Part 3

"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!"