer lay and jumped on board as she backed off the shingle.

He saw the fairy lights of the Landing die down, and then the steamer rounded a point and the Landing saw him no more.

"I'll kill em' both," said Pete. He could not see the quiet wonder of the night and the glory of the moon above the peaceful pine-clad hills. He saw poor Mary in a shroud, and Jenny laughing at him from the side of George Quin, who also smiled in triumph.

XIX

What the storekeeper told Pete was true enough, but such a man as that could know nothing of the deep inside of things, and the heart of such a strange woman as Indian Mary was hidden from him and all like him. It was hidden from herself, even when she knew she was maimed and disfigured, for still in spite of her bitterness and grief she yearned to go back to him who had hurt her and made her very dreadful to see. She had given herself to him once for all, and her heart was steadfast to the man he seemed to be when he took her to his house. Even then she had known his history, and had not been ignorant of his cruelty to a little dead woman who lay with an unborn child in the cemetery at the back of Kamloops town. When they first met he was grieving, as even such as Ned must, for the deed that made him lonely, and he was doing his poor best to keep away from drink. In those days he was a handsome man, taller and finer looking than his brother, and he captured Mary's heart. She was taken, as women can be taken, by seeing a strong man grieving, and she believed that he was more unfortunate than evil. For ten years she had hoped against hope, and now knowing that it was almost hopeless, was yet faithful rather to the dead man within him than to the wretch that he was.

"I must go back to him," she said. She could do no other.

And yet when he came to the hospital, and asked for her, she fell into a deadly tremble of sickness and would not see him. He had made her hideous, for though white linen hid her face, she could see beneath it, and knew. The man would hate what he had done, and hate her to whom he had done it. He went away mournfully, and for once went out of Kamloops quite sober, carrying no liquor. But before he went he was spoken to by the same sergeant of police whom Pete had feared after he had destroyed the cattle, and Ned was sick of heart to be so spoken to.

"It's lucky for you the gal didn't die, Quin," said the sergeant. "We'd ha' hung you high for it. She allows you didn't do it, but we know better. Run straight and keep sober, or we'll have you yet. You're a disgrace to a civilized community, a disgrace to a civilized country, Sir, that's what you are, you damned cayoot!"

Ned Quin had to take that and chew on it. And once, as he knew, he had been a man. He cried as he rode back to his ranche. He met old acquaintances who would not know him, and when he got back home to find it lonelier than his worst imagination, he feared to face it. Even the corrals were empty. The cattle that he had loved were dead: the cañon stank with them. One solitary cow lowed near the shack: Mary's horse was on the hill behind it with horses that belonged to Missouri Simpson, one of those who that day had met him on the road without the salutation that any stranger would get in a hospitable and kindly land.

He "hung it out" for days without drinking. He worked all he could: he rode over to the Nikola and rounded up a few head of steers that hadn't been handy when Pete drove the rest to death. He mended the broken fences of his corrals: he cleaned up the cold, neglected house. He cleaned up Mary's blood, and shivered as he scraped the earthen floor of the signs that were so nearly those of murder and of death.

He suffered agonies at night-time and still struggled, perhaps in his last fight against alcohol.

And when he had been alone a week Mary came back. She could not help coming: her heart was a mother's, seeing that she had no children, and the poor thing she loved was her child. She was lonely without him. Perhaps he would be kind now, perhaps he would forgive her for being so hideous. For one side of her face was still beautiful: both her sorrowful eyes were lovely. She left the hospital, and never entered a house in town. She went out at night lest they should see her, and faced the hill-road, as it wound up the hills at the back of the town, in a starry darkness. Her strength was not much, but she had enduring Indian blood in her veins, that blood that helps poor squaws to carry loads their lordly men will not touch: that blood that helps them to suffer uncomplaining: that blood which, in their male children, helps to endure, if need be, the dreadful torture of the hostile fire and stake. She went swiftly through the night, and long before dawn came over the last hill in the trail which led to the desolate ranche where her steadfast heart lay. Under the stars and a faint fine glow that was the dawn, she saw the little shack, and then her heart and limbs failed her. She sat down and cried softly for her sad life and her tortured love, and her lost beauty under the shroud of white linen over her right cheek and jaw. Would he be kind to her, or would he hide his eyes and drive her from him? She knew nothing but that her sad heart needed him, even him, rather than any kind and gentle man that lived. She rose up trembling but set forward on the trail, and at last came to the house. A little chill breeze blew down from the hills, and a cloud hid the faint rose of dawn, so that it was full night as she crossed the threshold. For Ned, sleeping uneasily and afraid of the very house, had set the door open. She stayed and heard him move in the bed. She reached out her empty arms, but not to any God. She reached them to her wretched child, her man. And then Ned woke.

"What's that?" he cried aloud. He saw a dark figure against the lucid night beyond the door.

"What's that?" he cried again. His voice shook.

"It's Mary," said the ghost he saw and feared.

"Oh, you——" he cried. She heard him shake. "Have you come back?"

She fell upon her knees by the bed.

"Yes, Ned."

He reached out a hand to her. It was cold as ice: for the blood had gone to his heart and brain.

"You've come back—to me?"

He knew it was a miracle, and, brutish and besotted as he was, he felt the awful benediction of her presence.

"To me!"

To him, to a man who had cursed her life at its springs, who had given her no joy, who had cut her to pieces by their bed and warm hearth! She had come back.

"If you want me," she murmured.

He shook and trembled. If he wanted her! He wanted nothing but her: she was the world to him.

"If I want you!"

He clutched her hands and kissed them. She felt the hot tears run on them. He wept for her, the poor man wept. She dragged herself close to the bed and tried to speak, tried to tell him that she was so altered. She spoke as if he had nothing to do with it: as if she had been smitten by some strange accident, by some disease, by some malignant and most unhappy fate. He heard her whisper.

"I'm, I'm not pretty now," she sobbed dryly. "Ned, I'm not toketie any more!"

For once, perhaps, he suffered more than she did: for that time he exceeded her grief, because this was his deed. He groaned.

"But if you want me!"

"I want you, Mary," he screamed suddenly, "no one else, dear Mary: oh, what a wretch I am!"

The best of him, long hidden, long concealed, in a drought of tears, came up at last. He hid his head in the pillow and cried like a child. She sat upon the bed in an urgent desire of maternal help and held his head between her hands.

"Poor Ned!"

She took him at last in her arms and murmured to him gently.

"Oh, oh, my man, my Ned!"

He felt the linen on her face and shivered, but spoke no more. She lay down by him and, overcome by her strange pure passion and the fatigue of the miles she had travelled to come to him, she at last fell asleep.

Then the slow dawn grew up over the clouds, and came in colour across the sunburnt hills and entered their home. Ned sat up in bed beside her and saw her dear face covered by its shroud.

"Help me, oh, God!" said the man.

And perhaps help might come, not from any God, but from the deep heart that prayed to the spirit of man which hides in all hearts and only answers to prayer, if it answers at all to any pleading.

XX

Though the railroad, the mighty railroad, the one and only Railroad of the Big Admiring World, was the chief topic of talk from Montreal to the Pacific, and not least so in little Kamloops by her blue river and lake, yet there was time for talk of other things even there. The men cackled and chattered in saloons and out of them, as is the fashion in sparsely inhabited countries as well as in suburbs, of all the windy ways of men. Like dust was the talk lifted up, like dust it fell and rose again. And the boys often talked of Ned, who, it seemed, had struck a new streak of virtue and avoidance of liquor.

"'Twas nip and tuck with him and the law," said one, "and he's still scared."

"True 'nough, Indian Mary nigh payssed in her checks. One more cut and she'd ha' bin mimaloose. They say so at the hawspital," said another.

"I wonder if he's done with Pitt River Pete, yet," wondered a third. "D'ye think he druv them steers into the cañon?"

"Who else? No, Ned Quin ain't through with Pete. Now I like Pete, he's a first-class Siwash, not bad by no means. And I never cottoned to Ned. He's got religion now, eh? Oh, shucks!"

So the fates and men disposed of things even at the time that the Kamloops sternwheeler came sweeping west through the quiet waters of the lakes and the quick stream of the connecting river, bearing Pete and his strange fortunes.

He fell instantly among such thieves of reputation, such usual slanderers of hope in sorrowful men, and heard the worst there was to hear, made better by no kindly word. Perhaps they knew well in their hearts that reformation was a vain thing: they scorned Ned's efforts to be better, and made the worst, as the world is apt to do, of all he had done. They drew frenzying pictures of Mary with the half-hid face: they told Pete of her sad aspect, and related, in gross passages of bloody words, exaggerations constructed out of stories from the hospital of mercy.

As if their incitements were insufficient, the coast talk of George and Jenny came up stream to him.

"Him and her's havin' a hell of a good time, Pete. He took your pretty klootchman over to Victoria as bold as brass, as if he was Lord High Muckamuck and she my Lady Dandy oh! Druv her araound in carriages, little Jenny as we knowed in Mis' Alexander's kitchen: she ez praoud ez any white woman, dressed to kill, and no fatal error. He's giv' her silks and satins like as if she wuz his wife, and she gigglin' happy. I say it's a dern shame for a man to kapsualla a chap's klootchman. Bymby he'll throw her over, chuck her out. And they say she's got a kid now, and it ain't yours, Pete."

There was love of offspring deep in Pete's heart, hidden from himself till this moment. He ran out of the shanty into the street.

"There ain't no need to fill the boy up the way you're doin'," said one of the loafers uneasily. "If ain't no good to make him so ez he'll murder them Quins."

The others laughed.

"None of us is stuck on the Quins," they declared. "And if Pete is burro enough to bray too loud and kick up his heels, forgettin' he's only a Siwash, they'll fill him up with lead. And even in this yer British Columbia, which is a dern sight too law-abidin' for a man, we reckon that self-defence is a good defence sometimes. Here's the worst of luck to Judge Begbie, anyhaow."

Next morning Pete rode on a hired horse towards the Nikola, being full of liquor ere he set out with a bottle in his pocket. He had tried to buy a gun, a six-shooter, but there are few in most British Columbia towns, and those who wore them by habit, in spite of the law, were not sellers. When a man has carried a "gun" for years he feels cold and helpless without it. That's one of the facts that are facts, tilikum.

But Pete didn't care. There were such things as shovels, said Pete furiously.

It was a heavenly bright morning, and the far distance of the warm hills, rising in terraces above the Lake, shone clear and warm. Such is the summer there, so sweet, so tender, so clear, and every day is a bride of kindly earth.

Pete rode hard and saw nothing but the wan aspect of his sister, and the giggling jeer of Jenny, clad in scarlet and bright shame.

The good brown earth with the lordly bull-pines scattered on rising hills was very fair to look upon. On the higher levels of the terraces were pools of shining lakes: some shone with shores of alkali and some were pure sweet water.

Pete, riding a doomed man however he wrought, drank no pure water with his heart. He sucked bitter water from the bitterest lakes, poor fool, going to do his duty, as his Indian blood said, and as much white blood would have said as well.

The sun, unclouded as it was, shone without the fierceness of the later summer. The grass, though it was browned, had still sap within it.

Pete rode half-drunken, with fire within him.

And then at last he topped the rise that hid Ned's shack. He saw a woman by the shack, and with his eyes discerned even from afar that she wore white linen on her head. But he could not hear her sing. And yet poor Mary sang: it seemed that out of her sorrow there had grown so great a joy that song would come from her wounded healing heart.

Pete rode down the trail. So in fine weather among the hills a storm may break. So may a cyclone, a tornado, approach a city. So may fire burst out at quiet, sleepy midnight. In one moment there was horror in the happy and repentant and praying home where Ned and Mary had come together once again.

"Oh, Mary," said Pete. He came riding fast. She looked up, did not know him, and looked again, and knew him. She called to Ned, who came out at the sound of galloping.

"It's Pete," she cried, but Ned stood there stupidly. In his great repentance and his new found peace he could not believe in bitter enmity, in war or in revenge.

There is a power of strange madness in the Indian blood, diluted though it be. Under the maddening influence of liquor the nature of the Indian flowers in dreadful passions, forgetful of new circumstances, oblivious of punishment and of law. None knew this better than Ned Quin, and yet he stood there foolishly, with a doubtful smile upon his face, a smile almost of greeting. He was even ready to forgive Pete for what he had done. He felt his heart was changed, and without a touch of religion or creed this was a natural and sweet conversion. But Mary tugged at his arm, for she knew.

