"By-by I go back to Kamloops," said Pete, as he sat in a chair by the window with a blanket round him. He was still weak, and didn't feel jealous about Jenny. "By-by I go to Pitt River or Hallison Lake."
He used to work when a boy for an old storekeeper at Harrison Lake. That was before he took to the Mill: before he had been to Kamloops. Old Smith was a pioneer, one of the Boston Bar Miners, one of those who had hunted for the mother and father of Cariboo gold in Baldy Mountain. He had been rich and poor and rich again, and even now, though poor enough, he grub-staked wandering prospectors on shares of the Dorado Hole they set out to find.
"Not a bad old fellow, old Smith," said the grubstaked ones. Pete said the same.
"Jenny she can go to hell," said Pete. And when he was well enough to leave the hospital he took a month's wages from the Mill, or nearly a month's, and went up-river to Harrison Lake. He never asked for Quin, and didn't even know that he and Jenny had both been laid up.
"She can go to hell," he told himself. "I go to Hallison Lake and by-by to Kamloops, see my sister Maly. Cultus Muckamuck much better man than Shautch Quin."
After all Cultus had never stolen his klootchman and smashed his skull.
Pete was still very weak when he left New Westminster behind and paid a dollar or so to go upstream to the mouth of Harrison River's blue waters. And Smith gave him "a jhob" at small wages but with good hash.
Then the East wind blew out of the hills, from the serried dark Cascades, and from the monarchs of the Selkirks on the Big Bend of the Columbia and from the giant Rockies beyond that swift clear stream. Nature closed up her wonderful store, and the Mills shut down, for the Lower Fraser was fast in heavy ice from way-up down to Lulu Island and even beyond, and no man and no Bull-Wheel, though it grunted in its frictions, could get logs out of the Boom. So Long Paul of the Boom as well as Long Mac of the Pony Saw and Ginger White of the Great Hoes and all the whole caboodle shut up shop and took to winter work, which meant growling and groaning and gambling and grumbling and playing Old Harry, and raising Cain and horrid crops besides, till frost unlocked the stream and booms again.
Oh, but the days when the East wind held up and the frost was clean and clear! The cold clean sun shone like pale fire in a pale blue sky and the world was hard and bright and white with fierce snow. It was fine enough in the City, and the boys went coasting down the hill streets across the main one, and the kiddies thought of Christmas with such joy as those elders, who had heaps of kids and little cash, could not feel. Nevertheless even a burdened father of many hoped while he could when the frost burned in the still air and fetched the blood to his face. There was health in it: health for Jenny, determined to love "Tchorch" always, and health for "Tchorch," whose poisoned wound healed up though it left a horrid scar on his left pectoral. If only it hadn't meant health for Pete too!
But it did. If it was fine in the City, how much finer, how much cleaner, how much more wonderful it was by the edge of a frozen lake, full of trout, and under the snowy feathery foliage of the firs and pines and the high pagodas of the majestic antique spruces. Pete sucked in health and strength like a child and ate his muckamuck with the determination of a bear at a discovered cache. He put on muscle and fat, and could leap again. And as he fattened, his mind grew darker. He missed his klootchman and woke of nights to miss her. The smile, that was his when he was weak, left him; it was put out by darkness. And under old Smith's wing in a little shack there was another Sitcum Siwash, one called John, who had a young klootchman of his own, and his young klootchman had a young papoose, and they were all as fat as butter and as happy as pigs in a wallow. This hit lonely Pete very hard. He was "solly" he hadn't killed Quin, and took to telling John his woes.