XXIV
The canoe in which Pete had set out in his great adventure was both heavy and cranky, and no one but a Siwash of the river or the Lakes would have paddled it a mile without disaster. But he had been bred in the sturgeon-haunted water of Pitt River, and knew the ways of his craft and could use the single-bladed paddle with the same skill that he showed with the maul and wedges on a great sawlog. Now as he left the light of the fired Mill behind him he knew (or feared) that he had not left his enemies behind him as well. The whole of the Mill would be his enemies. That he was sure of: he remembered poor old Skookum Charlie. He understood the minds of those he had endangered as well as the heart of such a man as Quin. And if Quin himself had escaped from the fire of the house he would be on the river! That Pete was sure of in his heart. And his heart failed him even as he swept outward on the first of the ebb, which ran fast, being now reinforced by the waters of the big river fed by the melting snows of a thousand miles of snow-clad hills.
This was, indeed, the nature of the man, as Long Mac knew it. He was capable of fierce resentment, capable of secret though unsubtle revenge, but he was not capable of standing up like a man at the stake of necessity; not his the blood of those nobler Indians of the Plains who could endure all things at the last. His blood was partly water, of a truth, and now it melted within him.
"They catch me fo' su'e," said Pete. His muscles weakened, his very soul was feeble. What a fool, a thrice-sodden fool, he had been to cut the hose in the Mill. But for that they might not have known he had fired it. But Long Mac knew, and perhaps Long Mac himself, who had nerves and muscles of steel, was out after him in the night. Oh, rather even Quin than that man, whom Quin himself treated with a courtesy he denied to all the others who worked for him.
But now the light of the Mill faded. On both sides of the river were heavy shadows: the great moving flood was but a mirror of darkness and a few stars that flicked silver into the lip and lap of the moving waters. Pete knew the ebb and current ran fastest in the middle of the stream, and yet to be out in the middle meant that he would be seen easier, if indeed he was pursued. He could not make up his mind whether to chance this or not. He sheered from the centre to the banks and back again. And every now and again it seemed to him that it would be wisest to run ashore, turn his dugout loose and take to the brush. And yet he did not do it. He was weak, now that fear was in him, and the alcohol died out of him, and he felt renewed pangs of hunger. To wander in the thick brush would be fatal. They would renew their search on the morrow: every avenue of escape would be guarded. And hunger would so tame the little spirit he had within him that he would give himself up.
"They hang me, they hang me," he said piteously, even as Ned Quin had said it. But there was none to help him. The very men who had been his brothers, his tilikums, would give him up now.
He cursed himself and Jenny and Quin and the memory of Skookum Charlie. He took the centre of the river at last and paddled hard. It was his only chance. If he could but get out to sea and then run ashore somewhere in the Territory, among some of the Washington Indians who knew nothing of him, he would be hard to find. The very thought of this helped him. He might escape after all.
And then his ears told he was not to escape so easily. He heard the sound of oars in the rowlocks of a boat. Or was it only the beating of his own heart? He could not locate the sound. At one moment it seemed to him that after all it was but someone further down the river and then it seemed behind him. If it were down stream it might be only some stray salmon boat doing its poor best in a bad year. Even they would say they had met him. He ceased to row and sheered across towards the darkest shadow of the bank.
And, as he sheered inwards, from behind the last bend of that very bank there shot a boat which was inshore of him. For Quin knew the river below the City as Pete did not, and he had kept in the strongest of the stream, which sometimes cut its deepest channel close to the shore. He was but a hundred yards from Pete when the Sitcum Siwash saw him and knew it was Quin.
Here the great river below the Island, where North and South Arms were one, was at its widest. And by the way his enemy came Pete knew that his hour had arrived. Though he paddled for awhile in sheer desperation he knew that his wretched heavy dug-out had no chance against a light boat, driven by the strongest arms in the City, perhaps the strongest in the whole country. And Quin was an oarsman and had loved the water always. The wretched fugitive changed his tune even as he strove in vain.
"He fix me, oh, he fix me——!"
Hot as he was with paddling, the cold sweat now ran down his brow and cheeks. He felt his heart fail within him: he felt his muscles fail. Yet still he strove and kept a distance between himself and Quin that only slowly lessened. For now Quin himself slackened his pace. He was sure he had the man, and yet it needed coolness to secure him.
To Quin, Pete had become the very incarnation of the devil, and he was wholly unconscious now that he had ever wronged him. The fact that he had stolen Jenny from him was but an old story. And Pete had brought it upon himself. No one but Quin in the whole world could have known (as Quin did know) that any kindness, any decency of conduct, in Pete would have secured Jenny to him against the world itself. She was pure faithfulness and pure affection, and malleable as wax in any warmth of heart. But Pete had been even as his fellows. He should have wedded some creature of the dust like Annawillee, to whom brutality was but her native mud. And Jenny was a strange blossom such as rarely grows in any tribe or race of men.
