British Columbia -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Revenge -- Fiction; Sawmills -- Fiction
There was no sign of red fire behind them now, but the fire burnt
within Quin. The fire was out in Pete. He wished he had never seen
Jenny, never seen the Mill, never played the fire. He went blind as
he paddled, ever and ever more feebly. If Quin had called to him
then the Siwash would have given in: he would have said----
"All right, Mista Quin, I'm done!"
That was his nature: the nature of the Coast Indians, as Long Mac
knew it. There wasn't in him or his tilikums, pure-blooded or
"breeds," the stuff to stand up against the bitter, hardy White, who
had taken their country and their women, and had made a new world
where they speared salmon, or each other. He knew he had no chance.
But Quin never spoke, even when he was within twenty yards of his
prey.
The terror of the white man got hold of Pete, and the terror of his
silence maddened him anew. There was not so much as a grunt out of
his pursuer. Pete saw a machine coming after him. It was not a man,
it was a thing that ran Indians down and drowned them. So might a
steamer, a dread "piah-ship," run down the dug-out of some poor wild
Siwash in some unexplored creek. Quin was not a man, or a white man,
he was the White Men: the very race. There had always been a touch
of the wild race in Pete: an underlying hint of the wrath of those
who go under. He had avenged himself, but it was still in vain. The
last word was, it seemed, with the deadly thing behind him.
Of a sudden Pete howled. It was a horrid cry: like the cry of a
solitary coyoté on a bluff in moonlight on a prairie of the South.
The very forests echoed with it, as they had echoed in dim ages past
with the war-whoops of other Indians. It made Quin turn his head as
he rowed. It was just in time, for with one sweep of his paddle Pete
had turned his canoe. The next instant it ran alongside the boat,
and Pete with one desperate leap came on board with his bare knife in
his hand. He fell upon his knees and scrambled to his feet as Quin,
loosing his oars, got to his. The capsized dug-out floated side by
side with the boat.
"I fix you," said Pete. Even in the darkness Quin could see the
white of his eye, the uplifted hand, the knife. The boat swayed,
nearly went over, Pete struck and missed, staggered, threw out his
left arm and Quin caught it. The next moment they were both in the
river, fighting desperately.
"I fix you," said Pete. They both mouthed water and Quin got his
right wrist at last. But not before a blow of Pete's had sliced his
ribs and cut a gash that stung like fire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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