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He's got all the pizen of Russia in him, flavoured with the rankest sauces of Europe." The Indian waited. "Shouldn't wonder," ventured the contractor, "if he's got something in his system." "If you'll let him get in a word edgeways," laughed Tressa. "That's the way all yours get in," grumbled her father. "Bohunk have big plans," grunted the Indian.
I ain't bin in the rustlin' game all these years not to pick up a few tricks to make a woman pinto look like a blood stallion." "But if he ever saw us either of us." The halfbreed spent the evening pondering on that. "Tressa! Quick!" But Tressa was too busy in the kitchen. "Tressa Torrance. It's a free show I wouldn't miss it. It's an epoch." She came skipping through the door.
But the shack door up at the trestle was empty; Torrance and Tressa would be in the kitchen cleaning up. Thereupon Conrad set off at a run up the sloping path, watching intermittently the angry scene below. A hundred yards from the grade he put his fingers to his lips and whistled. Torrance came instantly to the door.
The camp might go to perdition so far as he was concerned, but he wasn't going to have any rank outsider shoving it along. With a determined little set to her lips, her only inheritance from her father, Tressa Torrance passed through the living room and seized him by the ear; and he returned to earth with a howl of mock pain.
One poor woman, called Tressa, who was unable to speak above a whisper from utter weakness and exhaustion, told me she had had nine children, was suffering from incessant flooding, and felt 'as if her back would split open. There she lay, a mass of filthy tatters, without so much as a blanket under or over her, on the bare earth in this chilly darkness.
It was the gripping anxiety of it made him struggle to convince himself. But it was not the quicksands he feared, as Tressa supposed, but the bohunks. Things were going too smoothly in bulk the disturbing incidents were so trifling and ineffectual. Accustomed to difficulties, the absence of friction since the tragedy of the falling log was oppressive to him. It was unnatural.
Tressa was there beside him, and her father was standing on the step with his back to them; but the young lover did not seem to see her. She walked with him to the top of the path leading down to his shack, but he only muttered an absent-minded good-night and left her, hastening down the path, knowing nothing of the hot tears behind.
As Tressa stepped back to let the Policeman enter, the halfbreed slid unobtrusively to the other side of the room and stood in the semi-obscurity facing the doorway, his back tight against the wall. "Yes," stormed Torrance, "and if it had killed a dozen of them it would have served them right. They'd taken out the bolts and cut a rope."
If they bother you, truss 'em up only don't say I advised it, or leave me your widow to look after. By the way, where is she? Tressa wants to talk the latest prairie styles with her, and how to cure freckles. But come on into the sitting room and be comfortable." He started for the front room, pushing the others ahead of him.
Three miles down the track, in what remained of a deserted end-of-steel village, Sergeant Mahon sat in his shirt sleeves, smiling across the corner of a table into the eyes of his wife, the only white woman, except Tressa Torrance, within a day's hard ride.
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