The whirlwind came down on them: Pete rode at him and, ere he awakened and turned, rode him down. Ned fell and was struck by the horse, reluctant to ride over him, and Pete leapt from the saddle. He saw Mary with her hands up, but chiefly saw the white shroud on her face. He forgot her, forgot his horse, and only remembered that one of the brothers he hated lay sprawling before him, half stunned, raised on one hand. With a club, a branch of knotted fir, that he seized on, he went for the man and battered him. Mary flew at him, and he sent her headlong with a backward motion of his left arm. She reeled and fell and got upon her knees, screaming with bitter rage at her brother. But she was weak, and though she got to her feet again, she fell once more. She saw Ned bleeding, saw him fall supine, saw his empty hands open and shut: she heard the blows.

"Oh, God," she cried. Within the shack there was a shot-gun. It stood in the corner, there were cartridges handy. She crawled for the house, and got on her feet again and staggered till she reached it. She found the gun and the cartridges, threw the breech open, rammed one in and closed it. The possession of the weapon gave her strength. She ran out, and Pete saw her coming, saw the gun go to her shoulder. With the club in his hand he ran at her as quick as he had been in the Mill. And as he nearly closed with her she fired. He felt the very heat of the discharge, was blinded by it and by the grains of powder, and fell unhurt, save for a burnt and bloody ear. Mary struck him with the butt and knocked him senseless: he lay before her like a log. She dropped the gun and ran to Ned and fell upon her knees. She lifted his battered head and prayed for his life, and even as she prayed she believed that he was killed. There was no motion in him; her trembling hand could feel no heart-beat. She heard her brother groan.

"He's killed him," she screamed, "he's killed him!"

She laid her man down with his head upon a sack that lay near by. She turned to Pete with blazing eyes and saw the man she believed she had slain sitting up and staring about him foolishly. From one car blood ran: his white face was powder-scorched.

"You devil," said his sister, "you've killed my man, the man I loved; oh, you wicked beast, you cruel wretch, you pig——"

She screamed horrible abuse at her brother, dreadful abuse and foolish.

"They'll hang you, hang you, hang you!"

She yelled this at him as she stood before him like a fury. The words went by him like a breeze: they entered his ears but not his brain: he was still stupefied, half unconscious. He turned away and was violently sick. She pitied him not and was remorseless. She took him by the shoulder and shook him. He turned a foolish and wondering face at her, with some dawn, a very dim dawn, of consciousness in him.

"I'll get you hanged," she said. He heard the word "hanged" and again "hanged" and wondered sickly what it meant. She ran from him and he watched her. She went to the horse which stood some twenty yards away. The animal started and walked away and she stopped and spoke soothingly to it, using low words and bidding it be gentle. She went round in a circle and got upon the other side of it, and at last the horse stood still and let her grasp the bridle. Pete wondered what horse it was and why she was catching it. She brought it to the shack and slipped the bridle reins over a post.

He saw her use incredible strength and drag Ned Quin into the house. She cried aloud and sobbed most dreadfully. She put her man in the shadow, laid his head upon a pillow and covered his wounded face with white, even as her own was covered. She shut the door and came out. Pete still sat upon the ground with both hands outspread behind him. She said that he would be hanged, again she said it. He saw her get upon his horse and ride away towards the road. Where was she going? Who was it that was going? What was this woman going for?

These were horrible problems, but he knew, as a man knows things in a nightmare, when he cannot move, that their solution concerned him. They concerned him seriously. He struggled to solve them. It seemed that he spent years, aye, centuries, in the bitter attempt and still he saw the woman astraddle on a horse go up the rise to the north. This was a woman, oh, God, what woman?—a woman with a white cloth on her face, a ridiculous fierce figure who had said "hanged!" What was "hanged"? What did it mean? And why did she say it to him? What was he for that matter, and who was he? He struggled hard to discover that. So far as he could see, he was an unnamed, peculiarly solitary speck of aching, struggling matter in a world of pain. So they say the disembodied may feel. His senses were numbed: they sent foolish messages to him, messages that warned him and alarmed him without being intelligible. He knew that he was in some great danger. He saw a house, but did not know it; a gun, but could not say what it was and why it lay there in the pounded, trodden dust. Something wet dripped from his head: he put his hand up and saw blood upon it. Whoever he was, he was hurt in some way. He sighed and still saw the woman. Now she disappeared. It mattered very much. Why was she leaving him? He spoke suddenly.

"What's my name?" said Pete.

If he could only get that. On that point hung everything: he felt sure of that. Now he knew he was a man; he had got so far. But what manner of man he could not tell. How silly everything was! He groaned and grinned. Then he started.

"My name's Pete," he said suddenly. "It's Pete!"

This was the clue: this the end of the tangled cord of things. It was, he felt, utterly idiotic and alarming to know so much and no more. It was infinitely annoying. He said "I'm Pete, am I Pete, I'm Pete, eh!" and then sat staring. He wanted some kind of help, but what help he did not know. The task of discovering what all things were from what seemed the primal fact of all, that he was called Pete, appeared hugely difficult. He cried about it at last. And then some chickens came round the corner of the shack, and pecked in the dust. A big rooster came after them and stood upon a log, and whooped a loud cock-a-doodle-doo! It was a natural sound. Pete knew it and stared with sudden intelligence at the brilliant bird upon the log. Of a sudden the whole veil over all things was lifted. He knew who he was and why he was there and what he had done! Above all he knew what the word "hanged" meant. It was his sister who had said it. He got upon his knees and staggered till he could hold on to the house. It was a help to hold on to something while he thought.

"Hanged," said Pete. He had killed a man. Where was he? It was Ned Quin. But if he had killed him how had he got away?

"I won't be hanged," said Pete. "I won't. She's gone to tell 'em I've made Ned mimaloose, killed him. I'll stop her!"

That was a very clear idea, and the notion satisfied him for a while as he swayed to and fro. But how? The woman with the white linen had taken his horse. It was again a hard problem, but since he knew who he was, things were very much easier, though they were still a struggle. He didn't know how he got there, but presently he found himself in the stable, leading out Ned Quin's horse, a lean and old, but still sound, sorrel. It was wonderful to find that he had a horse already saddled and bridled. He didn't know that he had put the saddle on and cinched up the girths himself.

"Now I'm all right. That kloshe," said Pete. He almost forgot in his satisfaction what he wanted the horse for. But presently he remembered that he had to stop that woman (his sister, was she?) from going somewhere. Was there such a place as Kamloops? Very likely there was. Then he saw the gun.

"She shot at me," he said with feeble indignation, "I'm bleeding."

He wept again.

And suddenly he saw all things as clear as day. He had killed Ned: she had shot him and then she had said she would go into Kamloops and denounce him. There wasn't any time to lose. He "hung up" the horse and picked the gun from the ground. He went to the house and opened the door. It was very dark inside and the outside sun was now burning bright. He stumbled across something and only saved himself from falling with great difficulty. What had he stumbled over? He peered on the ground and as the pupils of his eyes dilated he saw a body stretched out with a white cloth over the face. He trembled.

"It's—it's Ned," he said, shaking. "They'll hang me!"

He wanted to lift the white cloth but dared not. He went round the body to the shelf where he knew the cartridges were kept. He put a handful in his pocket and then went out with his eyes straight before him. But he still saw the white cloth. When he was outside he loaded the gun in both barrels and clambered on the old sorrel with great difficulty. As he rode he swayed to and fro in the saddle.

But he had to catch Mary, had to stop her. That notion was all the thought in him. It helped to keep him from falling off. Yet he rode like a drunken man, and the landscape reeled and shifted and danced. The big bull-pines swayed as if there were a great wind and the road was sometimes a double track. Yet far ahead of him he saw a figure on a horse. It must be Mary. He clutched the gun and the horn of the saddle and spurred the old sorrel with a solitary Mexican spur which he had borrowed in the town. And as he rode the world began to settle down before him at last. Though his head was splitting he rode without his hat. It lay in red dust by Ned's house.

At first he went at a walk, but presently he urged the sorrel to a reluctant lope. The figure before him loped too. He saw he made little headway. He put the sorrel into a gallop and knew that he gained on her who now hated him. It was unjust of her: what he had done was for her, not for himself. Ned had hurt her horribly. Pete couldn't understand her. She appeared to love the man who had cut her down. It was foolish, strange.

And she meant to have him "hanged." That was the last spur to him: his vision cleared and became normal. The shifting planes of the terraced land in front of him sat down at last. He drove the spur into the sorrel brutally and set him at a furious gallop. He knew the horse that Mary rode was tired: it was not much of a cayuse at any time. He saw her plainly now.

And then she looked round and saw a horseman coming furiously. What horseman it was she knew not. Yet it might be Pete, though he was disabled. She made her horse gallop: she flogged him with a heavy quirt that hung to Pete's saddle.

But the man behind her gained. She saw him coming in front of a cloud of white dust. She looked back through dust. But perhaps it wasn't Pete.

Then she knew the action of the old sorrel, and panic got hold of her. It was Pete. Yes, that was certain. She screamed to her horse, and struck him hard. Now she heard above the sound of his hoofs upon the road the following echo-like thud of the sorrel as he crept up to her. She topped a little rise and raced down hill recklessly. Behind her now there was a moment's cessation of the following sound. Then she heard it again and looking back saw Pete come down the hill. He was within a quarter of a mile of her and she was not yet half-way to Kamloops!

She was his sister and an Indian. She was usually merciful to animals in spite of that: merciful and kind. But now she feared for herself, and the deep nature within her flowered as it had done when she sought Pete's life. She flogged the horse till she was weary and then pulled out a little knife she carried and stabbed it through the hide just behind the saddle. It was a bitter and cruel spurring. Under the dreadful stimulus her tired horse responded and galloped furiously. But the old horse behind her was the better animal: he answered that gallop of his own accord and was emulous, eager.

She heard Pete's voice, she turned and saw him creeping up to her: she saw he had the gun. She looked at him over her shoulder as they galloped: his face was dreadful to see: part of his ear was hanging loose: the blood was on his neck and shoulder. She saw him open his mouth: he was speaking: telling her to stop!

But he had killed her man! She believed it! She would not stop.

Now he crept further up to her, and her old horse was urged on by the following thunder of near hoofs. She turned from her pursuer: he saw nothing of her face but the white cloth. She heard him cursing awfully. He called her foul names: he screamed insults. Though she kept her eyes upon the road she saw dimly that he was ranging up alongside her.

"Stop," cried Pete. She answered on her horse with the quirt: she had dropped her knife a mile back. Behind the saddle there were blood marks. She was in a whirlwind: the sun burnt: the dust rose: she saw cattle run across the road. Beyond that slope Kamloops lay: through a fold of one of the terraces she saw a patch of the lake away to the east: yonder was the crystalline and azure Thompson. In front, the dark stained hill beyond the river and beyond Kamloops rose more clearly. Then she heard nothing of what he said: she saw his furious face, saw the blood again, the flapping cartilage of his ear, and then she saw him lift the gun. This then meant death! But when the explosion burst upon her like a blow, she felt the horse throw up his head, and knew that they were both falling. She saw, even as she fell, the one clear picture: the horse with his bleeding neck outstretched and his legs failing: the white road: the radiant prairie: the tall brown trees: the splendid river. Then the earth rose at her: she pitched headlong, and rolled over motionless.

On the road the wounded horse lay, lifting up his head as one aghast at death. He made no sound: the blood poured from the burst arteries and his head sank back.

Pete never looked behind him as he threw the gun away and went at a merciless gallop for the last level mile before the uplands opened on the valley of the Lake. He cursed his sister and Ned Quin and himself. How could he get away?

Before he got to the pitch of the road he turned in his saddle and looked back. He saw the dark patch that the dead horse made. He saw the cattle coming to find out what the unusual spectacle meant, for their curiosity was insatiable. Some already stood, staring and tossing their heads, in a half-circle round Mary and the horse.

Soon all the world would be in a circle round the victims! Where was he to go and how was he to act? He pulled up suddenly and put his hand to his aching head. If he went into Kamloops as he was, with a horse all flaked with foam, and with his own ear bleeding, all the little world of the town would be agog to know what had happened.

