"Hell he is," said Mac pensively; "has he had trouble with White?"
But Quin hadn't heard of it. Just of late White hadn't gone to the office with so many complaints. Since the spiking of the logs Quin had been less easy to deal with. He was troubled in his mind about Pete, and about Jenny. If Pete had spiked the logs, as Quin believed, he was capable of anything. And poor little Jenny was about to be a mother. It wouldn't be more than a month or two now.
Until Jenny had come into his life in real earnest, the Mill, the Stick Moola, had been the man's whole desire. He loved it amazingly: there wasn't a plank in it he didn't love, just as there wasn't a job in it that he couldn't do in some fashion, and no fool's fashion either. He had run the old Moola "good and strong," caring for everything, seeing that it had the best of everything. There wasn't a makeshift in it: it was a good Mill and Quin was a good manager. An accident of any kind hit him hard. For accidents there must and will be when saws are cutting lumber. To have a man killed troubled him, even if it were a sheer accident. But to have a man killed by a spiked log was very dreadful to him. It was the more dreadful that he had provoked the spiking. It shook Quin up more than he had ever been shaken. It broke his nerve a little, just as it had broken Ginger's. And by now he was very fond of Jenny, even if he cursed her, as he sometimes did. He dreaded this devil of a Pete, who wasn't the kind of Siwash that one found among the meaner tribes, the fishing, begging Indians. He had some red and ugly blood in him. He got on Quin's nerves.
And then Mary was Pete's sister. If she hadn't been he would never have known Jenny, and if he had given Pete a job it would have been like giving it to any Siwash. Now Pete would be more than ever down on them both. George began to think it worth while to find out where Pete was. He sent up to Kamloops to ask. At the same time he sent word to the hospital that Mary was to have anything she wanted. There was a deal of good in George Quin, and somehow little Jenny brought it out.
The poor girl in the hospital knew there was good in him. And in the old days there had been good in Ned. Even now she loved him. When they asked her how she had come to be injured, she declared that it was not Ned who had done it. She said that as she lay swathed in bandages before she knew how much she had been hurt. She said it with white lips that trembled when she had seen herself for the first time in the looking-glass. Perhaps few women would have been so brave, for she knew that henceforth no one would look on her without strange white bandages to hide the wound which her mad-man had made. For she had been beautiful, and even now there was beauty in her eyes and in the sunken cheek and curved chin that had been spared. But henceforth she went half covered in white linen, since none but a doctor could bear to look upon her without it.
"It wasn't Ned that did it," she said to the Law when it came to her. "It was a stranger."
And everyone knew better than that, unless indeed too much liquor had made Ned a stranger.
"I want to see Ned," she murmured. And yet she was very strong. A weak thing would have died. But she loved life greatly, though she wondered why. She made one of the nurses write to her man saying that she wanted him. That brought Ned back from Seattle. George received him sullenly. Jenny refused to see him.
"Watch out for Pete," said George when his brother went up-country.
"Pete, oh, to thunder with Pete," replied Ned.