They dragged Pete out at Ashcroft and put him and his bundle on the dry prairie, where the depôt was. He woke late at night and found his throat so parched that he could not speak to the darkness that closed about him. There wasn't a soul in the depôt, and not a shack or shebang handy. The dread collection of wallows described as a town was a mile off across the prairie, and Pete groaned as he set out for the lights of the biggest grog shanty there. He hadn't a red in his sack, to say nothing of a dime or two-bits, but some charitably disposed railroader, a Finn it was, gave him a drink, and he sat down in a corner along with a dozen others and went to sleep. In the morning he raised another drink, and set off for Kamloops, just as the railroad work began. He was asked to stop a dozen times, but he wasn't keen. "I go to Kamloops," he answered.
He humped himself and got to Sayona's Ferry in quick time, for someone gave him a lift on the road. He found a sternwheeler on the point of starting for Kamloops, and knowing the engineer and the fireman, who was a Siwash too, they shoved him in the stokehold and made him work his passage. Two hours of mighty labour with billets of firewood sweated the drink out of him, and by the time they were alongside the Kamloops shore he was something of a man again.
He found some tilikums in the town and recited his woes to them, telling them all about Jenny having quit him to go with Quin, who was Cultus Muckamuck's brother. He asked about his sister Mary, and about old Cultus.
"Cultus pahtlum evly sun, dlunk all the time now," said a Dry Belt Indian named Jimmy. "Nika manitsh Mary, I see Mary. She very sad with a black eye."
Pete was furious. Mary was older than he by five years and had been a mother to him when their mother went under. If he loved anyone he loved Mary.
"I wish I had a gun," said Pete. "I tell Cultus if he bad to Mary I kill heem."
He was almost bewildered by a sense of general and bitter injustice. Hadn't he been a good man to Jenny? Hadn't he been a good worker in the Mill? But Jenny had left him for the man he had worked for. Then instead of killing Quin or Ginger White he had killed poor old Skookum. He hadn't meant to kill him, but if the law knew he would be hanged all the same. And now poor Mary was having a bad time with old Cultus. When Cultus got mad, he was very dangerous, Pete knew that.
"Mary's a damn fool to stay with him," said Pete. "I tell her to leave heem. I get wu'k here, in the Mill. She live with me."
He went to the Kamloops Mill to look for work. They were full up and couldn't give him a show. But one of the men who knew him gave him a dollar and that made Pete happier. He raised a drink with it, a whole bottle of liquid lightning, and he didn't start for Cultus's ranche that day.
It was an awful pity he didn't. For Cultus had been in town that morning and had taken two bottles back with him. He had been drinking for weeks and was close upon delirium tremens. He had horrid fits of shaking.