And yet if he hid till dark, some would find Mary, perhaps dead, upon the open road. Someone might go to the shack and discover Ned. It was hard to know how to act. He remembered for the first time that he had a bottle in his pocket. He asked advice of that: it sent him flying down the road to Kamloops. It was best to risk things, best not to wait, not to dodge or to hide. His only chance was to get down to the coast and out of the country. To get north to the Columbia and then to Sand Point through Kootenay, practically the only alternative route out, was impossibly dangerous. And as he rode he saw a steamboat coming down the river from the Lakes. If he rode hard he might catch it and get away before a word was said. As he rode he bound up his head and ear with a big coloured handkerchief. It was red enough to hide the oozing blood.

It was an hour or more after noon when he rode into Kamloops. He came in at a lope and took on a careless air, calling "Klahowya" to some of his tilikums as they passed him. He even saluted a mounted policeman and went by him singing till he came to Alexander's, where he had got his horse from. He had to explain how he came back on Ned Quin's instead of the one he hired. But the stableman, who knew he had hired out a wretched crock, was easy enough to satisfy.

"That damned kieutan fell with me," said Pete, swaggering, "fell at an easy lope and burst my ear. I left him at Ned Quin's, sonny, and Ned'll bring him in to-molla and fetch out this old sorrel. Here's four bits for you."

He had paid the hire before he took out the horse that now lay dead upon the road. He heard the steamer's whistle at the nigh wharf and ran to catch her. In ten minutes he was on his way down stream to the Ferry.

He knew it would be, or so easily might be, "a close call" for him. And yet there was nothing else to do but to risk it. As the cool air of the river struck him he shivered. For he thought he had killed Ned Quin and, now that the heat went out of his blood, chilling the fever of revenge in him, he began to be very much afraid.

But he took a drink.

Far back upon the road the cattle ringed round Mary's body and the body of the horse, and a million flies blackened the pool of blood and drank against the dust that soaked it up. The cattle to leeward, smelling the horror of a spilt life, tossed their heads uneasily and challenged strange death, that horror of which their instincts spoke to them. Some to windward came closer and blew at the flies. They rose in black swarms and settled again. From a distance other cattle marched to the wavering ring about this wonder. Some came running. One of the inside steers touched Mary's body with his horn. She moaned and lifted her hand. The steer ran backwards, snorting, backing on others, who horned each other angrily. Then the steers crept up again to Mary and blew at the dust in which she lay.

But this time she rose to a sitting position, and the ring of cattle with their lowered heads retreated from her.

She wondered where she was, and how she came to be there. Then she saw the dead horse, and the gun that a cow smelt uneasily. She remembered that Pete had killed Ned, and that he had perhaps tried to kill her. She scrambled to her feet and the cattle jostled each other to get away from her. She staggered as she stood: for she had no strength, and all desire of life had gone out of her. And with that there came a sickness of the notion of revenge: it would only be trying to revenge herself on the inexorable destiny which was hers. Pete had killed her man and had gone. She would go back to her dead.

Overhead the sun burnt as she staggered on the road, the long, endless, wearying road, so like to life. She went at a foot pace, and the miles were weary endless spaces without hope. For her man was dead, and Pete was a cruel madman, and there was nothing left for her. Yet still she walked, like some painful hurt creature returning to its lair. She ached in every limb: her head seemed splitting: the physical torture of her being dulled her mind. And as it seemed to her only the sun of all things moved swiftly. It was drawing on towards evening when she came to her house and stood outside the door. Her knees trembled: she clutched at the latch and door-post to prevent herself falling.

Inside was her man dead: her man who had been so good and so cruel. She began to weep and opened the door, letting the westering sunlight in. The next moment she screamed dreadfully, for the place where she had left him was vacant!

"Oh, Ned, Ned!" she cried in a most lamentable voice. And yet within her murdered heart there sprang a faint poor flower of hope even as she cried. If he had been moved was it not that someone had come and taken him away? Then—then, oh, God, perhaps he was not dead! Her brain turned: she reeled again and clutched at the table and held to it.

"My God, listen to me, be merciful, where is my man, the man I love?"

She wrestled with the dark gods of fate whose blinded eyes knew not, nor cared, whom they trod down upon the dusty roads of earth.

And then she heard a rustle in the room, as of something stirring! She prayed that this was true: that she did not hear amiss and that when her eyes opened she would see Ned once more.

She heard a groan and ran to it blindly and found her man there, on the bed, their bed, still alive, though half blinded, blood-covered and hardly conscious!

"Ned, Ned!"

In her mad desire for revenge she had left him, believing him dead. She fell beside him with a scream that was no more than a sigh, and when she became conscious again after that awful shock of joy, she found his wounded hands seeking hers. She heard his hurt mouth whisper for water. For the little good that came with all the evil she thanked her God very humbly and brought the man water. He spoke to her and did not know that she had been away from him. He knew not how he had reached the bed, or come back to life and to her. He was very weak and gentle.

"My dear," he said feebly. She washed his wounds and bound them up. She cried softly over his pain, which was so much less than her own.

"I've been a brute to you," he mumbled. "But God help me I'll be that no more."

"You've always loved me," she said. It was true in spite of everything.

"Yes," said old Ned. Then he fell asleep and woke in an hour and wandered a little in his talk. But she soothed him into peace again and he rested quietly. Yet she could not leave him to get help till next morning, and when she went over to their nearest neighbour, Missouri Simpson, he was away from home. It was noon when he returned and rode into Kamloops for the doctor. He told the police what had happened, and found that someone had already brought into town Ned's gun and told them of the horse. They telegraphed to all stations to the Coast to hold a certain Sitcum Siwash, known as Pitt River Pete. But by that time Pete was in hiding on the south side of the Fraser, over against the Mill, with a canoe, stolen from a house near Ruby Creek, where he had left the train. For it seemed to him that he could not escape if he went further. That he had not been arrested yet was a miracle.

"They'll catch me and hang me," he said with a snarl.

He felt sure they would and he had something to do before they did.

As he lay in the brush, across the river, he tried to pick out the lights of the house, high upon the hill, in which Jenny and George Quin lived.

XXI

The news that one Pitt River Pete was wanted by the police, by the "bulls," spread fast through the town and into Shack City. As soon as they heard, and as soon as Indian Annie was chuckling grossly over the possible delight of seeing Pete hanged, the police came down and searched every hole and corner in the sawdust swamp. They routed out Annie almost the first of the lot, and she screamed insults at them as they searched her den.

"Kahta you damn plisman tink I hide Pete?" she yelled. "Pete hyu mesachie, him damn bad Siwash; if him come I say 'mahsh, klatawa, go, you damn thief.' Oh, you damn plisman, what for you make mess my house? You tink Pete him one pin I hide him lik' dat?"

They bade her dry up and when she refused they took her by the scruff of the neck and bundled her outside. She sat in sawdust and yelled till they left her shack and searched the others. They found nothing, of course, but they found out one thing, and that was the readiness of most of the men of the Mill, Siwashes or Whites, to give away Pete with both hands. For they, at any rate, were certain that it was he who had spiked the logs and killed poor old Skookum Charlie. And since he had killed a Chinaman, too, all the men from the Flowery Kingdom were ready to do the same. Old Wong said so to the "damned plismen." But as the Chinamen relied on the police to save them from abuse and injury, they were even readier to help than the Siwashes.

"Supposee we savvy Pete, we tellee you allo tim'," said Wong. "My tink Pete damn bad man, spikee logs, killee my flin Fan. Fan velly good man, my flin, and Pete spoilum 'tumach,' killee him dead. All light, we come tellee."

There wasn't a doubt about it, that if Pete turned up in Shack-Town he would be given away, and though the police went away empty-handed they had high hopes of nailing him shortly.

They had had a considerable pow-pow that morning in the Engine-Room before work started up and there wasn't a soul found there to say a word for Pete. This was natural enough.

"A man that'll spike logs ain't a human being, boys," said Long Mac seriously.

"Killing his own tilikums," said Shorty Gibbs. "It was horrid seein' pore old Skookum!"

"The Chinky was horridest," said Tenas Billy. "I picked him up."

"So you did," said Shorty. "But what d'ye think Pete's doin'?"

"He'll be on the scoot."

"To be sure, but where?"

"Oh, to hell and gone out of this."

"That's your tumtum. It ain't mine by a mile. If he's been spoilin' Ned Quin's face what'll he do 'bout George, eh?"

Mac intervened.

"Waal, boys, these Injuns are a rotten crowd. You can't bet on what they'll do. Some o' them don't care a damn if their klootchmen quit. I know, for I've run with 'em on the Eastern Slope o' the Rockies and on the plains. Sometimes they will though."

He told a ghastly tale.

"Pete's a holy terror, that's what," said Tenas Billy. "I never give him credit for sand, I admit, but he has it."

"Sand be damned," said Long Mac; "he hasn't sand. It's only Injun temper. I know 'em. They ain't sandy in the way we speak of it, boys. Bein' sandy is bein' cool. Pete don't do notion' unless he's mad. None of 'em do, at least none of these fish-fed coast Injuns. They's a measly crowd."

The men chewed on that.

"Nevertheless," said Shorty, considering the matter fully, "I'd rather be me than George Quin with Pete loose on the tear. The man that spiked our boom and hunted old Cultus Muckamuck's steers into a dry cañon and then hammered him to pulp with a club mayn't have sand, but he's dangerous."

"He's the kind of Johnny that'd fire the Mill," said Ginger White, who so far had held his tongue.

"White's on the target," said Mac as the whistle blew. But he forgot about it when the song and the dance of the day commenced. There's fine forgetfulness in work.

Quin was as foolish as the rest of them. That is to say, he talked to the police and came to the conclusion that Pete wasn't likely to be on hand now and for ever after. He knew what Mac knew and despised the average Coast Indian. It was true enough they weren't up to much unless they were "full," full, that is, of liquor. And a man like Quin knew by instinct the weakness there was in such as Pete, in spite of his now bloody record. For Quin had a fine square jaw and Pete hadn't. But then Quin was incapable of underhand night work. And he didn't know that Pete was like a rat in a trap, as a criminal is in British Columbia. And there was another thing. He knew that Ned wasn't dead, by any means. It never occurred to him that Pete believed he had killed Cultus and must be desperate if he wasn't out of the country.

"I wish the swine was dead," said George Quin. "I believe I'd marry Jenny."

She had twined herself round his heart, and when he saw her nursing the one child he had ever been father of he was as soft as cream with her. Not a soul about the City would have believed it was George Quin if they had seen him with his naked boy in his arms. Only the Chinamen knew about it, for Sam told them, being delighted, as they all are, with male offspring. They really sympathised with the big boss as they thought of their own wives far away in "China-side" and the children some of them hadn't seen. Old Wong wept secretly, for he had worked and gone home to marry a wife, and she had died. It wasn't likely he would ever make enough money to buy another, unless he got it by gambling. He was as bad at that as old Papp, the German, who still hadn't made sufficient to go home to "California," in spite of all his work, and those muscles which made him feel as if he would "braig dings" if he didn't toil.

Yes, tilikum, George Quin, "Tchorch," was happy, as happy as he could be.

And Jenny was nearly as happy as she could be. Her child was a gift from heaven, even if heaven frowned as it gave her the beautiful boy. She never saw the Bible or the horrid pictures and she saw instead the scripture of the child's pure flesh hourly and read the dark language of her man's heart. He adored what she had given him, and she knew, as a woman may know, that underneath his awkward roughness and his careless ways, sometimes not wholly gentle, there was real love for her and the wish to be good. And when he sat with her and smoked, she caught the paternal look of full satisfaction that he feigned to hide from himself. What a boy it was!

He was as fat as a prairie chicken, and as full of life as a fresh-run salmon. How pink he showed in hot water: how he squealed like a dear little pig and kicked his crumpled dimpled legs! Was there ever such a boy before?

"Oh, Tchorch, see," said Jenny. She showed him the baby's thick dark hair. The child was a garden of delight that she cultivated all day long.

But she never forgot "Tchorch," who had been so good to her, and had taken her to Victoria and driven her about in a fine carriage: who had showed her the world. If she had only been his wife the whole earth could have offered her nothing.

