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.
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."
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.