As the result of the consultation they put Pete on the table and shaved his head and trephined him and raised a depressed patch in his skull. It was the bit with which he had put a depressed place in a bridge bent. And then true intelligence (of the Sitcum Siwash order) came back into Pete's dark eyes, and he was presently aware that he was Pitt River Pete, and that Jenny his klootchman had run away with Quin and that he had gone for Quin in the Mill. So far as Pete was concerned this had happened a minute ago and he was very much surprised to find himself opening his eyes on two strange gentlemen in white aprons, and his nose to the scent of chloroform, when an instant before he had seen Quin in front of him among the finer odours of fresh sawdust. Pete made a motion to get up and finish Quin, but somehow he couldn't and he closed his eyes again and went to sleep. When he woke once more he was in a nice bed with a white lady looking after his wants. He wondered vaguely what a white klootchman was doing there and again went to sleep. On the whole he was very comfortable and didn't care about anything, not even Jenny. When he woke again, he made the white klootchman explain briefly what had happened to him. The white klootchman did her best to follow his wau-wau and gave him to understand that he had had an accident in the Mill and an operation. And it gradually dawned on Pete that all these occurrences had caused a lapse of time almost miraculous. Nothing that the white klootchman said convinced him, however: it was the scent of the keen autumn air coming down the river from his own home mountains, the Pitt River Mountains. It was now October and nearly the end of it, and there was already a winter garment on the big hills. From his window he could see the far cone of Mount Baker, white and shining. When he looked a little round the corner he saw his own hills. The air was beautiful and keen, fresh as mountain water, tonic as free life itself. To smell it brought him strength, for there is great strength in the clean scent of things. He snuffed the air of the upper river and recalled the high plateaus of the Dry Belt. "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.