And yet behind her was the dark shadow of Pete. George never spoke of him, and if he had known that Sam did he would have kicked the Chinaman from the house to the Mill. Yet it wasn't Sam's fault, though he was a chatterbox and always ready for "talkee" at any time. Jenny asked him about things. She knew that men said it was Pete who had spiked the logs. Sam told her of the death of his poor countryman. She wept bitterly about Skookum, who had always been a kind, thick-headed chap, very good to his klootchman. She had now taken up with another who wasn't good to her.

"Poor old Skookum," said Jenny. Oh, it was dreadful of Pete. And yet it was her fault.

But she had her boy! Oh, not for anything, not for life or heaven or all the round world contained of good, would she have parted with her child and George's. She hadn't lived before. And now "Tchorch" loved her so much more. He was so satisfied, so content to sit and smoke. Her Indian blood was happy to see her man sit solemnly and puff the clouds into the air without a word.

Now she knew of the search for Pete, and knew what he had done, just as she knew what wicked Ned had done to poor Mary. She hated Ned, and was sure he was utterly bad. Nevertheless, Mary had gone back to him. That she knew was natural.

"Poor Mary loves him," she said, "but she has no baby!"

If the sky was clear, it was for her little boy: when the breezes blew they were for him: the beauty of the river was his: the loveliness of stars and the goodness of her milk were the gifts of God, who was not angry with her but only sorrowful because she was not married.

"He would marry me if——"

Oh, yes, if Pete were dead! She could not say it, but could not help the bad thought rising within her. To be married to George! She trembled to think of it.

In her heaven Pete was the dark cloud. Perhaps her constant thought of him put it into George's head to say, as he did say, very suddenly that same night—

"I wish I could marry you, tenas!"

She crept to his knee, and laid her head on his hand. She got more beautiful every day, more gentle, more tender.

"There's not a spark of vice in the little woman," said her man, with tears in his eyes. He said he was a damn fool and spoke gruffly next time. But she understood her Chief, her great man, and was pleased to serve his gruffest speech.

"If only that cursed Siwash was dead," said George.

But if he wasn't he would either be in the "pen" for years or would be seen no more on the Fraser River. That seemed certain.

And still George was uneasy. It was impossible to say where the man was. The belief of the police that he had escaped out of the country went for nothing. British Columbia might be a mouse-trap, but it was a handy place for holing up in, and the brush alongside the river would have hidden a thousand. George had a talk about the matter with Long Mac, who was the only one of the workers in his Mill who had brains beyond his daily task.

"What do you think, McClellan?" asked the Tyee.

Mac's eyes showed that he could think.

"He's a dangerous skunk, that's my tumtum, Mr. Quin," said Mac. He told him what Ginger White had said and Quin frowned heavily.

"Fire my Mill!"

The Mill was his life, and till Jenny had borne him a child it had been his true and lasting passion. There was a fascination about it and the work of it that he loved. The scent of the lumber: the sound of the saws: the rush of the work: the hustling of the men, made something beyond words. The Mill was a live thing, warm, strong, adequate, equal to its work. It filled Quin's alert, strong mind.

"Fire my Mill!"

That was Long Mac's "tumtum," his thought, his notion.

"If he ain't really skipped out, that's what a cuss like Pete would do to you, Sir," said Mac. "He's made a holy record for himself, ain't he? We know he spiked the logs and killed poor Skookum, and there ain't the shadder of a doubt he fixed your brother's cattle. And then he's laid him out, and started off down here. They traced him to Ruby Creek, and it's tol'ble sure he kapsuallowed a canoe there. But no one's got on his tracks. It's bad luck there's been such a mighty poor salmon run this year, or he'd ha' been seen on the River."

As it was, the lordly tyee salmon, the quinnat, had been making a poor show in the Fraser that year, as he will at intervals, more or less regular. The canneries were fairly frozen out and shut down. The river was empty of boats and men.

"I'll set another night-watchman on," said Quin. "There's something in what you say, McClellan. The police are damn fools, though."

"I'll take a night or two at it myself, if you like, Mr. Quin," said Long Mac.

"You're the very man," replied Quin.

That night Pete got his hidden dug-out into the water. But his chief thoughts were not of the Mill.

XXII

It was all very well for George Quin, who had brought all the trouble on himself by running after other people's klootchmen, to say the police were fools, but as a matter of fact they had done as much as could be expected of them, and perhaps more, seeing that Quin wasn't very popular with them. His Mill with its Shack-Town gave them more trouble than the whole of the City, and within a year two "damn plismen," as Annie called them, had been laid out cold with clubs in its vicinity. And nobody had gone into the penitentiary for the murderous assaults. Nevertheless they had searched every likely hole and corner for Pete, from his old native hang-out, Pitt River, down to the Serpentine and beyond it. They had beaten the brush along both sides of the Fraser, North and South Arm and the Island. And, indeed, they came within a throw of the dice of catching Pete. One of them missed him and his canoe by a hair's-breadth, and the Sitcum Siwash had been about to cave in and show himself when the man turned aside.

As it was, the very search for Pete worked him up to desperation just as he was beginning to get cold on revenge and to think rather of escape. If the police were so keen as to search the brush and go up and down the river, how was he to get away? Like most of his sort he didn't know the country, and would have been puzzled to get even as far as Whatcom. And even if he did there would be someone waiting for him. And to go down stream in the dug-out would be to run right into a trap, like a salmon. His rage began to burn in him again, and to this was added hunger. He had over a hundred dollars in his pocket but hadn't eaten for four-and-twenty hours. He would have given his soul for a square meal and a long drink, and as hunger bit him he knew that if he lingered any longer mere famine would induce him to give himself up. Then he would be hanged, and get nothing more than he had got already as the price of his neck. When the second night fell he was wholly desperate.

"I fix heem to-night, or they catch me," said Pete. "One ting or the other, Pete, my boy!"

If he only could get a drink! With a drink inside him he would be equal to anything. He wondered if he dare trust any of his old tilikums of the Mill. He thought of Chihuahua and of Chihuahua's klootchman, Annawillee, and then of old Annie. They would give him away for a dollar; he knew that, and very likely there was a price on his head. If poor old Skookum hadn't been killed he would have done anything for him. Pete was very sorry he had killed Skookum, very sorry indeed.

But he kept on thinking about that drink. If there was one woman or man in Shack-Town who always managed to have liquor in her shanty, it was old Annie.

"I'd choke her for it," said Pete, as he shoved off in his dug-out and paddled lightly against the last of the flood coming in from the great Pacific. "I'd choke her for it."

The night was moonless and cloudy and as dark as it ever gets on the Fraser in summer. There was even a touch of an easterly wind about, and the faint chill of it made him shiver. Without a drink he felt almost hopeless.

"I try," said Pete in sudden desperation. The lights were out all over the town. Hardly a solitary lamp starred the opposing darkness of the hill above the river. The world was asleep. There was only a moving lamp in the Mill. He knew it belonged to the night-watchman, a sleepy-headed old German, once a worker in the Planing Mill with old Papp. But since he lost his hand he had been made night-watchman.

"I give heem plenty light by-by," said Pete. He slanted across the river and came to an old deserted rotten wharf a little above the Mill. There in the black shadow he ran his canoe ashore and stepped into the mud. He crept silently to where the shore shelved, and, climbing up, thrust his head out between some broken flooring of the wharf. The world was quiet as a tomb. There was even peace in Shack-Town. Whether he got that drink or not he had business there that night. Though Chihuahua most likely wouldn't give him a drink, Pete meant to make the Mexican help him. For at the back of Chihuahua's shanty, which was only a one-room hiding hole, there was a little outhouse. In that Chihuahua always kept some kerosene.

Pete slipped across the road like a shadow, dodging among the piles of lumber as he went. His senses were as alert as a cougar's. And the sawdust under foot made his steps soundless. On the other side of the road he waited to be sure that no one moved. There was only one light in Shack-Town, and it was at Annie's. That meant that she was either awake or had fallen asleep drunk on the floor, forgetful of her lamp. Perhaps she had a bottle, said Pete thirstily. He felt cold and nervous and forgot about the kerosene. He ran lightly across the road and came to Annie's. He had a sheath knife in his belt. It had once belonged to Jack Mottram, but Pete had stolen it. He had no intention of using it on Annie, that is unless he had to, of course. He carried a heavy stick in his hand.

He looked into Annie's window, which was naturally enough foul within and without. He saw nothing at first but the dim light of the lamp, but as everything was quiet he rubbed the glass of one pane with his cap. Then he saw that Annie was lying on the floor, a mere bundle of rags. Was that a bottle by her?

You bet it was, tilikum! Pete knew a bottle when he saw it. Perhaps by good luck it wasn't empty. He shortened the club in his hand and tapped lightly on the door with it. Annie never moved. He pushed the door open, and still she didn't move. He crept in like a cat until he could reach out and touch the bottle. It lay on its side and the cork was out. Nevertheless, a bottle can hold quite a good drink in it even on its side. It was as full as it could be in such a position, and careless of the silent woman he drank it to its fiery dregs. Hot life ran through his veins. It was fire: such fire as makes murder light and easy. He grinned happily and put the bottle down again by Annie's limp hand.

His life ran warm within him and all his desire of vengeance grew in alcohol as grass will grow in a warm rain of spring.

He found the kerosene in Chihuahua's little den, and started, not for the Mill, but for George Quin's house.

"My klootchman, ha," said Pete fiercely. "She have a papoose!"

The papoose slumbered in his loving mother's arms. By her side big George lay. The night was so sweet and quiet. If George could marry her he would. Oh, wonderful, sorrowful world that it was. And here was the world within her arms and within her reach.

"I just love Tchorch and baby!"

She woke and slept. Oh, heavenly night and heavenly day when baby slept, or waked, or stared solemnly, as Indian blood will and must, at the strange hard world that meets its wondering eyes.

The summer had been warm and rainless, everything was dry with the good warmth of summer. The brush showed brown: the paths were white: the lumber, whether in stacked piles or in framed houses, was ready for fire. A spark would light it: a single match might cause a conflagration as it would in a dry forest of red cedar or the resinous spruce.

And Pete carried kerosene. He drenched a southern wall of boards with it and laid against the wall dry brush and pieces of sawed lumber that lay about from the building of the house. He knew the wood must flame like tinder. If it ran unchecked for a minute it would take the river to put it out. And it was high above the river. He grinned and lighted a match.

The next minute he was running down the hill like a deer. In less than a minute he dropped, still carrying the half-emptied kerosene can, through the hole in the wharf. Then he waited and saw a warm blaze high upon the hill.

"That fix heem and her," said Pete, intoxicated with his deed and with the alcohol. "That teach heem, damn Shautch Quin, heh! I kill his blother, heh, and burn his house!"

His heart was warm within him as fire. It seemed so good to be revenged. Now they would wake, and perhaps would not escape. All the world would wake and go up there, and then the Mill would be left alone. Already the flame on the hill was so fierce that many must see it.

And, indeed, many saw it, and some came running and there was a growing sound of men, and far off he heard men call. And then from up above there came the sound of firearms, used as an alarm. By this he knew that Quin was up.

"I fix heem and now I fix his Mill;" said Pete hoarsely. He had forgotten all they had told him of the scheme by which a man pays a little so that he shall not lose all. What did it matter? The Mill was Quin's, and he loved it. Pete knew that.

As all the town woke he dropped down stream in his canoe and came to the Mill.

It was built, as all such are when they border on a river or any water, partly on the land and partly on great piles sunk in the river bed. The wharves, where scows and steamboats and schooners loaded the lumber, were even further towards the deep water. At high tide a boat could pass underneath them all, and get beneath the deep shadow of the Mill. There fish played constantly, schools of little candle-fish, the oolachan that the fur-seals love, that is so fat that when it dries it drips oil. And there were places in the Mill that dripped oil, as there are in all works where machinery moves swiftly, and bearings are apt to grow hot. For many years the Mill had never ceased to run, save when heavy frost fixed the moving river in thick-ribbed ice, and it was saturated with all that burns. In every crack dry sawdust lay that was almost explosive: the bearings of belts were fat with oil. Pete knew it would burn like tinder, like dry, dead resinous spruce, like the bark of red cedar.