It was not of Jenny that Quin thought. He forgot her very danger that night and forgot his own. He even forgot his child. He remembered nothing but the burnt Mill, nothing but the spiked logs. Oh, but he "had it in" for Pete!
"He's burnt my Mill," said Quin. In spite of any help the loss would be heavy, but it was not the loss that Quin thought of: it was of the Mill itself. So fine a creature it was, so live, so quick, so wonderful. Rebuilt it might be, but it would no longer be the Mill that he had made: that he had picked up a mere foundling, as a derelict of the river, and turned to something so like a living thing that he came to love it. Now it was hot ashes, burning embers: the wind played with it. It was dead!
There was no sign of red fire behind them now, but the fire burnt within Quin. The fire was out in Pete. He wished he had never seen Jenny, never seen the Mill, never played the fire. He went blind as he paddled, ever and ever more feebly. If Quin had called to him then the Siwash would have given in: he would have said——
"All right, Mista Quin, I'm done!"
That was his nature: the nature of the Coast Indians, as Long Mac knew it. There wasn't in him or his tilikums, pure-blooded or "breeds," the stuff to stand up against the bitter, hardy White, who had taken their country and their women, and had made a new world where they speared salmon, or each other. He knew he had no chance.
But Quin never spoke, even when he was within twenty yards of his prey.
The terror of the white man got hold of Pete, and the terror of his silence maddened him anew. There was not so much as a grunt out of his pursuer. Pete saw a machine coming after him. It was not a man, it was a thing that ran Indians down and drowned them. So might a steamer, a dread "piah-ship," run down the dug-out of some poor wild Siwash in some unexplored creek. Quin was not a man, or a white man, he was the White Men: the very race. There had always been a touch of the wild race in Pete: an underlying hint of the wrath of those who go under. He had avenged himself, but it was still in vain. The last word was, it seemed, with the deadly thing behind him.
Of a sudden Pete howled. It was a horrid cry: like the cry of a solitary coyoté on a bluff in moonlight on a prairie of the South. The very forests echoed with it, as they had echoed in dim ages past with the war-whoops of other Indians. It made Quin turn his head as he rowed. It was just in time, for with one sweep of his paddle Pete had turned his canoe. The next instant it ran alongside the boat, and Pete with one desperate leap came on board with his bare knife in his hand. He fell upon his knees and scrambled to his feet as Quin, loosing his oars, got to his. The capsized dug-out floated side by side with the boat.
"I fix you," said Pete. Even in the darkness Quin could see the white of his eye, the uplifted hand, the knife. The boat swayed, nearly went over, Pete struck and missed, staggered, threw out his left arm and Quin caught it. The next moment they were both in the river, fighting desperately.
"I fix you," said Pete. They both mouthed water and Quin got his right wrist at last. But not before a blow of Pete's had sliced his ribs and cut a gash that stung like fire.
Both of the men could swim, but swimming was in vain. Both were strong, and now Pete's strength was as the strength of a madman who chooses death in a very passion for the end of all things. He seemed as if made of fine steel, of whip-cord, of something resilient, tense. There was in him that elasticity which enables the great quinnat to overcome the awful stream of the Fraser in its narrow Cañon. It was with difficulty, with deadly difficulty, that Quin held the wrist that controlled the knife. He knew that he must do that even if he drowned. It was his last thought, his last conscious thought, just as Pete's last thought was to free himself and find Quin's heart.
They sank, as they struggled, far below the surface of the flood. Quin held his breath till it seemed that he would burst. His lungs were bursting with blood: his brain fainted for it. He struggled to preserve his power of choice, for it appeared better to be stabbed if even so he could breathe. But even as he fought he was aware in some cool and dreadfully far-off cell of his brain that though he let go he would not yet rise. It was a question of who could last longest. As he was drowning he remembered (and recalled how he had heard the saying) that the other man was probably as bad. He even grinned horribly as he thought this. Then he saw Jenny and the child. The vision passed and he saw the burning Mill. He heard Mac speak, heard the roar of the flames, and the murmur of the crowd. Then he came to the surface and knew where he was, knew that he was alive but at handgrips with Death himself. He sucked in air, filled his lungs and rolled over, and went under once again.
