The prey of the strongest

by Morley Roberts

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!