Pete was a handsome boy if one likes or does not dislike the Indian cheekbones. For the features of the Sitcum-Siwash were almost purely Indian; his colour was a memory of his English father. He was tall, nearly five foot ten, lightly and beautifully built. He was as quick on his feet as a bird on the wing. His hands, even, were fine considering he was one who would work. His eyes were reddish brown, his teeth ivory: his moustache was a scanty Indian growth. Not a doubt of it but that Pete was the best-looking "breed" round about Westminster. And he wasn't as lazy as most of them.
Take his history on trust. It is easy to imagine it. He had half learnt to read at an Anglican Mission. His English was not bad when he talked to white men. In truth it was better and heaps cleaner than Jack Mottram's. But talk on the American side of the water is always cleaner. "If you don't like bawdry, we'll have very little of it," said Lucio to the Friar, who was perhaps American. Pete was a nice boy of twenty-three. But he had a loose lip and could look savage. His mind was a tiny circle. He could reach with his hand almost as far as his mind went. He had a religion once, when he left the Fathers of the Mission. He then believed in the Saghalie Tyee, the Chief of Heaven: in fact, in the Head Boss. Now he believed in the head boss of the Mill and in whisky and in his wife: all of them very risky beliefs indeed.
So far Jenny, Pete's little klootchman (and a sweet pretty creature she was) hadn't yet showed up in the shebang. She had been out somewhere, the Lord alone knows where (Quin would have wished he knew), and she was now in the inside room, dressing or rather taking off an outside gown and putting on a gorgeous flowered dressing-gown given her by a lady at Kamloops. Now she came out.
She was a beauty, tilikum, and you can believe it or leave it alone. She was little, no more than five feet three say, but perfectly made, round, plump, most adequate, which is a mighty good word, seeing that she was all there in some ways. She had a complexion of rosy eve, and teeth no narwhal's horn could match for whiteness, and her lips were red-blooded, her ears pink. She had dimples to be sworn by: and the only sign of her Indian blood (which was obviously Hydah) came out in her long straight black hair, that she wore coiled in a huge untidy mass. But for that she was white as far as her body went. As for her soul—but that's telling too soon.
Now she came out of the inner chamber in her scarlet gown, which was flaming with outrageous tulips, horribly parodying even a Dutch grower's nightmare, and she looked like a rosebud, or a merry saint in a flaming San Benito with flower flame devils on it in paint. And not a soul of her tilikums knew she was lovely. They envied her that San Benito!
Jenny was sober enough this time (and so far), and if no one knew she was lovely she knew it, and she eyed some of the drunken klootchmen disdainfully. This was not so much that they were pahtlum but because they had but ten cents worth of clothes and were not toketie or pretty.
"Fo!" said Jenny, stepping lightly among the recumbent and half-recumbent till she squatted on her hams by the fire.
"Where you bin, Jenny?" asked Pete, already hiccupping. And Jenny said she had been with Mary, or Alice, or someone else. May be it was true.
"Have a drink," said her man, handing her a bottle. She tilted it and showed her sweet neck and ripe bosom as she drank and handed it back empty.
Then Jack Mottram, English sailorman and general rolling stone and blackguard, came in hugging two bottles of deadly poison, one under each arm.