II
There were times when the Mill ate wood all night long, but such times were rare, for now the City of the Fraser was not booming. She sat sombrely by her bright waters and moaned the bitter fact that the railway was not coming her way, but was to thrust out its beak into the waters of the Inlet. The City was a little sad, a little bitter, her wharves were deserted, dank, lonely. She saw no great future before her: houses in her precincts were empty: men spoke scornfully of her beauty and exalted Granville and the forests whence Vancouver should spring.
But for such as worked in the Mill the City was enough. They lived their little lives, strove manfully or poorly, thinking of little things, of few dollars, of a few days, and of Saturdays, and of Sundays when no man worked. And each night in Sawmill Town, in Sawdust Territory, was a holiday, for then toil ceased and the shacks lighted up and there was opportunity for talk. Work was over. 'Halo Mamook,' no work now, but it might be rye, or other poison and gambling and debauchery. The respectable workers (note that they were mostly American) went off up town, to the Farmers' Home or some such place, or to the City library, or to each other's homes, while the main body of the toilers of the Mill 'played hell' in their own way under the very shadow of the Mill itself. For them the end of the week was a Big Jamboree, but every night was a little one.
Pete was back among his old tilikums, his old partners and friends, and it was an occasion for a jamboree, a high old jamboree of its order, that is; for real Red Paint, howling, shrieking, screaming Jamborees were out of order and the highly respectable rulers of the City saw to it that the place was not painted red by any citizen out on the loose with a gun. British Columbia, mark you, is an orderly spot: amazingly good and virtuous and law-abiding, and killing is murder there. This excites scorn and derision and even amazement in American citizens come in from Spokane Falls, say, or elsewhere, from such spots as Seattle, or even Snohomish.
But even without Red Paint, or guns, or galloping cayuses up and down a scandalised British City, cannot a man, and men and their klootchmen, get drink and get drunk and raise Cain in Sawdust Town? You bet they can, tilikums! Nawitka, certainly! Oh, shucks—to be sure!
Pete and Jenny (being hard up as yet) lived in a room of Indian Annie's shack, and had dirt and liberty. In Sawdust Town, just across the road and on the land side of the Mill, were squads of disreputable shacks in streets laid down with stinking rotten sawdust and marked out with piles of ancient lumber. All this had one time been a swamp, but in the course of generations sawdust filled it to the brim. Sawdust rots and ferments and smells almost as badly as rice or wheat rotting in a ship's limbers, and the odour of the place in a calm was a thing to feel, to cut, even with an axe. It was a paying property to Quin and Quin's brother, for lumber costs next door to nothing at a mill, and the rent came in easily, as it should when it can be deducted from wages. It was a good clean property as some landlords say in such cases, meaning that the interest is secure. Life wasn't; and as to morality, why, what did the Quin Brothers care about their renters of the shacks, shanties, and keekwilly holes? They cared nothing about their morals or their manners or the sanitation.
Chinamen lived there: they were Canton wharf-rats mostly, big men, little men, men who lived their own odd secret racial lives hidden away from the eyes of whites. White boys yelled—
"Oh, Chinkie, kihi, kiti mukhahoilo——"
And it was supposed to be an insult. The Chinkies cursed the boys by their Gods, and by Buddha and by the Christians' Gods. "Oh, ya, velly bad boy, oh, damn." Stones flew, chunks of lumber, and boys or Chinamen ran. The Orientals chattered indignantly on doorsteps. If a boy had disappeared suddenly, who would have wondered?
It was a splendid locality for nature, the nature of Man, not for the growth of other things. There were few conventions green in the neighbourhood, a man was a man, and a hound a hound there, and a devil a devil without a mask. It had a fascination.