As he moved in the darkness, over the sound of the lapping water he heard the sound of the waking city. Where so much was built of wood, fire was dreadfully interesting. He knew the world would wake and be upon the hill. Now he saw the glimmer of the fire he had lighted show a gleam upon the water under the sky. He laughed to himself quietly, and, holding on to a pile, listened. Was there anyone above him on the floor of the Mill? Or had even the watchman run to Quin's house to help? He knew how fire drew a man, how it drew all men.

There was no sound above him. He ran his canoe into deeper darkness and left it on the mud and climbed straight among crossing interlaced timbers to the first floor, where the Shingler worked and laths were made. He moved lightly, his feet in silent mocassins, and entered the dark hole under the Chinee Trimmer. Above him was the chute by which matched-flooring came down to the Chinamen, who carried it to the Planers and the machines that worked it. He heard the hum of a far-off crowd and saw the light of the burning house. He climbed into the upper Mill. And as he thrust his head out of the chute at the left hand of the Trimmer, then idle in the casing, he saw the house itself through the great side chute of the Mill, down which he had fallen the day he struck Quin with the pickareen.

The Mill was empty. He looked round cautiously and then leapt out upon the floor. There was sufficient light for him to see by, and he saw that some man had at least taken precautions against him. There were buckets of water here and there: there was even a hose-pipe with a pump, a force-pump. There was another hose coming from the Engine-Room. These things showed him he had been feared: they showed him it would be hard to get away. But he had no time to think. With a savage grin he pulled out his knife and sliced the hose into pieces. He capsized the buckets as they stood. Then he fetched his oil-can from where he had put it, close to the Pony Saw, and emptied it at a spot which he chose, because the oil would run upon the sawdust carrier and go down past the fine cedar dust from the Shingler. Below the Shingle Mill was the water. He knew exactly where to find the spot where the oil would drip into the river. He ran back to the chute by which he had ascended and as he slipped into the chute he heard someone call.

"Hallo, Dutchy, Dutchy!" said a voice.

But Dutchy, the old one-handed German watchman, did not answer. Pete heard him who spoke break out swearing.

"Goldarn the old idiot, I believe he ain't here," said the voice. It was the voice of Long Mac, a man to be feared, a strong man, a keen and quick man, a man with brains and skill and grit.

Pete heard him enter the Mill and run upstairs, and he knew that in another moment Mac would know someone had been there, although old Dutchy had done what he should not have done, and had left the Mill to go to the other fire. There was no time to lose. He went silently for the canoe, and found it, got into it, and worked his way to the space under the Shingle Mill. Now the light of the burning house was bright upon the lip of the river, running on the first of the ebb against a warm Chinook wind.

He heard Mac burst out into blasphemy. He had found no Dutchy, but cut hose instead. And then old Dutchy came running. He heard Mac curse him.

"What did I tell you, you old fool? Didn't I say look out lively here! That swine's about now, by God! He's cut the hose, maybe lighted the Mill already!"

"Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott," said Dutchy, "I haf not been afay von minute."

"Oh, to hell," said Mac.

He found the capsized buckets and burst out again. He spoke rapidly, and Pete, as he clutched at a pile, caught but a word or two.

"Run—police—boat!"

He understood what this meant: if he didn't do it now, he would have no time. At the sound of old Dutchy's steps on the boards as he ran overhead Pete struck a match and lighted dripping kerosene. The flame circled on a patch of board, and burnt blue and flickered, drawing upward through a crack. The Mill was fired!

"I fix heem," said Pete; "if they catch me I fix heem all the same."

He thrust his canoe for the open water and then stayed aghast. It seemed that the world was very light. His lip fell a little. And he heard a voice speak overhead, a voice which was like a bow drawn at a venture.

"I know you're about hyar, Pete," said Mac in a roar like that of a wild beast. "I know you're hyar!"

He didn't know, but his instincts and his knowledge told him the truth. Underneath him somewhere lay the incendiary. In some dark hole or corner the beast of fire was hidden. Pete's heart stood still and he knew what a fool he had been to meddle with aught on the upper floor.

And he heard the light crackle of his new fire.

"Come out, you hound," cried Mac. And then the flame caught the sawdust carrier and Mac saw the creep of light under a crack and knew the Mill was fired—fired irredeemably and beyond hope. He pulled his gun and shot down through the floor at a venture, and by a wonderful chance the bullet cleared any beam and struck the water close by Pete. The Siwash let go and thrust the dug-out into the stream.

And in the Mill the fire was like an explosion. It ran along the carriers and the ways of the belts and reached out into inaccessible corners where lay the warm dust of years and grew up through a thousand cracks like red-hot weeds at the breath of spring in a tropic garden.

"Oh, my God," said Mac. The breath of the fire choked him: he ran back from it: it burst up about him: to escape he leapt over it, but before he got to the great Chute the flame spurted from beneath the Big Hoes and licked at the teeth of shining steel. Then it played about the Pony Saw and far off under the Bull-Wheel it grew up and danced. Then it went like a fiery creeper, like a red climbing rose, and touched the dusty roof. In the next moment the body of the Mill was fire. Mac went back, missed his footing and slipped headlong down the chute, even as Pete had once fallen. He rose with a shout which was half a shriek, for he had dislocated his shoulder, and folks running in the road to the lesser fire, turned to the greater and saw the Mill ablaze.

And out in the river Pete was paddling hard. But the lamp that he had lighted was a very bright one, that made the river suddenly a golden pool and shone afar off on the other side of the white roof of the Big Cannery. One man on the wharf saw him and called to Mac, who came fast.

"By the Lord, that's Pete," said Mac, "that's Pete and my shoulder's out. Get a boat, boys, get a boat! There's one under the wharf at the other end. Get a boat and go after him!"

But to go out on the river at midnight after a killer and an incendiary from mere love of the law or even of hunting was beyond those who heard the man from Michigan speak.

"Oh, hell, not me! Tain't my funeral," they said. And then Quin came running to them. He was white as the ashes of his house would be on the morrow, but he saw what Mac and the others saw. That must be Pete on the river!

"He's got us, Sir, he's got us," said Mas.

Even in that moment Quin saw how he held his arm.

"You're hurt?"

"I fell down the chute, Sir, the fire almost caught me."

The flames roared now. The inside of the Mill was a furnace. Fire played fantastic games on the high sloping roof.

"There's a boat——"

"I know," said Quin.

"These hoosiers ain't game," said Mac.

A bigger crowd of those who weren't game to tackle wild beasts gathered round them. Faces were white in the glow of the fire.

"At the house, Sir——"

"They're all right. I'll go after him," said Quin. He ran, and Mac cried—

"Take my gun, Sir——"

But Quin did not hear him. He ran round the end of the Mill and was lost.

In another moment they saw him in the boat out upon the river. Pete went out of sight. The crowd watched till Quin was out of sight, too.

"What's the bettin' we'll see either of em' again?" asked a man in the crowd.

The odds were against it.

"I fix heem all right," said Pete.

XXIII

It was Jenny who first wakened in the house on the hill, for she slept lightly as a young mother does. And yet when she woke, sleep was not wholly out of her eyes and mind, and it seemed to her that it was morning, and that Sam, her good Sam, was up betimes in the kitchen. She heard the fine crackling, at first a mere crepitation, of the crawling flame, and felt comfortable as one does at the notion of the good creature fire, the greatest servant of man. Deep in the hearts of men lies the love of it, for fire has served them through the innumerable generations of their rise from those who knew it not. A million ancestors of each have sat by brave flames in dark woodlands and have warmed themselves and found comfort in all the storms of the open world. For the house is the fire, the covering of the fire, and the hearth is the great altar, where a daily sacrifice is made to the gods.

She fell asleep again.

And then she smelt smoke and roused herself suddenly and saw a strange light outside in the darkness. The fire flickered like a serpent's tongue, and she saw it, and her heart went cold. For the servant becomes a tyrant, and the god is oftentimes cruel to his people. She clutched the child, and with her other hand caught hold of George. She cried to him aloud, and even before he was awake he stood upon the floor, knowing that some enemy was at hand. And even then the red enemy looked in at the window and there was the tinkle of broken glass.

"Oh, this is Pete's work," he said. But he said it not aloud. "Get up, girl. Come, tenas," he cried. He opened the door and found the house full of smoke. Below, he heard the work of the fire. And the outer wall below the window was one flame.

"This is Pete's work," he said. And he said to himself—

"What of the Mill?"

Jenny clutched the baby to her bosom, and he slammed the door to. It was not the first time he had met fire and he understood it. He wetted a handkerchief and tied it over his own mouth. There were some who would have wondered at his swiftness, and the cool courage of him in so threatening a fight. He bound wet rags across the brave lifted mouth of Jenny, and the child cried as he did the same for him. Then he caught her in his arms and rushed the stairs, and as he ran he called aloud, "Sam, Sam!"

The smoke was pungent, acrid, suffocating, and the heat of the air already cracked the skin. Out of the smoke he saw licking tongues of flame, flame curious and avid, searching, strenuous, alive. One tongue licked at him and he smelt, among all the other odours of the fire, the smell of singed hair. He heard the crying of the child, its outraged mind working angrily. Jenny whimpered a little. Her hand was steel about him. He rushed an opaque veil of blinding smoke, interpenetrated by lightnings, and bull-headed burst in Sam's door. He heard the boy cry out. But they were saved, if it were not that Pete stood outside to kill those whom he had driven from their shelter. That might be; Quin knew it. And yet he could not go first. Sam caught his arm.

"Oh, oh, Mista Quin!" he cried, "oh, oh, velly dleadful, my much aflaid."

Sam had pluck enough, as he had more than once shown when some white young hoodlums of the town had small-ganged him. But when fire is the master many are not brave.

"Open the window," said Quin. Outside to the ground was a drop of twelve feet. But the ground was hard. Quin put Jenny down by the window and got a blanket from the boy's bed.

"Out you go first, Sam," he said.

But Sam, though not "blave" and "velly much aflaid," knew it was the right thing for the "Missus" to go first.

"Oh, no, Mista Quin, my no go first. Missus she go and litty chilo. My not too much aflaid."

He trembled like a leaf all the same.

"Get out of the window chop-chop," said Quin in a voice that Sam had only heard once before when he had dared to be insolent. He sprang to the window, and, clutching the blanket that Quin held, he slid to the ground.

"Now my catchee Missus," he said exultantly. And with the fire beneath the boards of the room, Quin had no choice. He tied a quilt round Jenny's waist and lowered her and the child till Sam could touch her. He let go, and sliding down the blanket, which he had made fast to the frame of Sam's bed, he, too, reached the ground safely. And people came running up the hill. Whether this was Pete's work or not they were safe. But their house was a torch, the flames soared above the gambrel of the roof.

Jenny sat upon a rock, clad only in her nightgown, with the quilt thrown about her shoulders. Her home was burning and all their beautiful things were destroyed. She could not cry, but her heart wept, and the child was her only comfort. She knew well enough that this was Pete's work, she felt it in her heart.

And a crowd gathered. There were many from the City: those whose work it is to put out fires, and some of the police. There was a fat saloon-keeper whom she knew by sight and the old boss of the Farmers' Home. With them were many Siwashes from Shack-Town: among them the wedger-off who had replaced Pete. She saw old Papp, the German from "California," and Chihuahua, with his beady eyes flashing, and his teeth all a-grin. With him came his klootchman, Annawillee, the one who always sang the song of the mournful one, also called Annawillee. Then there were Chinamen in wide flapping pyjamas, old Wong, the wise man, and Fan-tan and Sam Lung, and Quong. They made a circle about her and the fire, and chattered in Chinese, in Chinook, in Spanish, for now Spanish Joe, the handsome man, came up and palavered with Chihuahua. She felt their eyes upon her. She had "shem" that they should see her, for she was not Quin's wife, and his child cried upon her knees. She hid her bare feet under the nightgown. Sam stood by her. She saw Quin speak to the police, to the firemen. Any help was vain. Then Long Mac ran up the hill, as light as a wapiti on his feet. He said but a word and ran back. But it was a wise word, though too late.

"Send someone down to the Mill, Quin. If this is Pete, it won't satisfy him. I'll get a boat and go on the River."

"Do," said Quin. "I'll see this through and be with you in a minute."

But the swift minutes passed, and before they gave up all hope (though Quin never had hope) and before he could say what should be done with Jenny, someone cried out suddenly—

"The Mill, the Mill!"

