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With the winter's supply of logs now gone, logging operations commenced in the woods with renewed vigor, the river teemed with rafts, the shouts of the rivermen echoing from bank to bank. Both Tyee and Darrow were getting out spruce for the government and ship timbers for the wooden shipyards along San Francisco Bay.
It was rather late when he started home and in the knowledge that darkness might find him well up the river he hurried. Now, from the Bight of Tyee to a point some five miles above Darrow, the Skookum flows in almost a straight line; the few bends are wide and gradual, and when The Laird came to this home-stretch he urged the boat to its maximum speed of twenty-eight miles per hour.
"It was not always there, that great rock, drawing its strength and its wonderful power from the seas, for it, too, was once a Great Tyee, who ruled a mighty tract of waters.
And like a bird I rose up in the air, and the living Mandell Folk, and the dead Sunlanders, the little kayaks, the big ship, the guns, the wealth everything rose up in the air. So I say, I, Ounenk, who tell the tale, am the only one left." A great silence fell upon the assemblage. Tyee looked at Aab-Waak with awe-struck eyes, but forbore to speak. Even the women were too stunned to wail the dead.
At last the distressed tyee, induced by hunger, put forth his hand to touch the food. But he suddenly drew it back, saying that Hall and Wood were there. "They will not let me eat," said he, with a look of despair and terror. Maquina pointed to Thompson and Jewett. "Is it they who have bewitched you?" he asked.
He was bound to try and play even, regardless of you. When he precipitated that row on the Tyee, I knew it was going to be a fight for my financial life for my own life, if he ever got me foul. And it was not a thing I could talk about to you, in your state of mind, then. You were through with me. Regardless of him, you were getting farther and farther away from me.
"And Pome-Lee?" cried one of the two Hungry Folk; "Pome-Lee, the son of my mother?" "Pome-Lee is not," Ounenk answered in a monotonous voice. "And the Sunlanders?" from Aab-Waak. "The Sunlanders are not." "Then the ship of the Sunlanders, and the wealth and guns and things?" Tyee demanded. "Neither the ship of the Sunlanders, nor the wealth and guns and things," was the unvarying response.
"We'll do business," said Martin Darrow and they did, although it was many years after Hector McKaye had incorporated the Tyee Lumber Company and founded his town of Port Agnew before Darrow began operations. True to his promise, McKaye deeded him a mill-and town-site, and he founded a settlement on the eastern edge of Port Agnew, but quite distinct from it, and called it Darrow, after himself.
"And at his home on the north shore his mother dressed his bed with fresh furs each morning. The seasons drifted by, winter followed summer, summer followed winter. But it was four years before the Tenas Tyee found the centre of the great salt-chuck oluk and plunged his hunting-knife into its evil heart. In its death-agony it writhed through the Narrows, leaving a trail of blackness on the waters.
"The only shadow on the joy of it all was war, for the tribe of the great Tyee was at war with the Upper Coast Indians, those who lived north, near what is named by the Paleface as the port of Prince Rupert.
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