CHAPTER XII
Dan Quinlan
IN the years of Lightning’s service at the Marton farm he had only penetrated the greater foothills to the south-west as far as Dan Quinlan’s homestead on two or three occasions.
His real reason for avoiding Dan Quinlan was his cold opinion that the man was unfit for white man’s association. The thing that was anathema to his ideas of manhood was that Dan lived with a squaw. There were always to be found loafing about his place a number of his wife’s coloured relations; and then there were offspring which he claimed no white man had the right to bring into the world—little dusky, happy, laughing, wild creatures, with all the potentialities for evil resulting from the mixture of colour.
Then his farm was such as no white man need take joy in. A log dug-out on a hillside, overlooking a poor corral that was just sufficient for his ten mean cows; a ramshackle barn which stabled a small bunch of saddle choyeuses; and a patch of ploughing that barely provided sufficient feed, with a few cabbages, and a supply of potatoes thrown in. And, added to the rest, the whole place was completely overrun by savage trail dogs.
In Lightning’s view, whatever he might choose to call himself, there was only one designation to which Dan Quinlan was entitled. The man lived by trapping and pelt-hunting, and any other means that offered itself. He had become a white Indian. In short, he had “taken the blanket,” and was no longer entitled to associate with white men or claim their respect. Lightning’s opinion was characteristic, and in consequence of it he had not been near the Irishman since the death of George Marton.
Had he done so, the scene he would have discovered would still have been, to all outward appearance, much about the same. There stood the dishevelled dug-out, that was sufficiently stout, and supplied all the man’s needs and those of his dusky family. The barn looked to have been slightly enlarged, but had gained nothing else by the change. The corral still accommodated the ten mean cows which grazed over the flat of grass which filled the valley below. The wolfish dog pack still beset the place.
But the change was there, and he would no doubt have discovered it. It lay within the forest which clothed the whole hillside about the dug-out. Less than half a mile from the Irishman’s home a clearing had been made. It had a winding roadway cut through the trees. Four ring corrals had been set up, and in connection with them was all the paraphernalia of the cattle-raiser. There was the branding “pinch.” There was the smith’s forge, and the searing-irons. There were great stackings of hay for feed. And several soundly built huts of log and thatch dotted the outer ring of the clearing for use in the work amongst the cattle.
The place was basking under a blaze of spring sunshine that was only little short of the full heat of summer. The forest had already set forth its paler shades of green, and the stark arms of deciduous trees were donning their delicate spring costumes. The mountain stream, in the heart of the valley, was a boisterous, rushing torrent, and the grass in the open was leaping by inches with every passing day.
Two men were standing near by, overlooking the work of branding the cattle with which the corrals were teeming. The men in the corrals, and at the forge, and working the cumbersome “pinch,” were not ordinary cattlemen. They were not even white men. They were relatives of Cama, the wife of Dan Quinlan, and the Irishman had pressed them into his service without scruple.
Standing with his white-haired companion, Dan’s eyes were alight with humour. His big body was clad in the buckskin which the faithful Cama prepared for it. The only thing with which to distinguish him from his dusky relatives by marriage was his white face, rugged and weather-beaten, his enormous size, his mass of curling, fair hair, and his laughing blue eyes.