As if they had been turned on their heels by some strange machinery the big crowd turned and saw a running light in the Mill. It was as if the crowd of workers danced with lamps: as if there were some Chinese Feast of Lanterns in its dark floors. Then the flickering, dancing lights coalesced and they saw flames flow out, and flow down and climb up.

"The Mill!" said Quin.

Bad enough to lose his house, his home, which now he loved, but to lose the Mill was a thousand times worse. The house was but a new thing and the Mill was old. Thousands of days he had watched the work and heard its song: not a board of it, not a rafter, not a stud or beam or scantling or shingle that wasn't his delight. It was part of himself, the thing wherewith he worked, the live muscles with which he toiled: his spirit extended to it: he ran it with his steam, with his belts, with his mind, his energy.

"Oh, my Mill!"

Barefoot as he was, being clad only in his shirt and trousers, he leapt down the hill and never felt his wounded feet. Jenny saw him go, saw the crowd break and waver, saw it turn and flood the lower hillside, moving down. Their lighted faces turned from her, she saw them run.

"Oh, Tchorch, oh, Tchorch!"

But George never heard her feeble cry in the torrent. He had forgotten her and the boy.

And when she could again see for her tears she was alone save for Sam, her faithful Sam, and Annawillee and Indian Annie, the last to climb the hill. Even Chihuahua had gone and all the Chinamen. She saw Wong departing last of all. The fire drew even the philosopher. She heard Annie speak to her.

"Ho, tenas Jenny, toketie Jenny, dis your man, mesachie Pete. Evelybody savvy Pete done um, Jenny. Oh, what peety toketie house mamook piah, all bu'n, all flame."

"Oho, hyu keely, hyu keely," moaned Annawillee, "pletty house mamook piah. Mamook nanitch you' papoosh, Jenny, let me see papoosh."

These were foul and filthy hags, and now Jenny knew it. She cried and Sam did not know what to do.

"Missus, you no cly," he said despairingly. But still she cried, and Annie sat down by her.

"Where Mista Quin klatawa? Ha, Moola mamook piah all same yo' toketie house, tenas. Now you got halo house, you come mine, Jenny."

And Annawillee lifted the quilt from the baby and saw it.

"Hyu toketie papoosh, hyu toketie, ha, I love papoosh, Jenny's papoosh."

"What I do, Sam?" moaned Jenny. The Mill was in a roar of flames. It lighted the town and the river and the white canneries across the wide red flood.

"Oh, you come down to sto'e," said Sam. Where else could she go but to the store? Why hadn't the big boss told him what to do? For everything outside the house Sam was as helpless as the very papoose. He hated and loathed the Siwashes and their klootchmen. They were dreadful, uncleanly people. It was his one great wonder in life that "Missus" was a Siwash klootchman.

"You come down to sto'e," he said.

"You come my house, Jenny," said Annie, who thought if she gave Jenny shelter she would get more dollars from Quin, who lately had refused her anything. "You come my house, tenas."

But Sam held her tight and helped her on the difficult path. Her feet were bare and so were his. Neither Annie nor Annawillee had mocassins on, the soles of their feet were as hard as horn.

They went down the hill slowly, and still the old hag said—

"You come my shack, tenas, bad for papoose to be out night."

Every stick and stone of the path was lighted for them. Jenny's heart was in ashes for the grief of "Tchorch," who so loved his Mill and his house. All her beautiful clothes were burnt. Perhaps Pete would kill him even now.

"Oh, where is Tchorch?" she cried as they came to the bottom of the hill. And the wavering crowd kept on saying where he was.

"The boss is on the river."

"Went in a boat, pardner——"

"Oh, but he was mad! I wouldn't be the Siwash——"

"I don't hanker none to be Quin if Pete gets him. Pete's a boy, ain't he? Solid ideas, by gosh——"

"See, there's the Planin' Mill goin' up the flume!"

"'Tis a mighty expensive fire, this. Eh, what?"

"Licks me Moolas don't burn mor' off'n, pard!"

"Well, we're out of a job, tilikums."

The crowd moved and swayed and moaned. They cried "Oh!" and "Ah!" and "See!" The Mill was hell. Old Dutchy sat on a pile of sawed lumber with his lighted lamp on his knees; the poor doddering fool trimmed the wick and cried. Jenny heard old Papp speak to him in German.

"Sei ruhig, alte dummkopf."

And Papp went on in English.

"Dain'd your vault, old shap, iv so be Pete wanded to purn ze Mill, he vould purn it all same. If I had him I vould braig him lige a sdick, so!"

There was no pity for the man who had spiked the logs. They would have hung him if they had had hold of him. They would have thrown him on the fire. Then the front of the Mill fell out. The crowd surged backwards, and Jenny was near thrown down. Old Papp fell against Sam, and both went down. Annie and Annawillee caught hold of Jenny and her papoose, and dragged her to their shack.

"That all light, tenas. You come. I give you a dlink, tenas. Here, Annawillee, you hold papoosh."

She snatched the baby from Jenny's weakening arms and Annawillee ran on ahead with him.

When Sam recovered his feet Jenny was gone.

"Oh, where my Missus, where my Missus?" roared Sam, blubbering.

"What's the infernal Chinaman kickin' up such a bobbery about?" asked the scornful crowd.

XXIV

The canoe in which Pete had set out in his great adventure was both heavy and cranky, and no one but a Siwash of the river or the Lakes would have paddled it a mile without disaster. But he had been bred in the sturgeon-haunted water of Pitt River, and knew the ways of his craft and could use the single-bladed paddle with the same skill that he showed with the maul and wedges on a great sawlog. Now as he left the light of the fired Mill behind him he knew (or feared) that he had not left his enemies behind him as well. The whole of the Mill would be his enemies. That he was sure of: he remembered poor old Skookum Charlie. He understood the minds of those he had endangered as well as the heart of such a man as Quin. And if Quin himself had escaped from the fire of the house he would be on the river! That Pete was sure of in his heart. And his heart failed him even as he swept outward on the first of the ebb, which ran fast, being now reinforced by the waters of the big river fed by the melting snows of a thousand miles of snow-clad hills.

This was, indeed, the nature of the man, as Long Mac knew it. He was capable of fierce resentment, capable of secret though unsubtle revenge, but he was not capable of standing up like a man at the stake of necessity; not his the blood of those nobler Indians of the Plains who could endure all things at the last. His blood was partly water, of a truth, and now it melted within him.

"They catch me fo' su'e," said Pete. His muscles weakened, his very soul was feeble. What a fool, a thrice-sodden fool, he had been to cut the hose in the Mill. But for that they might not have known he had fired it. But Long Mac knew, and perhaps Long Mac himself, who had nerves and muscles of steel, was out after him in the night. Oh, rather even Quin than that man, whom Quin himself treated with a courtesy he denied to all the others who worked for him.

But now the light of the Mill faded. On both sides of the river were heavy shadows: the great moving flood was but a mirror of darkness and a few stars that flicked silver into the lip and lap of the moving waters. Pete knew the ebb and current ran fastest in the middle of the stream, and yet to be out in the middle meant that he would be seen easier, if indeed he was pursued. He could not make up his mind whether to chance this or not. He sheered from the centre to the banks and back again. And every now and again it seemed to him that it would be wisest to run ashore, turn his dugout loose and take to the brush. And yet he did not do it. He was weak, now that fear was in him, and the alcohol died out of him, and he felt renewed pangs of hunger. To wander in the thick brush would be fatal. They would renew their search on the morrow: every avenue of escape would be guarded. And hunger would so tame the little spirit he had within him that he would give himself up.

"They hang me, they hang me," he said piteously, even as Ned Quin had said it. But there was none to help him. The very men who had been his brothers, his tilikums, would give him up now.

He cursed himself and Jenny and Quin and the memory of Skookum Charlie. He took the centre of the river at last and paddled hard. It was his only chance. If he could but get out to sea and then run ashore somewhere in the Territory, among some of the Washington Indians who knew nothing of him, he would be hard to find. The very thought of this helped him. He might escape after all.

And then his ears told he was not to escape so easily. He heard the sound of oars in the rowlocks of a boat. Or was it only the beating of his own heart? He could not locate the sound. At one moment it seemed to him that after all it was but someone further down the river and then it seemed behind him. If it were down stream it might be only some stray salmon boat doing its poor best in a bad year. Even they would say they had met him. He ceased to row and sheered across towards the darkest shadow of the bank.

And, as he sheered inwards, from behind the last bend of that very bank there shot a boat which was inshore of him. For Quin knew the river below the City as Pete did not, and he had kept in the strongest of the stream, which sometimes cut its deepest channel close to the shore. He was but a hundred yards from Pete when the Sitcum Siwash saw him and knew it was Quin.

Here the great river below the Island, where North and South Arms were one, was at its widest. And by the way his enemy came Pete knew that his hour had arrived. Though he paddled for awhile in sheer desperation he knew that his wretched heavy dug-out had no chance against a light boat, driven by the strongest arms in the City, perhaps the strongest in the whole country. And Quin was an oarsman and had loved the water always. The wretched fugitive changed his tune even as he strove in vain.

"He fix me, oh, he fix me——!"

Hot as he was with paddling, the cold sweat now ran down his brow and cheeks. He felt his heart fail within him: he felt his muscles fail. Yet still he strove and kept a distance between himself and Quin that only slowly lessened. For now Quin himself slackened his pace. He was sure he had the man, and yet it needed coolness to secure him.

To Quin, Pete had become the very incarnation of the devil, and he was wholly unconscious now that he had ever wronged him. The fact that he had stolen Jenny from him was but an old story. And Pete had brought it upon himself. No one but Quin in the whole world could have known (as Quin did know) that any kindness, any decency of conduct, in Pete would have secured Jenny to him against the world itself. She was pure faithfulness and pure affection, and malleable as wax in any warmth of heart. But Pete had been even as his fellows. He should have wedded some creature of the dust like Annawillee, to whom brutality was but her native mud. And Jenny was a strange blossom such as rarely grows in any tribe or race of men.

It was not of Jenny that Quin thought. He forgot her very danger that night and forgot his own. He even forgot his child. He remembered nothing but the burnt Mill, nothing but the spiked logs. Oh, but he "had it in" for Pete!

"He's burnt my Mill," said Quin. In spite of any help the loss would be heavy, but it was not the loss that Quin thought of: it was of the Mill itself. So fine a creature it was, so live, so quick, so wonderful. Rebuilt it might be, but it would no longer be the Mill that he had made: that he had picked up a mere foundling, as a derelict of the river, and turned to something so like a living thing that he came to love it. Now it was hot ashes, burning embers: the wind played with it. It was dead!

There was no sign of red fire behind them now, but the fire burnt within Quin. The fire was out in Pete. He wished he had never seen Jenny, never seen the Mill, never played the fire. He went blind as he paddled, ever and ever more feebly. If Quin had called to him then the Siwash would have given in: he would have said——

"All right, Mista Quin, I'm done!"

That was his nature: the nature of the Coast Indians, as Long Mac knew it. There wasn't in him or his tilikums, pure-blooded or "breeds," the stuff to stand up against the bitter, hardy White, who had taken their country and their women, and had made a new world where they speared salmon, or each other. He knew he had no chance.

But Quin never spoke, even when he was within twenty yards of his prey.

The terror of the white man got hold of Pete, and the terror of his silence maddened him anew. There was not so much as a grunt out of his pursuer. Pete saw a machine coming after him. It was not a man, it was a thing that ran Indians down and drowned them. So might a steamer, a dread "piah-ship," run down the dug-out of some poor wild Siwash in some unexplored creek. Quin was not a man, or a white man, he was the White Men: the very race. There had always been a touch of the wild race in Pete: an underlying hint of the wrath of those who go under. He had avenged himself, but it was still in vain. The last word was, it seemed, with the deadly thing behind him.

Of a sudden Pete howled. It was a horrid cry: like the cry of a solitary coyoté on a bluff in moonlight on a prairie of the South. The very forests echoed with it, as they had echoed in dim ages past with the war-whoops of other Indians. It made Quin turn his head as he rowed. It was just in time, for with one sweep of his paddle Pete had turned his canoe. The next instant it ran alongside the boat, and Pete with one desperate leap came on board with his bare knife in his hand. He fell upon his knees and scrambled to his feet as Quin, loosing his oars, got to his. The capsized dug-out floated side by side with the boat.

