"I don't hanker none to be Quin if Pete gets him. Pete's a boy, ain't he? Solid ideas, by gosh----" "See, there's the Planin' Mill goin' up the flume!" "'Tis a mighty expensive fire, this. Eh, what?" "Licks me Moolas don't burn mor' off'n, pard!" "Well, we're out of a job, tilikums." The crowd moved and swayed and moaned. They cried "Oh!" and "Ah!" and "See!" The Mill was hell. Old Dutchy sat on a pile of sawed lumber with his lighted lamp on his knees; the poor doddering fool trimmed the wick and cried. Jenny heard old Papp speak to him in German. "Sei ruhig, alte dummkopf." And Papp went on in English. "Dain'd your vault, old shap, iv so be Pete wanded to purn ze Mill, he vould purn it all same. If I had him I vould braig him lige a sdick, so!" There was no pity for the man who had spiked the logs. They would have hung him if they had had hold of him. They would have thrown him on the fire. Then the front of the Mill fell out. The crowd surged backwards, and Jenny was near thrown down. Old Papp fell against Sam, and both went down. Annie and Annawillee caught hold of Jenny and her papoose, and dragged her to their shack. "That all light, tenas. You come. I give you a dlink, tenas. Here, Annawillee, you hold papoosh." She snatched the baby from Jenny's weakening arms and Annawillee ran on ahead with him. When Sam recovered his feet Jenny was gone. "Oh, where my Missus, where my Missus?" roared Sam, blubbering. "What's the infernal Chinaman kickin' up such a bobbery about?" asked the scornful crowd. XXIV The canoe in which Pete had set out in his great adventure was both heavy and cranky, and no one but a Siwash of the river or the Lakes would have paddled it a mile without disaster. But he had been bred in the sturgeon-haunted water of Pitt River, and knew the ways of his craft and could use the single-bladed paddle with the same skill that he showed with the maul and wedges on a great sawlog. Now as he left the light of the fired Mill behind him he knew (or feared) that he had not left his enemies behind him as well. The whole of the Mill would be his enemies. That he was sure of: he remembered poor old Skookum Charlie. He understood the minds of those he had endangered as well as the heart of such a man as Quin. And if Quin himself had escaped from the fire of the house he would be on the river! That Pete was sure of in his heart. And his heart failed him even as he swept outward on the first of the ebb, which ran fast, being now reinforced by the waters of the big river fed by the melting snows of a thousand miles of snow-clad hills.