Because the railroad was being put through and coming to an End, to two ends, to two Ends of Track, now closing up rapidly. Once the work had been spread over four thousand miles, away by Montreal and Quebec and the Lake of the Woods and the Great Lake Side, and away to Winnipeg and Medicine Hat and Calgary and the Rockies. Now the work narrowed to a few hundred miles, to a hundred; to-morrow, perhaps to fifty. All the world of the road was rammed and jammed and crammed into a little space, as if it were but the Gulf of Athlone. Men thrust each other aside, it was elbow work, jostling, it was a high old crowd. Betcher life, tilikum, it was a daisy of a time and place that dark-eyed Pete stepped into out of that old scow of a stern-wheeler. The Town scooted: she hummed: she sizzled. What ho, and let her rip! That was the word. The soberest men grew drunken on mere prospects: there was money in everything: no one could miss it: dollars grew on trees: they lined the roads: they could be caught swimming in the Lake. Men lived fatly: hash was good and none too dear, after all. "For hayf a dollar" one could get piled up, get stodged, pawled. "Oh, come in and Eat," said one house. "We give the best Pie," said another. Pie fetched the men every time. Your worker loves his pie: there's a fine lumberers' song about Pie which is as popular with the men of the Woods as "Joint Ahead and Centre Back" is with Railroaders. They all gave good pie at the Landing. You bet, tilikum. Pete, in all his born days, had never seen or heard or dreamt of such an astonishing hubbub, such go, such never-let-up, as he saw at the busy Landing. He was a stunned, astonished Siwash for a while and wandered around with his eyes out of his head, feeling lonely, stranded, desolate. And then he found that he knew men here and there and everywhere. Some of them slapped him on the back: some said "Howdy": some said "Hev a drink, sonny!" Men were generous: they felt they were millionaires or on the way to be: it was a fine old world. Pete smiled and smoked and drank in this house and that and forgot for awhile all about Mason, who was supposed to be running a little saw-mill in the woods, that Missouri Simpson had told him of. Pete put his woes into the background; he couldn't hear or see them at the Landing for quite a while. There was truly a weakness of revenge in him. If either or both of the Quins had followed him up and said: "Look hyar, Pete, come and hev a drink and let's talk about these klootchmen----" Why, it is at least possible that Pete would have drunk till he wept and have taken dollars to forgive them about Jenny and Mary. He had a weakness in him, poor devil, as so many have.