When consciousness is past there is a long space of organized, of purposed, instinctive struggle for life left in a man. So it was with Quin. He knew not that he slipped both hands to Pete's right wrist: he was unaware that when they once more rose Pete howled as his wrist snapped. Even Pete did not know it: he knew that he was a fluid part of nature, suffering agony and yet finding sleep in agony, sleep so exquisite that it was a recompense at last for all the woes of the world. And he was all the world himself, one with the river, one with the night and the great darkness which comes in the end to all. Pete sighed deliciously and sank, and rose and sank again, into the arms of one who was perhaps his mother, perhaps his dear Jenny whom he now loved so tenderly.
And a blind creature, still unconscious, unknowing, hung on to Pete's wrist. That was what Quin thought. But what he hung to was the boat, capsized but still floating, which had gone down stream with them. He was in a cramp of agony: if he could have let go he would have done so, but something not himself, as it seemed, made him hold on. He still fought with the dead man who rolled below him at the bottom of the river.
Then he came back to the knowledge that he was at least alive. Yet at first he was not even sure of that. He was only sure that he suffered, without knowing what it was that suffered. It seemed monstrous that he should be in such agony, in all his limbs and body and brain. But he could not distinguish between them for a long time after he was able to discern, with such curious eyes as an infant may possess, the fact that there were lights in the dim sky. That was the first thing he named.
"Stars!" he said doubtfully.
And then he knew that there was such a creature as a man! He gasped and drew in air again and with it life and more far-off knowledge. He remembered the Mill which was burnt in some ancient day, and Jenny, long since dust, of course. And then the past times marched up to him: he knew they were the present, and that he had lost Pitt River Pete in the river, and that he hung feebly to a capsized boat. The rest of his knowledge of himself was like an awful flood: it was overwhelming: it weakened him and made him cry. Tears ran down his face as he lifted his chin above the water.
And still he floated seaward.
A huge and totally insoluble problem oppressed him. He was aware now that water was not his element. This dawned on him gradually. At first all his remembered feelings were connected with water. He had, it seemed, been born in it. It was very natural to be floating in it. There was at least nothing to contradict its being natural. But now he felt for something with his feet, for he was conscious of them. What he wanted was land. Men walked on land. Houses, yes, houses and Mills were built on land.
That was land over there! It was a million miles off. How did one get so far? To be sure, one swam! He shook his head feebly. One couldn't swim, one would have to let go the boat! He forgot all about the land far a very long time. When he remembered it again with a start it was much nearer, very much nearer. He saw individual trees, knew they were trees. Branches held out their arms to him. Though swimming, was impossible it was no longer wholly ridiculous. He remembered doing it himself. He even remembered learning swimming. He had won a race as a boy in Vermont.
"To be sure," said Quin. The current swept him closer in shore. Something touched his feet. He drew them up sharply and shuddered. Pete was down there somewhere. Oh, yes, but he was dead! Dead men were disagreeable, especially when they had been drowned and not recovered for days in hot weather. He touched bottom again. It was very muddy. It was easy to get stuck in mud. One could drown in it.
"Why, I may be drowned yet," said Quin. It was very surprising to think of!
"No, I won't be drowned," said Quin. "I'll hang on to this boat. Why not?"
Nevertheless the water was cold. It came down from the mountains, from much further off than Caribou and from the Eagle Range. There was snow there.
"I am cold," said Quin. "I ought to get ashore."
The boat itself touched a mud-bank. Quin felt bottom again and just as he was deciding to let go the boat swung off. Quin cried and was very angry.
"I'll do it next time," said Quin. But he didn't. He was afraid to let go. And yet the shore was very close. Once more the boat touched and his feet were quite firm in the mud. But there was a bottom six inches down. He thought he prayed to something, to God perhaps, and then he saw the boat swing away from him. He was quite alone and very solitary. To lose the boat was like losing one's home. He staggered and fell flailing and found bottom with his hands. He hung to the very earth, but was dizzy. He waited quite a while to be sure of himself and then scrambled with infinite and most appalling labour to the shore. His limbs were as heavy as death, as lead. He dragged them after him. He ached.
But at last he came out on the land.
It was earth: he had got there. Was there ever in all human experience such a pleasant spot to lie down on, to sleep in? He just knew there wasn't. He forgot he was wet, that he was cold, that Pete was dead, that he was alive, and he went on his knees and scrabbled like a tired beast at the ground. And then he went to sleep, holding himself with his arms and making strange comfortable little noises.
Sleep rolled over him like a river. Artillery would not have awakened him, nor thunder, nor the curious hands of friends or the hostile claws of creatures of prey.
And within a few minutes of his going to sleep other boats came down the river and passed him.
They picked up the capsized boat.
"Quin's dead then," they told each other.
It was quite possible Quin's body believed that, too. But his warm mind knew better, of course. He had got earth under him, and he warmed it.