Next day there was a mighty row about the missing sledge-hammer.
"I tink some damn thief kapsualla heem," said Pete.
That week the frost returned once more. This time it lasted till the early spring.
XIII
B.C., as the boys call it, or British Columbia, is most undoubtedly a wonderful place, a first-class place, even if the bottom falls out of it periodically and booms die down into slumps and the world becomes weary. But the odd thing is that it is a country which is, so to speak, all one gut, like a herring. The Fraser Cañon is the gate of the lower country and the gate of the upper country. There's only one way up and down, tilikum, unless you are a crazy prospector or a cracked hunter. Though the great River itself comes from the North past Lillooet and by, and from, Cariboo, yet the main line of men and railroads and wanderers to and fro lies rather by the blue Thompson than the grey Fraser.
You meet Bill and Charlie and Tom and Jack and Dick and Harry on the road. You liquor with them at Yale, where the Cañon opens: you toss for drinks with them at French Charlie's, you climb Jackass Mountain with them (or meet them there) and again discuss work and railroading and sawmills and Mr. Vanderdunk, the Contractor, at Lytton. You run against your partner or the man you quarrelled or fought with at Savona. You see Mrs. Grey or Brown or Robinson at Eight Mile Creek. Very likely you get full up at Oregon Pete's with the man you last met at Kamloops, or the son of a gun who worked alongside you at the Inlet. On the Shushwap you tumble up against your brother, maybe, in a sternwheeler, and at Eagle Pass you give cigars (5 cents Punches!) to a dozen whose nicknames you know and whose names you don't.
Properly speaking there are few ways into B.C. Perhaps there are none out. It is a devil of a country for getting to know every man jack in it. From the Columbia Crossing, or even from the summit of the Rockies down to the Inlet, and the City of Vancouver (in Pete's time mere forest and as thick as a wheatfield), it's the Main Street.
The fact of the matter is that the whole of the Slope, the Pacific Slope, is only one Main Street. It begins to dawn on a man on the Slope, that in a very few years he might know everyone from the Rocky Mountains down to Victoria and to Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and San Francisco. Men wander to and fro like damned souls or migratory salmon or caribou.
Pete, you know, knew everyone in B.C. by sight, more or less. There wasn't a shebang on the road he wasn't familiar with. He came on chaps here and there who said "Klahya" or "What ho!" or "Hell, it ain't you?" or "Thunder, it's old Pete, so it is." He felt familiar with the road, with the Cañon, with every house, every loafer, every bummer, every "goldarned drifting son of a gun" who went up and down like a log in the tide-way, or round and round like one in a whirlpool, betwixt the Victoria beginning and the Rocky Mountain End. When he had been full of Mills and Canneries he used to mosey off up-country. When he was soaked by the Wet Belt and the wet rains he pined for the Dry Belt. When the high dry plateaus of the Dry Belt dried him up, he thought of the soft days lower down, or higher up in the Upper Wet Belt of the Shushwap. One can swap climate for climate in a few hours.