"I fix you," said Pete. Even in the darkness Quin could see the white of his eye, the uplifted hand, the knife. The boat swayed, nearly went over, Pete struck and missed, staggered, threw out his left arm and Quin caught it. The next moment they were both in the river, fighting desperately.

"I fix you," said Pete. They both mouthed water and Quin got his right wrist at last. But not before a blow of Pete's had sliced his ribs and cut a gash that stung like fire.

Both of the men could swim, but swimming was in vain. Both were strong, and now Pete's strength was as the strength of a madman who chooses death in a very passion for the end of all things. He seemed as if made of fine steel, of whip-cord, of something resilient, tense. There was in him that elasticity which enables the great quinnat to overcome the awful stream of the Fraser in its narrow Cañon. It was with difficulty, with deadly difficulty, that Quin held the wrist that controlled the knife. He knew that he must do that even if he drowned. It was his last thought, his last conscious thought, just as Pete's last thought was to free himself and find Quin's heart.

They sank, as they struggled, far below the surface of the flood. Quin held his breath till it seemed that he would burst. His lungs were bursting with blood: his brain fainted for it. He struggled to preserve his power of choice, for it appeared better to be stabbed if even so he could breathe. But even as he fought he was aware in some cool and dreadfully far-off cell of his brain that though he let go he would not yet rise. It was a question of who could last longest. As he was drowning he remembered (and recalled how he had heard the saying) that the other man was probably as bad. He even grinned horribly as he thought this. Then he saw Jenny and the child. The vision passed and he saw the burning Mill. He heard Mac speak, heard the roar of the flames, and the murmur of the crowd. Then he came to the surface and knew where he was, knew that he was alive but at handgrips with Death himself. He sucked in air, filled his lungs and rolled over, and went under once again.

When consciousness is past there is a long space of organized, of purposed, instinctive struggle for life left in a man. So it was with Quin. He knew not that he slipped both hands to Pete's right wrist: he was unaware that when they once more rose Pete howled as his wrist snapped. Even Pete did not know it: he knew that he was a fluid part of nature, suffering agony and yet finding sleep in agony, sleep so exquisite that it was a recompense at last for all the woes of the world. And he was all the world himself, one with the river, one with the night and the great darkness which comes in the end to all. Pete sighed deliciously and sank, and rose and sank again, into the arms of one who was perhaps his mother, perhaps his dear Jenny whom he now loved so tenderly.

And a blind creature, still unconscious, unknowing, hung on to Pete's wrist. That was what Quin thought. But what he hung to was the boat, capsized but still floating, which had gone down stream with them. He was in a cramp of agony: if he could have let go he would have done so, but something not himself, as it seemed, made him hold on. He still fought with the dead man who rolled below him at the bottom of the river.

Then he came back to the knowledge that he was at least alive. Yet at first he was not even sure of that. He was only sure that he suffered, without knowing what it was that suffered. It seemed monstrous that he should be in such agony, in all his limbs and body and brain. But he could not distinguish between them for a long time after he was able to discern, with such curious eyes as an infant may possess, the fact that there were lights in the dim sky. That was the first thing he named.

"Stars!" he said doubtfully.

And then he knew that there was such a creature as a man! He gasped and drew in air again and with it life and more far-off knowledge. He remembered the Mill which was burnt in some ancient day, and Jenny, long since dust, of course. And then the past times marched up to him: he knew they were the present, and that he had lost Pitt River Pete in the river, and that he hung feebly to a capsized boat. The rest of his knowledge of himself was like an awful flood: it was overwhelming: it weakened him and made him cry. Tears ran down his face as he lifted his chin above the water.

And still he floated seaward.

A huge and totally insoluble problem oppressed him. He was aware now that water was not his element. This dawned on him gradually. At first all his remembered feelings were connected with water. He had, it seemed, been born in it. It was very natural to be floating in it. There was at least nothing to contradict its being natural. But now he felt for something with his feet, for he was conscious of them. What he wanted was land. Men walked on land. Houses, yes, houses and Mills were built on land.

That was land over there! It was a million miles off. How did one get so far? To be sure, one swam! He shook his head feebly. One couldn't swim, one would have to let go the boat! He forgot all about the land far a very long time. When he remembered it again with a start it was much nearer, very much nearer. He saw individual trees, knew they were trees. Branches held out their arms to him. Though swimming, was impossible it was no longer wholly ridiculous. He remembered doing it himself. He even remembered learning swimming. He had won a race as a boy in Vermont.

"To be sure," said Quin. The current swept him closer in shore. Something touched his feet. He drew them up sharply and shuddered. Pete was down there somewhere. Oh, yes, but he was dead! Dead men were disagreeable, especially when they had been drowned and not recovered for days in hot weather. He touched bottom again. It was very muddy. It was easy to get stuck in mud. One could drown in it.

"Why, I may be drowned yet," said Quin. It was very surprising to think of!

"No, I won't be drowned," said Quin. "I'll hang on to this boat. Why not?"

Nevertheless the water was cold. It came down from the mountains, from much further off than Caribou and from the Eagle Range. There was snow there.

"I am cold," said Quin. "I ought to get ashore."

The boat itself touched a mud-bank. Quin felt bottom again and just as he was deciding to let go the boat swung off. Quin cried and was very angry.

"I'll do it next time," said Quin. But he didn't. He was afraid to let go. And yet the shore was very close. Once more the boat touched and his feet were quite firm in the mud. But there was a bottom six inches down. He thought he prayed to something, to God perhaps, and then he saw the boat swing away from him. He was quite alone and very solitary. To lose the boat was like losing one's home. He staggered and fell flailing and found bottom with his hands. He hung to the very earth, but was dizzy. He waited quite a while to be sure of himself and then scrambled with infinite and most appalling labour to the shore. His limbs were as heavy as death, as lead. He dragged them after him. He ached.

But at last he came out on the land.

It was earth: he had got there. Was there ever in all human experience such a pleasant spot to lie down on, to sleep in? He just knew there wasn't. He forgot he was wet, that he was cold, that Pete was dead, that he was alive, and he went on his knees and scrabbled like a tired beast at the ground. And then he went to sleep, holding himself with his arms and making strange comfortable little noises.

Sleep rolled over him like a river. Artillery would not have awakened him, nor thunder, nor the curious hands of friends or the hostile claws of creatures of prey.

And within a few minutes of his going to sleep other boats came down the river and passed him.

They picked up the capsized boat.

"Quin's dead then," they told each other.

It was quite possible Quin's body believed that, too. But his warm mind knew better, of course. He had got earth under him, and he warmed it.

XXV

"Oh, oho, the toketie papoosh: I love the papoosh, Jenny's papoosh," said Annawillee, as she held the baby. The shack was lighted by the burning Mill rather than by the stinking slush lamp on the foul table. Jenny cried for her baby, but Annawillee was after all a woman and loved children in her own way. For years she hadn't handled one. Her only child had died. Its father was not Chihuahua.

"Oh, give him me, Annawillee," said Jenny. He was George's child, and now she knew that "Tchorch" was out on the great lonely river, hunting unhappy Pete. Men said they would never come back. Her soul was burning even as the Mill burnt. "Tchorch" loved her and yet had forgotten her.

"Give him to me."

But Annawillee sat on the floor and sang about the papoosh, a song of a poor Klootchman deserted by her man and left with her child:

"Oh, nika tenas
Hyas nika klahowyam,
Hyu keely,
Konaway sun,
Nika tenas.

"Ah, my little one,
Sad am I——
I mourn and weep,
Ah, still must cry,
Ah, my little one, every day!"

Annie screamed at her.

"Pelton Annawillee, halo mamook Jenny keely, make her not mournful, pelton, oh, fool!"

"I love papoosh," said Annawillee. She burst into tears.

"Take heem, Jenny, take yo' papoosh. Mine mimaloose, is dead."

Jenny took the baby to her bosom, and sat down desolately on the edge of Annie's bed. Her body shivered at the foulness of things, even as her soul shivered for fear about George. An hour ago she had been happy, happy, happy! Now——

"Oh, God," she prayed. But she could not weep.

"Jenny, you have dlink, you tak' one dlink, tenas toketie?" said Annie. What else was there but "dlink" for misery, for the loss of a home, for the loss of her man?

But Jenny shook her head.

"I got one," said Annie. For she remembered she had not finished the bottle before she went to sleep by the fire. She hunted for the bottle and found it. It was empty!

"Some dam' tief stealum," screamed Annie. Who could it have been but Annawillee?

"I never takum," yelled Annawillee when the old hag got her by the hair and tugged at it. "You old beast, leggo me. I never tak' um."

Jenny cried out to Annie. It was awful to see this in her agony of grief.

"I get mo'," said Annie. "I got dolla. I find Chihuahua, he buy bottle whisky!"

She went out. Annawillee wrung her hair into a horrid coil and knotted it clumsily at the back of her neck. She cried about her dead papoosh. The tears ran down her dirty face.

Outside the hum and murmur of the crowd still endured. Every now and again there was a crash, as some of the great Mill fell in. Piles of lumber caught: they roared to the skies in wavering columns. The crowd laughed and moaned and roared and was silent, as the sea beach is silent between great breakers.

And George was on the river hunting Pete! Jenny clutched her baby to her bosom. Annawillee went on crying. Then the door opened and Annie came back.

"I send Chihuahua. He get dlink. Dlink velly good for you, Jenny. By-by Shautch Quin come back and say I good to you, and he be good to poor old Annie, who get you for heem, tenas!"

But Jenny only heard her words as part of the sounds of the night. If George did not come back! She moaned dreadfully, and shivered in spite of the heat of the great fire, which made itself felt even in the shack.

"Tchorch, Tchorch!"

She felt him in her arms, as she had held to him when he bore her through the fire. He was a man, a real man. She saw poor Ned, who wasn't one. She saw Mary. But Mary had no child. Poor Mary and poor Annawillee!

The door opened and Chihuahua came in with a bottle.

"You dam' thief, you open um and dlink," said Annie furiously. Chihuahua laughed.

"Hey, hermosa Annie, why you tink I no do dat?"

He was half drunk already. He saw Jenny.

"Hallo, Jenny, peretty Jenny! Peretty womans make mischief. All for dis Pete burn the Moola, and we all out of jhob!"

That was true enough, and Jenny knew it. But Chihuahua was a beast. He came over to her and put his arm about her waist and hugged her.

"I love you, peretty," he whispered; "if de boss no come back, I kick Annawillee out and have you for klootchman!"

It was as if he had struck her down and dragged her in the mud. She turned cold with horror. Oh, if George didn't come back what would she do: what would she do?

"I love you, peretty Jenny!" said the hot breath of the beast. And Annawillee mourned upon the floor, but heard not. Annie took a drink.

"Now, toketie, my own tenas Jenny, you have dlink," said Annie. She spoke in Chinook, and Jenny answered in it. It was the first time she had used the Jargon since she went to George.

"Nika halo tikegh, I no want it," said Jenny.

"You have it, pelton," said Annie. "What for, kahta you so fool? Him velly good whisky."

"Take it, Jenny," said the hot breath in her ear.

"I won't," said Jenny. She knew all it meant now. Again Chihuahua put his arm about her. She wrenched herself away from him and Annawillee saw what her man was doing, and scrambled to her feet.

"Oh, you dam' man you do dat," she screamed jealously, forgetting her dead child and its dead father.

"You s'ut up, dry up," said Chihuahua, "or I keek you, Annawillee."

He took the bottle from Annie and drank.

"I lov' Jenny, toketie Jenny; Jenny mia hermosa muchacha, and she lov' me."

He caught at her again, and Annawillee came at him with her claws. He knocked her down, and she lay where she fell. Annie screamed at him.

"You no do dat, Chihuahua. You leave Jenny alone, man. When Shautch Quin come back he keel you——"

Chihuahua grinned.

"He no come back no more. Pete fix him on the river, I sure of dat, Annie. Jenny she be my klootchman, eh, Jenny!"

Jenny was as white as death. She had lived for more than a year with George and this was hell for her. And if George didn't come back! Chihuahua came staggering to her. She caught the empty bottle by the neck and stared at him with blazing eyes. He stopped.

