He was, at the same time, discovering in himself personal needs to which he had never given a thought, sordid everyday necessities the satisfaction of which had always been at hand, unquestioned, taken for granted much as one takes the sun and the air for granted. His meals had been provided. His bed had been provided. The funds which had clothed and educated him and trained him for the ministry had been provided, and likewise his transportation to the scene of his endeavors. How, he had not known except in the vaguest way, he had not particularly inquired, any more than the child inquires the whence and the why of luscious berries he finds growing upon a bush in the garden.

Not until he was torn by the roots out of the old, ordered environment and flung headlong into an environment where cause and effect are linked close did he consider these things. Materially he was getting a first-hand lesson in economics—and domestic science of a sort! Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands, skilful exercise of the thought-function.

If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt—unless he denied the justice of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give? Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity to be bartered.

He did not think these things in these terms. He found himself becoming involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly for words to define the unrest that was in him.

While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched, unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pass along one edge of his clearing, a cluster of bright-winged ducks slung over Tommy's shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came down a long corridor. They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr with a disturbing insistence.

The plague of mosquitoes had somewhat abated. In the early morning and for a time in the evening, and also when rain dampened the atmosphere, these pests still kept a man's hands busy warding them off. But through the dry heat of the day he could go abroad in reasonable comfort.

So now Mr. Thompson washed up his dishes in a fashion to make the lips of a careful housekeeper pucker in disdain, clapped on his broken-rimmed straw hat and sallied forth.

He was full of an earnest desire to do good, as he defined doing good. He had come here for that purpose, backed by an organization for just such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation, of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his business to show them with certainty the paths that led to each.

But he could not reach them unless he could speak their tongue, he could not gather them about him in the open meadow as the Man of Galilee gathered his disciples about him. The climate was against that simple procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a beginning—to learn the tribal language and to build a church.

He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled him to assimilate the messes he cooked without suffering acute indigestion. Likewise only a naive turn of mind enabled him to ward off mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he struggled with pronunciations and meanings like a child learning the alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons. And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was to be a meeting-house.

He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved. He had to fell trees, to lop off the branches, and cut the trunks to proper length, then roll them with infinite effort to their proper place in the structure. He could only gather how a log building could be erected by asking Lachlan, and by taking the Lone Moose cabins for his model. And he was a fearful and wonderful axeman. His log ends looked as if chewed by a beaver, except that they lacked the beaver's neatness of finish. His feet suffered manifold hairbreadth escapes from the sharp blade. He could never guess which way a tree would fall. For a week's work he had got two courses of logs laid in position.

He did not allow his mind to dwell on the ultimate outcome of this task, because he was uneasily aware that Lone Moose was smiling slyly behind its brown hand at him and his works. In his mind there was nothing for it but a church. He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan's house, with Lachlan senior to interpret his words. The Indians had come. Indeed, they had come en masse. They packed the room he spoke in, big and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond. The day was very hot, the roof low, the windows closed. There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and sturdy smell that came near to sickening Mr. Thompson. He was extraordinarily glad when he got outside. That closeness—to speak mildly—coupled with the heavy, copper-red faces, impassive as masks, impersonally listening with scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man's thoughts would not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.

Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.

Axe in hand, he set to work. He had learned the first lesson of manual labor—that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body is swaddled in clothes. His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all slung across a fallen tree. Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt joined the discarded garments.

Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform to the clerical figure. He was the antithesis of asceticism, of gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose. He was simply a big man lustily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat standing out on brow and cheek, his sturdy neck all a-glisten with moisture. Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled and played. The flat muscle-bands across his broad chest slackened and tightened as his arms swung. For Mr. Thompson had been fashioned by Nature in a generous mood. He was not a heroic figure, but he was big and built as a man should be, deep in the chest, flat-backed, very straight when he stood erect. He had escaped the scholarly stoop. If his muscles were soft they were in a fair way to become hardened.

He was more or less unconscious of all this. He had never thought of his body as being strong or well-shaped, because he had never used it, never pitted his strength against the strength of other men, never worked, never striven. It had never been necessary for him to do so. He had been taught that pride of that sort was sinful, and he had accepted the teaching rather too literally.

