XIII
B.C., as the boys call it, or British Columbia, is most undoubtedly a wonderful place, a first-class place, even if the bottom falls out of it periodically and booms die down into slumps and the world becomes weary. But the odd thing is that it is a country which is, so to speak, all one gut, like a herring. The Fraser Cañon is the gate of the lower country and the gate of the upper country. There's only one way up and down, tilikum, unless you are a crazy prospector or a cracked hunter. Though the great River itself comes from the North past Lillooet and by, and from, Cariboo, yet the main line of men and railroads and wanderers to and fro lies rather by the blue Thompson than the grey Fraser.
You meet Bill and Charlie and Tom and Jack and Dick and Harry on the road. You liquor with them at Yale, where the Cañon opens: you toss for drinks with them at French Charlie's, you climb Jackass Mountain with them (or meet them there) and again discuss work and railroading and sawmills and Mr. Vanderdunk, the Contractor, at Lytton. You run against your partner or the man you quarrelled or fought with at Savona. You see Mrs. Grey or Brown or Robinson at Eight Mile Creek. Very likely you get full up at Oregon Pete's with the man you last met at Kamloops, or the son of a gun who worked alongside you at the Inlet. On the Shushwap you tumble up against your brother, maybe, in a sternwheeler, and at Eagle Pass you give cigars (5 cents Punches!) to a dozen whose nicknames you know and whose names you don't.
Properly speaking there are few ways into B.C. Perhaps there are none out. It is a devil of a country for getting to know every man jack in it. From the Columbia Crossing, or even from the summit of the Rockies down to the Inlet, and the City of Vancouver (in Pete's time mere forest and as thick as a wheatfield), it's the Main Street.
The fact of the matter is that the whole of the Slope, the Pacific Slope, is only one Main Street. It begins to dawn on a man on the Slope, that in a very few years he might know everyone from the Rocky Mountains down to Victoria and to Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and San Francisco. Men wander to and fro like damned souls or migratory salmon or caribou.
Pete, you know, knew everyone in B.C. by sight, more or less. There wasn't a shebang on the road he wasn't familiar with. He came on chaps here and there who said "Klahya" or "What ho!" or "Hell, it ain't you?" or "Thunder, it's old Pete, so it is." He felt familiar with the road, with the Cañon, with every house, every loafer, every bummer, every "goldarned drifting son of a gun" who went up and down like a log in the tide-way, or round and round like one in a whirlpool, betwixt the Victoria beginning and the Rocky Mountain End. When he had been full of Mills and Canneries he used to mosey off up-country. When he was soaked by the Wet Belt and the wet rains he pined for the Dry Belt. When the high dry plateaus of the Dry Belt dried him up, he thought of the soft days lower down, or higher up in the Upper Wet Belt of the Shushwap. One can swap climate for climate in a few hours.
Now the frost of the lower country, of the lower Fraser, with its intervals of warm Chinook wind and rain, sickened Pete. He put in a lot of time at old Smith's, but by the end of February he was keen on climbing higher. Old Smith got on his nerves, good old soul though he was, and of course Pete couldn't stick to one "jhob." Old Cultus seemed so good a chap, and Pete thought it would be a fine thing to put his legs across a cayuse once more and go a-riding, whooping hell and thunder out of the steers. And he had come nigh to forgetting Jenny. When he thought of her his face looked devilish, but he thought of her seldom.
"She bad klootchman, yah," said Pete. But he couldn't go yet. He waited for the harder frost to go, for the big ice, then two feet thick, to break again in the lower river. Then the Mill would start, and he would hear of the spiked logs.
"That make Quin sick," said Pete. So he hung on and waited, knowing he would hear. It couldn't be long. Men from the City said that things had been tough that winter in Shack-Town. He heard at intervals about this chap or that: about Skookum, good old Skookum, and Chihuahua, who had been jailed for a jag which was of portentous dimensions, leading him to assault a policeman Up Town. The "bulls" yanked Chihuahua in and he got it hot, officially and otherwise, as a man will in the calaboose.
