"Good-looking gal, Joe," said Pete Staley.
Joe grunted by way of affirmation.
Joe Mixer was a well-known character up and down the Campbell. Outside he had been a butcher, they said, and had come North owing to an unpleasantness following upon his attempt to carve a piece of human meat. He was a factor in the little community of the river by reason of his bulk and the noise he made, but privately he was not regarded with much affection. In a rough, new society much is condoned through the fear of being thought self-righteous. The first commandment of the frontier is: Thou shalt not appear any better than thy neighbour. Hence Joe was accepted for one of the crowd, while stories were circulated behind his back of lingering butchering tendencies, of a dog he had tortured, of a native woman who had sought safety from him through a priest.
"Who is she?" asked Staley.
"Darned if I know," said Wes'. "She ain't any of the Cheval Noir crowd, that's sure, or from Campbell Lake neither. Says she's goin' to your dump at Gisborne."
"She come down the river on a little raft early yesterday morning," said Matthews, the engineer. "Five o'clock it was, I guess. I come out on deck to take a look at the sky, and I seen her landing below Thomson's store there. Thinking nobody saw her, she pushed the raft off in the current."
"They're a sly lot," said Staley. "A white man never can tell what they're up to."
They continued to discuss Nahnya with a freedom that caused Ralph to grind his teeth. To avoid arousing their suspicions he was obliged to keep a smooth face, and to enter into the discussion. Up to this time Ralph had thought of these four as "good enough heads" and had drunk with them at Maroney's like everybody else. Now they suddenly seemed like foul-mouthed satyrs that a man ought to knock down one by one for decency's sake. They were not as bad as all that, of course; the change was in Ralph, not in them.
Finally Joe said with what seemed to Ralph an egregious display of male vanity: "I can handle them. I'll find out who she is."
He went inside the deckhouse with a propitiatory leer on his fat red face that caused Ralph's gorge to rise. Ralph sat on pins and needles watching out of the corners of his eyes, and straining his ears in vain to hear what was said.