"So help me, Dick, the gammon worked.Half of them, at least, saw Tilly disappear in the air.They'd drunk my whiskey at Juneau and seen stranger sights, I'll warrant.Why should I not do this thing, I, who sold bad spirits corked in bottles? Some of the women shrieked.Everybody fell to whispering in bunches.Ifolded my arms and held my head high, and they drew further away from me.The time was ripe to go.'Grab him,' Chief George cries.Three or four of them came at me, but I whirled, quick, made a couple of passes like to send them after Tilly, and pointed up.Touch me? Not for the kingdoms of the earth.Chief George harangued them, but he couldn't get them to lift a leg.Then he made to take me himself; but I repeated the mummery and his grit went out through his fingers.
"'Let your shamans work wonders the like of which I have done this night,' I says.'Let them call Killisnoo down out of the sky whither I have sent her.' But the priests knew their limits.
'May your klooches bear you sons as the spawn of the salmon,' Isays, turning to go; 'and may your totem pole stand long in the land, and the smoke of your camp rise always.'
"But if the beggars could have seen me hitting the high places for the sloop as soon as I was clear of them, they'd thought my own medicine had got after me.Tilly'd kept warm by chopping the ice away, and was all ready to cast off.Gawd! how we ran before it, the Taku howling after us and the freezing seas sweeping over at every clip.With everything battened down, me a-steering and Tilly chopping ice, we held on half the night, till I plumped the sloop ashore on Porcupine Island, and we shivered it out on the beach; blankets wet, and Tilly drying the matches on her breast.
"So I think I know something about it.Seven years, Dick, man and wife, in rough sailing and smooth.And then she died, in the heart of the winter, died in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station.She held my hand to the last, the ice creeping up inside the door and spreading thick on the gut of the window.Outside, the lone howl of the wolf and the Silence; inside, death and the Silence.You've never heard the Silence yet, Dick, and Gawd grant you don't ever have to hear it when you sit by the side of death.
Hear it? Ay, till the breath whistles like a siren, and the heart booms, booms, booms, like the surf on the shore.
"Siwash, Dick, but a woman.White, Dick, white, clear through.
Towards the last she says, 'Keep my feather bed, Tommy, keep it always.' And I agreed.Then she opened her eyes, full with the pain.'I've been a good woman to you, Tommy, and because of that I want you to promise--to promise'--the words seemed to stick in her throat--'that when you marry, the woman be white.No more Siwash, Tommy.I know.Plenty white women down to Juneau now.Iknow.Your people call you "squaw-man," your women turn their heads to the one side on the street, and you do not go to their cabins like other men.Why? Your wife Siwash.Is it not so?
And this is not good.Wherefore I die.Promise me.Kiss me in token of your promise.'
"I kissed her, and she dozed off, whispering, 'It is good.' At the end, that near gone my ear was at her lips, she roused for the last time.'Remember, Tommy; remember my feather bed.' Then she died, in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station."The tent heeled over and half flattened before the gale.Dick refilled his pipe, while Tommy drew the tea and set it aside against Molly's return.
And she of the flashing eyes and Yankee blood? Blinded, falling, crawling on hand and knee, the wind thrust back in her throat by the wind, she was heading for the tent.On her shoulders a bulky pack caught the full fury of the storm.She plucked feebly at the knotted flaps, but it was Tommy and Dick who cast them loose.
Then she set her soul for the last effort, staggered in, and fell exhausted on the floor.
Tommy unbuckled the straps and took the pack from her.As he lifted it there was a clanging of pots and pans.Dick, pouring out a mug of whiskey, paused long enough to pass the wink across her body.Tommy winked back.His lips pursed the monosyllable, "clothes," but Dick shook his head reprovingly."Here, little woman," he said, after she had drunk the whiskey and straightened up a bit.
"Here's some dry togs.Climb into them.We're going out to extra-peg the tent.After that, give us the call, and we'll come in and have dinner.Sing out when you're ready.""So help me, Dick, that's knocked the edge off her for the rest of this trip," Tommy spluttered as they crouched to the lee of the tent.
"But it's the edge is her saving grace." Dick replied, ducking his head to a volley of sleet that drove around a corner of the canvas."The edge that you and I've got, Tommy, and the edge of our mothers before us."