Already a curious sort of change was manifesting in him. His blue eyes had a different expression than one would have observed in them during—well, during the period of his theological studies, shall we say, when the state of his soul and the state of other people's souls was the only consideration. One would have been troubled to make out any pronounced personality then. He was simply a studious young man with a sanctimonious air. But now that the wind and the sun had somewhat turned his fair skin and brought out a goodly crop of freckles, now that the vigor of his movements and the healthy perspiration had rumpled up his reddish-brown hair and put a wave in it, he could—standing up on his log—easily have passed for a husky woodsman; until some experienced eye observed him make such sorry work of a woodsman's task. He had acquired no skill with the axe. That takes time. But he made vigorous endeavor, and he was beginning to feel strength flow through him, to realize it as a potential blessing. Now that the soreness was working out of his sinews it gave him a peculiar elation to lay hold of a log-end, to heave until his arms and back grew rigid, and to feel the heavy weight move. That exultant sense of physical power was quite new and rather puzzling to him. He could not understand why he enjoyed chopping logs and moving them about, and yet was prone to grow moody, to be full of disquieting perplexities when he sat down to think.

He had been at work for perhaps two hours. He was resting. To be explicit, he was standing on a fallen tree. Between his feet there was a notch cut half-way through the wood. In this white gash the blade of his axe was driven solidly, and he rested his hands on the rigid haft while he stood drawing gulps of forest-scented air into his lungs.

Mr. Thompson was not gifted with eyes in the back of his head. His hearing was keen enough, but the soft, turfy earth absorbed footfalls, especially when that foot was shod with a buckskin moccasin. So he did not see Sophie Carr, nor hear her until a thought that was running in his mind slipped off the end of his tongue.

"This is going to make a terrible amount of labor."

He said this aloud, in a matter-of-fact tone.

"And a terrible waste of labor," Sophie answered him.

He looked quickly over one shoulder, saw her standing there, got down off his log—blushing a little at his comparative nakedness. It seemed to him that he must appear shockingly nude, since the upper part of his body was but thinly covered by a garment that opened wide over his breast. He felt a good deal like a shy girl first appearing on the beach in an abbreviated bathing suit. But Sophie seemed unconscious of his embarrassment, or the cause of it. However, Mr. Thompson picked up his coat, and felt more at ease when he had slipped it on. He sat down, still breathing heavily from his recent exertions.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Oh, well," she said—and left the sentence unfinished, save by an outward motion of her hands that might have meant anything. But she smiled, and Mr. Thompson observed that she had fine, white, even teeth. Each time he saw her some salient personal feature seemed to claim his attention. To be sure he had seen other girls with good teeth and red lips and other physical charms perhaps as great as Sophie Carr's. But these things had never riveted his attention. There was something about this girl that quickened every fiber of his being. And even while she made him always acutely conscious of her bodily presence, he was a little bit afraid of her. He had swift, discomforting visions of her standing afar beckoning to him, and of himself unable to resist, no matter what the penalty. She stirred up things in his mind that made him blush. He was conscious of a desire to touch her hand, to kiss her. He found himself totally unable to close the gates of his mind against such thoughts when she was near him. And it was self-generated within him. Sophie Carr was never more than impersonally pleasant to him. Sometimes she was utterly indifferent. Often she said things about his calling that made him wince.

"Tell me," Thompson said abruptly, after a momentary silence, "how it happens that the men who have been here before me left no trace of any—any—well, anything? There have been other missionaries. They had funds. They were stationed here. What did they do? I have been going to ask your father. I daresay you can tell me yourself."

The girl laughed, whether at the question or at his earnestness he could not say.

"They did nothing," she answered in an amused tone. "What could they do? You haven't begun to realize yet what a difficult job you've tackled. The others came here, stayed awhile, threw up their hands and went away. Their idea of doing good seemed to consist of having a ready-made church and a ready-made congregation, and to preach nice little, ready-made religiosities on a Sunday. You can't preach anything to a people who don't understand a word you say, and who are mostly too busy with more pressing affairs to listen if they did understand. And you see for yourself there's no church."

"But what did these fellows do?" he persisted. That had been puzzling him.

"Nothing," she said scornfully "nothing but sit around and complain about the loneliness and the coarse food and the discouraging outlook. Then they'd finally go away—go back to where they came from, I suppose."

