XVIII
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.