Next morning Pete rode on a hired horse towards the Nikola, being full of liquor ere he set out with a bottle in his pocket. He had tried to buy a gun, a six-shooter, but there are few in most British Columbia towns, and those who wore them by habit, in spite of the law, were not sellers. When a man has carried a "gun" for years he feels cold and helpless without it. That's one of the facts that are facts, tilikum.
But Pete didn't care. There were such things as shovels, said Pete furiously.
It was a heavenly bright morning, and the far distance of the warm hills, rising in terraces above the Lake, shone clear and warm. Such is the summer there, so sweet, so tender, so clear, and every day is a bride of kindly earth.
Pete rode hard and saw nothing but the wan aspect of his sister, and the giggling jeer of Jenny, clad in scarlet and bright shame.
The good brown earth with the lordly bull-pines scattered on rising hills was very fair to look upon. On the higher levels of the terraces were pools of shining lakes: some shone with shores of alkali and some were pure sweet water.
Pete, riding a doomed man however he wrought, drank no pure water with his heart. He sucked bitter water from the bitterest lakes, poor fool, going to do his duty, as his Indian blood said, and as much white blood would have said as well.
The sun, unclouded as it was, shone without the fierceness of the later summer. The grass, though it was browned, had still sap within it.
Pete rode half-drunken, with fire within him.
And then at last he topped the rise that hid Ned's shack. He saw a woman by the shack, and with his eyes discerned even from afar that she wore white linen on her head. But he could not hear her sing. And yet poor Mary sang: it seemed that out of her sorrow there had grown so great a joy that song would come from her wounded healing heart.
Pete rode down the trail. So in fine weather among the hills a storm may break. So may a cyclone, a tornado, approach a city. So may fire burst out at quiet, sleepy midnight. In one moment there was horror in the happy and repentant and praying home where Ned and Mary had come together once again.