"The last man," Thompson ventured doubtfully. "The factor at Pachugan told me Mr. Carr assaulted him. That seems rather odd to me, after what I've seen of your father. Was it so?"

"The last missionary wasn't what you'd call a good man, in any sense," Sophie answered frankly. "He was here most of one summer, and toward the last he showed himself up pretty badly. He developed a nasty trick of annoying little native girls. Dad thrashed him properly. Dad took it as a sort of reflection on us. Even the Indians don't approve of that sort of thing. He left in a hurry, after that."

Thompson felt his face burn.

"Things like that made a bad impression," he returned diffidently. "I suppose in all walks of life there are wolves in sheep's clothing. I hope it hasn't prejudiced you against churchmen in general."

"One single incident?" she smiled. "That wouldn't be very logical, would it? No. We're not so intolerant. I don't suppose dad would actually have gone the length of thrashing him, if the preacher hadn't taken a high and mighty tone as a sort of bluff. That particular preacher happened to be a local nuisance. I suppose in a settled, well-organized community, public opinion and convention is a check on such men. They keep within bounds because there's a heavy penalty if they don't. Up here where law and conventions and so on practically don't exist, men of a certain stamp aren't long in reverting to pure animalism. It's natural enough, I dare say. Dad would be the last one to set himself up as a critic of any one's personal morality. But it isn't very nice, especially for preachers, who come here posing as the representatives of all that is good and pure and holy."

"You get terribly sarcastic at times, Miss Carr," Thompson complained. "A man can preach the Gospel without losing his manhood."

"If he had any clear conception of manhood I don't see how he could devote himself to preaching as a profession," she said composedly. "Of course, it's perhaps an excellent means of livelihood, but rather a parasitic means, don't you think?"

"When Christ came among men He was reviled and despised," Mr. Thompson declared impressively.

"Do you consider yourself the prototype of Christ?" the girl inquired mockingly. "Why, if the man of Galilee could be reincarnated the first thing He would attack would be the official expounders of Christianity, with their creeds and formalisms, their temples and their self-seeking. The Nazarene was a radical. The average preacher is an out-and-out reactionary."

"How do you know?" he challenged boldly. "According to your own account of your life so far, you have never had opportunity to find the truth or falsity of such a sweeping statement. You've always lived—" he looked about the enfolding woods—"how can one know what the world outside of Lake Athabasca is, if one has never been there?"

She laughed.

"One can't know positively," she said. "Not from personal experience. But one can read eagerly, and one can think about what one reads, and one can draw pretty fair conclusions from history, from what wise men, real thinkers, have written about this big world one has never seen. And the official exponents of theology show up rather poorly as helpful social factors, so far as my study of sociology has gone."

"You seem to have a grudge against the cloth," Thompson hazarded a shrewd guess. "I wonder why?"

"I'll tell you why," the girl said—and she laughed a little self-consciously. "My reason tells me it's a silly way to feel. I can never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same dispassionate plane that dad can. There's a foolish sense of personal grievance. Dad had it once, too, but he got over it long ago. I never have. Perhaps you'll understand if I tell you. My mother was a vain, silly, emotional sort of person, it seems, with some wonderful capacity for attracting men. Dad was passionately fond of her. When I was about three years old my foolish mother ran away with a young minister. After living with him about six months, wandering about from place to place, she drowned herself."

Thompson listened to this recital of human frailty in wonder at the calm way in which Sophie Carr could speak to him, a stranger, of a tragedy so intimate. She stopped a second.

"Dad was all broken up about it," she continued. "He loved my mother with all her weaknesses—and he's a man with a profound knowledge of and tolerance for human weaknesses. I daresay he would have been quite willing to consider the past a blank if she had found out she cared most for him, and had come back. But, as I said, she drowned herself. We lived in the eastern States. It simply unrooted dad. He took me and came away up here and buried himself. Incidentally he buried me too. And I don't want to be buried. I resent being buried. I hope I shall not always be a prisoner in these woods. And I grow more and more resentful against that preacher for giving my father a jolt that made a recluse of him. Don't you see? That one thing has colored my personal attitude toward preachers as a class. I can never meet a minister without thinking of that episode which has kept me here where I never see another white woman, and very seldom a man. It's really a weak spot in me, holding a grudge like that. One wouldn't condemn carpenters as a body because one carpenter botched a house. And still—"

She made the queer little gesture with her hands that he had noticed before. And she smiled quite pleasantly at Mr. Thompson in womanly inconsistency with the attitude she had just been explaining she held toward ministers.