Then the River cracked loudly: the ice roared and broke, and piled itself up in bars and ridges and grumbled and swung and went away with the ebb and up with the flood, roaring all the time.
"Now they start up the Moola queek," said Pete as day by day he saw less ice. The rain poured down and the river was almost in flood already, though the winter held up-country, of course. When the frost broke in the wet Cascades and up in Cariboo, and in the head waters of the forking Thompson, there would be a proper amount of water in the Cañon.
And still he waited.
But in the Mill they started at last, and came nigh to the end of the Mill boom before they could get a steamer to tow them up the new boom. Then they got it, and Pete heard that it was there.
"I make heem sick," said Pete, still waiting. And the spiked logs waited. Their time must come.
It came at last, and of that day men of the Hills still speak.
It was one of Ginger White's devilish days, when he hated himself and his kind and was willing to burst himself if he could make others sigh or groan. He ran the crew of the Mill almost to death, and death came at last as the day died down and found them running the saws screaming in logs still cold within. For the winter left the men soft: they had been half-fed, many of them: they had lived idle lives, and found work hard on their hands, hard on their muscles. But Ginger never failed when the devil was in him. The winter was over: he wanted to work, for he was all behind with money.
"I'll make 'em sweat, I'll make 'em skip," said Ginger.
That day Quin was much in the Mill, and he was there when the lightning struck Skookum Charlie: when the saws spouted fire. He, too, was glad to get back to labour: to the doing of things. And he loved the Mill, as many did.
It was a great log of spruce that carried death within it. High up above the Saws hung a lamp so that Skookum and his partner could see the cut as well as feel it. The whole Mill squealed and trembled: every machine within it ran full blast: the song of the Mill was great.
"Oh, heave and roll," said the Bull-Wheel. They got the log on the carriage, drove in the dogs and Ginger sent her at the eager saws. He cut the slab off, and then set her for an eight-inch cant and got her half through, when the lightning came.
There was a horrid rip, a grinding, deafening crash and streams of fire came out of the cut log. On top of it was Skookum driving home a wedge. He drove it deep and deeper, and as the crash came, Quin stood where he had stood when Pete went for him. There was another horrid scream as the smashed saw broke and hurled a jagged quadrant upward from the cut.
"Oh, Christ!" said those who saw. At Quin's red feet, a bloody corpse lay, for the saw had sliced Skookum nigh in two, shearing through flesh and bones, ribs and spine. For one moment he was helped to his feet by the thing that cut his life out, and he stood upon the log, with a howl torn out of his very lungs, and then pitched headlong on the floor.
There came screams from the far end of the Mill, for another segment of the saw had flown out straight, and, striking a roller, came up slanting from it, and disembowelled a wretched Chinaman. He stood and squealed lamentably and then looked at himself and lay down and died.
And all the Mill ceased and men came running even from below.
"My God," said Quin.
But Ginger said nothing. Terror had hold of him. He leant against the deadly log and vomited. Every lamp in the Mill was held up in two circles, one about Skookum and the other about the Chinaman. Faces as white as the dead men's looked at the dead.
That night Skookum's klootchman sat with loosed hair howling over the body of her good and stupid man. And by her Annie and Annawillee mourned.
And many thought of Pete. Among them were Quin and his klootchman Jenny, who understood the nature of the man who had been her man and was now no better than a murderer.
"I done it, I," said Jenny; "if I stay with Pete this no happen!"
She cried all night and "Tchorch" could not comfort her. Nor could he sleep till in his rage he cursed her, and came nigh to striking her. Then she crept into his arms and tried to soothe him, and wept no more.
The next day Pete started up-country, for Kamloops.
"I never mean to kill Skookum," he said with a white face. "I never mean to keel him. I lik' Skookum."
The poor fool cried.