"You peretty devil!" said Chihuahua. "I lik' kees you all same, Jenny."

"I'll keel you," she whispered. There was murder in her eyes, and drunk as he was he knew it. And Annie had picked up a burnt bar of iron that served her as a poker. Chihuahua quailed before them.

"I on'y jhoke," he said. "My klootchman she Annawillee, very good woman, Annawillee. You geeve me one mo' dolla I get mo' whisky, Annie."

But all Annie had to give him was the iron bar.

"You bad man, you beas', you go!"

And Chihuahua whitened, as he had done more than once before when Annie got mad. He went out like a lamb, and Jenny sat down on the bed, and sobbed for the first time as if her heart would break.

And the fire still burnt, but without great flames. Some of the crowd went home. It was past two o'clock and soon would be dawn.

"You no tak' my man, Jenny?" moaned Annawillee.

"No, no, no," said Jenny.

"Chihuahua him a beas' to me," said Annawillee. "I hat' heem, but I hav' no other man now and I no more a pretty klootchman. What I do if he tak' other klootchman?"

"I rather die, Annawillee," said Jenny.

"Him no so velly bad," said Annawillee, "but easy for young and toketie gal lik' you fin' nodder man."

She murmured, snuffling, a song that the Siwash women often sing:

"Kultus kopet nika,
Spose mika mahsh nika,
Hyu tenas men koolie kopa town,
Alkie wekt nika iskum,
Wake kul kopa nika."

"'Tis naught to me,
If you act so,
For I can see,
Young men who go
About the town, and when I can
I soon will take another man."

"You soon fin' a man, you," said Annawillee. "All men say you toketie. S'pose Shautch Quin mimaloose any man tak' you, Jenny."

"Dat so," said Annie soothingly. "I fin' you Shautch, Jenny, and I queek fin' other one, my pretty Jenny!"

And Jenny's heart was cold within her. For her child's sake perhaps——

And then there came a knock at the door, and her heart leapt again like a babe. Annie opened the door, and outside stood Sam.

"My Missus here, oh, where my Missus?" he cried dolorously. "My loosee my Missus in the clowd!"

Jenny cried out to him.

"Oh, Sam, Sam!"

He had always been good and kind and was clean and bright.

"Oh, Missus here, my heap glad, Missus. What for Missus stay inside house like t'is, no good for Missus, no clean, bah!"

She cried out for George, and Sam shook his head mournfully.

"Boss no come back, Missus, Moola-man say Boss low boat in liver, looksee t'at tief makee fy in Moola and house. Bymby boss catchee. You come, Missus."

But Annie had no mind to let her go.

"Dam' Shinaman, klatawa, you go. Jenny she stay wit' Annie."

She stood in the doorway, and Jenny was behind her. Annawillee went on with her song. "Soon Jenny get another man. That easy for Jenny!"

"Oh, where I go, Sam?"

"My tinkee you go Wong's, Missus. Him velly good man, house heap clean."

"She no go dam' Shinaman," roared Annie.

"I will go," said Jenny.

But Annie slammed the door in Sam's face. The boy was furious.

"All light, Missus! One Moola-man, him Long Mac, wantshee you. My tellee Wong and him. Bymby my comee back. Yah, old cow-woman, Annie!"

He ran to Wong's shack and told the old man he had found the "Missus." By the time they came again to Annie's, Chihuahua and Spanish Joe had gone there and, being more drunk than ever, Chihuahua had burst the door in. Joe tackled Annie and took the iron bar from her. She screamed like a wild-cat in a trap. Both the men went for Jenny, who stood in the corner and shrieked for George and Sam.

"'Ole your tongue, peretty one," said handsome Joe. "I always lov' you; now you be my woman——"

Chihuahua trampled over Annie to get to Jenny.

"She mine, Joe, she mine!"

Joe turned on Chihuahua with a very evil smile, and spoke to him in Spanish.

"I take her, see, Chihuahua!"

Outside, Wong knocked at the door. Perhaps he was not a very brave man. It is not wise to be very brave in an alien country, but he owed a good deal to George Quin and liked him. Sam stood behind him wringing his hands and crying out, "Missus, Missus!"

Joe had her round the waist. Annawillee screamed and held to Chihuahua's legs. He kicked her hard, and panted furiously at Joe.

"You say you help me, Joe!"

"I help myself, you fool," said Joe. Chihuahua had been a mat for him to wipe his feet on for years. "I wait for her; now I have her."

Chihuahua kicked Annawillee again and got free. Annie got up and ran to their end of the room. She caught Joe by the arm: he sent her headlong and she fell against the table. It went over and the lamp fell on the floor. The only light in the room came from the live embers of the great dead Mill.

And suddenly Jenny felt Joe loose her. He made an awful sound, which was not a cry, and something hot and warm gushed upon her bosom. She saw him stagger, saw his arms go up in the air, and heard a growl from Chihuahua.

"Fool," said the Mexican. He had sliced Joe's throat right open and cut his voice and his cry asunder. The Castilian reeled again and fell, and then the door was burst open. Long Mac stood in the opening.

"Jenny, my girl," he cried; But Jenny did not answer. She lay insensible on the bed: she was dyed crimson. Her child screamed, but she heard nothing.

"Long Mac!" said Chihuahua. He feared him always, and now feared all men.

"Jenny here," he said in a quavering voice. And Mac strode in. He stepped across Joe and found Jenny and her child. He took them in his arms, though he ached dreadfully in his set shoulder, and carried them out.

"Missus, oh, Missus," said Sam. Chihuahua crept out after them and then ran into the shadows, casting away his stained knife. Annawillee had lost her man, and the police found him the next day. A poor fool of a white woman in the City shrieked about the dead Castilian. No one but that poor fool was sorry.

XXVI

Mac carried Jenny into Wong's shack, and laid her on the bed. Though the house smelt of China and of opium it was clean as fresh sawdust. They washed the blood from her and the child, while Sam cried, fearing she was hurt. And she came back to consciousness. Mac was very solemn.

"Where the boss, you tink?" asked Wong.

The men who had followed George Quin down the river were home again by now. They brought back with them the empty boat.

"I reckon he's dead," answered Mac. Sam cried, for he was "heap solly." Quin had been a good boss to him and there are many Chinamen who understand that after all, whatever we may say about them.

"Oh, the Missus, the Missus," said Sam. He sat down and sobbed. Jenny opened her eyes and saw old Wong, with a million wrinkles on his kindly face, inscrutable in every feature.

"Tchorch," she murmured. The tears came to Mac's eyes, though he was hard to move and knew much of the bitterness of life.

Wong's face was like that of some carved god who sits in the peace which is undisturbed by human prayer. And yet his hands were kind and his voice gentle. He murmured to himself in his own tongue.

"Where is Tchorch?" asked Jenny. Now she saw Long Mac, whom Quin trusted. She appealed to the strong man.

"He has not returned, ma'am," said Mac. She was no longer a little Siwash klootchman to him, but a bereaved woman.

She looked at him long and steadfastly, and read his face. She was an Indian, after all, and could endure much.

"My baby," she said. Sam had the boy. He gave it her. She murmured something to the fatherless, and lay back with him in her arms, She motioned to Mac and he came nearer.

"Is Tchorch dead, Mister Maclan?"

She could not speak his name.

"I'm afraid so, ma'am," he answered.

"Have they found him?"

"Only the empty boat."

Then no one spoke. She turned her head away, Outside the dawn came up and looked down on ashes. In the distance they heard Annawillee mourning. She sat in the road with dust upon her head, like an Indian widow.

"I loved Tchorch," said Jenny. Then she rose in the bed and shrieked awfully.

"I want Tchorch, I want Tchorch!"

She was like steel under the powerful hands of the man who sat by her.

"Oh, ma'am," said Mac. He said—"I've lost many."

The tears ran down his face. Sam was like a reed shaken by the wind. Old Wong stood by the window and stared across the river, now open to the view, since the Mill was gone.

"My poor girl!"

She held his hand now as if it was life itself. And yet it might have been as if he were Death.

"He was so good," she said.

It wasn't what many would have said. But Mac understood: for he had lost many, and some said that he, too, was a hard man.

She lay back again. Wong still stood by the window without moving. He, too, had lost one he loved; she, who was to have brought him children who would have honoured his ashes and his ancestral spirit, was dead in child-birth far away across the long, long paths of ocean.

But now he looked across the river as the dawn shone upon its silver flood. Perhaps he looked at something. It seemed so to Sam, who rose and went to him. The old man spoke to him very quietly. They both went outside.

"Tchorch is dead," said Jenny.

But Tchorch was not dead. Something spoke of hope to Mac, something he didn't understand. Perhaps the wise old Wong could have explained it. He and Sam stood by the wharf and looked across the river to the further bank. His eyes were strong, they were the eyes of an old man who can see far. Now he saw something on the other bank, something moving in the half darkness of the dawn. As the day grew, even Sam saw that a man came stumbling along the bank of the shore. Who was it?

"Oh, even yet he may not be dead, Jenny," said Mac. It was as if some dawn grew in him because the dawn grew in the East: some hope within him because there was hope in the heart of a poor serving boy and a wise old man. She clutched his hand.

"Tchorch was very strong," she said.

And Sam came walking to the door.

"Wong wantchee see you, Sir," he said. He came in without raising his eyes. Mac pressed Jenny's hand and went out.

"Oh, Missus," said Sam.

His heart was full.

Though the river was wide the day was now bright. A strong man's voice might reach across it in a windless time. But strong men may be weak, if they have struggled.

Wong stood still as Mac came up to him. Though he could see so well he was a little deaf.

"What is it, Wong?" asked Mac. Even as he spoke it seemed to him that he heard a faint far-off call.

"My tinkee t'at Mista Quin," said Wong as he pointed across the river. He spoke as quietly as if he had said that he thought he could see the rosy cone of Mount Baker shining in the rising sun.

"You think—oh, hell!" said Mac.

He smote Wong on the shoulder and the old man turned to him. There was something like a smile upon his face at last.

"Ta't the boss fo' su'," he said; "my can see."

Mac ran a little way up-stream, past the burnt wharves, and came to one where there was a boat. He thrust it down the shore into the water and forgot his aching shoulder, bad as it was.

"Oh, poor Jenny, poor Jenny!" he said. He heard the call again.

"That's Quin's call. By the Holy Mackinaw that's him," said Mac. Now that he knew, the ache came back to him. He pulled in one oar and sculled the boat from the stern with the other.

And George Quin sat down on the edge of the water and waited.

"If he says 'How's Jenny?' first of all, I'll recken he's worth the little klootchman," said Mac. He saw Quin rise up and stand waiting. He was torn to rags and still soaking, but his face was strong and calm.

"That you, Quin?" asked Mac.

"That's me," said Quin. Then he spoke aright.

"How's Jenny, old man?"

"All hunkey," said Mac. "But we tho't you was mimaloose."

"Pete is," said Quin. He climbed into the boat stiffly. His wound smarted bitterly, but he said nothing of it.

"You must have had a close call, Quin."

"Tol'rable," said Quin. "Where's the little woman?"

"Old Wong's lookin' after her. 'Twas him spotted you over here."

"Wong's all right," said Quin. "'Tis a clean sweep of the old Moola, Mac."

"That's what," said Mac. They came to the shore. When they were both on dry land Mac held out his hand.

"Shake," he said.

They "shook," and walked up to the road.

"You and the little gal kin hev my house till you've time to look araound," said Mac. "It's not dandy, but I reckon you can make out in it."

Quin nodded.

"Right," he said. He stood still for a minute and looked at the open space where the Mill had been.

"You and me and the boys will build the old Moola up again, Mac," said Quin.

"Oh, I reckon," said Mac.

And Quin went across the road to Shack-Town and came to Wong's. The old man saluted him gravely.

"You're all right," said Quin. What more could any man say?

He heard a cry inside the shack, and Sam came out with the papoose in his arms.

"Oh, Mista Quin, my heap glad you not dead, my heap glad!"

"You damn fool," said Quin with a smile. He went in and found Jenny.

"Tchorch!" she said.

"Jenny, my girl!"

He held her in his arms and she laid her head upon his heart.

"Tchorch!" she murmured.

"Oh, but you've had a time," said George.

"I jhoost want Tchorch," said Jenny.

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