The Bible was the source of all the woe that followed when a big deal in lumber took Quin over to Victoria and kept him there three days. He had more than half a mind to take her with him, and if her speech hadn't betrayed her origin he would have done it like a shot. And when he went Jenny cried as if he were going to cross the Big Salt Chuck or the Pacific. Though her mother had been a Hydah she knew nothing of the waters.
"I much aflaid of Pete," she thought.
But Quin gave great directions to Sam and he believed he could trust him.
"My look see evely ting," said Sam. "Missus all light: my givee good chow-chow, hot wata, blush dlesses, t'at all light. My no lettee Missus go out? No, good, my no lettee."
But he played Fan-tan of course, and couldn't be expected to stay in all the time, or to understand that the Missus was upset in her mind about morality. And he knew nothing and cared less about the Bible. There wasn't the making of a rice Christian in him unless rice was very scarce indeed, and now he lived on the fat of the land of British Columbia.
So the day after she had cried herself to sleep, she came across the Bible.
It was not quite a family Bible, and only weighed a pound or so, but it had a biblical cover of sullen puritanical leather which suggested that the very bookbinder himself was of the sourest disposition, a round-head, a kill-joy, with ethics equal to the best Scotch morality. This binding alone, however, would have had comparatively little effect on the childish mind of Jenny. But the book had in it dour and savage pictures of so surprising a lack of artistic merit that they struck her down at once, poor child. In spite of the lack of colour the dreadful draughtsman made very effective curly-whirly flames in a hell which was remarkably like a study of a suburban coal-cellar, and the victims of his fire and ferocity expressed the extremest anguish as they fried on eternal grids! Oh, horrors, but the pictures brought back to the fearful mind of the tenas klootchman all the dread with which the good (or bad) minister, Alexander Mickie, had inspired her when she attended Sunday School at Kamloops and heard him preach in Chinook. For Chinook is no more than a few hundred words and most of them are very material. So was Mickie's mind, whether he preached openly or drank in secret, and the hyas piah of Lejaub, or the great fire of the Devil (Lejaub being equal to Le Diable), was a hot wood fire to Jenny. She believed naturally enough in Lejaub much more than in God, for her Indian blood helped her there, or rather hindered her, and the English God was a far-off notion to a mind not given to high abstractions.
So Jenny when she got the picture Bible sat with it in her lap and trembled.
"I a bad woman, I go to hell; very wrong for me to love Tchorch!" was her mind's commentary as she turned the blind pages for some other picture.
And every now and again she turned back to the curling flames and elaborate grids of hell. She traced in some anguished lineaments a remote likeness to herself. Then she fell to weeping, and weeping Sam found her. He was sympathetic. On the whole Sam was a very good sort.