Nah Siks, ho, my friend, let me introduce you to George Quin: Manager and part owner of the Mill, of the Stick Moola which ate logs and turned out lumber and used (even as sawdust) the lives and muscles of high-toned High Binders from Kowloon and the back parts of Canton, and hidalgos from Spain with knives about them, and gentlemen from Whitechapel who knew the ways of the sea, and many first-class Americans from the woods, to say nothing of Letts, Lapps and Finns and our tilikums the Indians from the Coast.

Quin was two hundred pounds weight, and as solid as a cant of his fir, and his mind was compact, a useful mind when dollars were concerned. He was a squaw-man and was always in with one of them, for there are men who don't care for white women (though indeed he had cared very much for one) and so run after klootchmen just as water runs down hill. It is explicable, for the conduct of (or the conducting of) a white woman for the most part takes a deal of restraint. Quin hated any form of it: he was by nature a kind of savage, though he was born in Vermont and bred up in lower Canada. He went West early (even to China, by the way) and only kept so much restraint as enabled him to hang on and make dollars and crawl up a financial ladder—with that wanting he might have been:—

A Hobo,
A Blanket Stiff
or
A mere Gaycat,

and have ended as a "Tomayto-can Vag!" These are all species of the Genus Tramp, or Varieties of the species, and the essence of them all is letting go. We who are not such vagabonds have to hold on with our teeth and nails and climb. But the blessedness of refusing to climb and the blessedness of being at the bottom are wonderful. We all know it as we hang on. Now Quin, for all his force and weight and power of body and of mind was a tramp in his heart, but a coward who was afraid of opinion, where want of dollars was concerned. He turned himself loose only with the women. He hated respectable ones. You had to be civil and gentlemanly and a lot of hogwash like that with ladies.

"Oh, hell," said Quin. "Great Scott, by the Holy Mackinaw, not me!"

The devil of it all is that we are pushed on by something that is not ourselves, and for what? It's by no means a case of "Sic vos non vobis" but "sic nos non nobis," and that's a solid fact, solid enough to burst the teeth out of any Hoe that can cut teak or mahogany, to say nothing of the soft wood of the Coast.

Quin compromised with the Mournful Spirit of Push and gave his soul to dollars on that behalf, and his body to the klootchmen.

It wasn't often that he slung work and took a holiday, but in latitude 49.50 N. and longitude 122 W., which is about the situation of New Westminster, so far as I can remember, Mills themselves take holidays in frost time, and when the Mill was shut down the Christmas before, he had taken a run up to Kamloops to see his brother Ned or Cultus Muckamuck.

There he saw Jenny, the sweet little devil, who hadn't been married to Pete for more than six months and was just nineteen. He made up his mind about her then, but there were difficulties. For one thing Ned was always wanting him, and Indian Mary, Ned's klootchman, was a good woman and heartily religious in her own way, and she had a care for the pretty little girl when the Panther, or Hyas Puss-Puss, called George Quin, came nosing around. And Pete was but newly wed and hadn't beaten Jenny yet. And Jenny, the pretty dear, was fond of her Sitcum Siwash and loved to see him on horseback, all so bold and fine with one hand on his hip and a quirt in the other. Given favourable circumstances and enforced sobriety there's no knowing what the two might have been.

I shall have to own it wasn't all George Quin after all: I couldn't help liking George somehow. It's the most mixed kind of a world, and though the best we know, it might have been improved by a little foresight one would think. There's always something pathetically good in blackguards, something that redeems the worst. What a pity it is!