Part 10

"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.