"One gets such silly notions," she remarked. "Just like your idea that you can come here and do good. You can't, you know—not for others—not by your method. It's absurd. One can help others most, I really believe, by helping oneself. I've noticed in reading of the phenomena of human relations that the most pronounced idealists are frequently a sad burden to others."

Mr. Thompson found himself at a loss for instant reply. It was a trifle less direct, more subtle than he liked. It opened hazily paths of speculation he had never explored because generalizations of that sort had never been propounded to him—certainly never by a young woman whose very physical presence disturbed him sadly.

And while he was turning that last sentence over uncomfortably in his mind a hail sounded across the meadow. Sophie stood up and waved the tin bucket she had in her hand. Tommy Ashe came striding toward them. He, too, carried a tin bucket.

"We're going to a blackberry patch down the creek," Sophie answered Thompson's involuntary look of inquiry. "Get a pail and come along."

"I must work," Thompson shook his head.

"Berry-picking's work, if work is what you want," she retorted. "You'd think so by the time you'd picked a hundred quarts or more and preserved them for winter use. But then I suppose your winter supply will emanate from some mysterious, beneficent source, without any effort on your part. How fortunate that will be."

She tempered this sally with a laugh, and being presently joined by Tommy Ashe, set off toward the bank of Lone Moose, leaving Mr. Thompson sitting on his log, indulging in some very mixed reflections.

The task he was engaged upon seemed suddenly to have lost its savor. Whether this arose from a depressing sense of inability to deny the truth of much that Sophie Carr had just said, or from the fact that as he sat there looking after them he found himself envying Tommy Ashe's pleasant intimacy with the girl, he could not say. Indeed, he did not inquire too closely of himself. Some of the conclusions he was latterly arriving at were so radically different from what he was accustomed to accepting that he was a little bit afraid of them.

It took him a considerable time to get back into a proper working frame of mind. The progress of his wooden edifice suffered by that much. When he went trudging home at last, sweaty and tired, with his axe over one shoulder, he was wondering frankly if, after all, it was either wise or necessary to establish a mission at Lone Moose. What good could he or any other man possibly do there? The logical and proper answer to that did not spring as readily to his lips as it would have done at the time of his appointment by the Board of Home Missions.

Along with that he was troubled by a constant recurrence of his thoughts to Sophie Carr. Nor was it a matter of wonder at her bookish knowledge, her astonishing vocabulary, her ability to think and to express her thoughts concisely. He conceded that she was a remarkable young woman in that respect. It was not her intellectual capacity which concerned him greatly, but the sunny aureole of her hair, the smiling curve of her lips, the willowy pliancy of her well-developed body. Just to think of her meant a colorful picture, a vision that filled him with uneasy restlessness, with vague dissatisfaction, with certain indefinable longings.

He was quite unable to define to himself the purport of these remarkable symptoms.



CHAPTER VII

A SLIP OF THE AXE

Mr. Thompson gradually became aware of a change in the season. The calendar lost a good deal of its significance up there, partly because he had no calendar and partly because one day was so much a duplicate of another that the flitting of time escaped his notice. But he became conscious that the days grew shorter, the nights a shade more cool, and that the atmosphere was taking on that hazy, mellow stillness which makes Indian Summer a period of rare beauty in the North. He took serious stock of elapsed time then, and found to his surprise that it was September the fifteenth.

He had not accomplished much. The walls of his church stood about the level of his head. It grew increasingly difficult for him alone to hoist the logs into place. The door and window spaces were out of square. Without help he did not see how he was going to rectify these small errors and get the roof on. Even after it should be roofed, the cracks chinked and daubed with mud, the doors and windows in place—what then?

He would still lack hearers for the message which he daily grew a little more doubtful of his ability to deliver. A native streak of stubbornness kept him studying the language along with his daily tussle with the axe and saw. But the rate of his progress was such that he pessimistically calculated that it would take him at least two years before he could preach with any degree of understanding in the Athabascan tongue.

So far he had never gone the length of candidly asking himself whether by then it would be a task he could put his heart into, if he were even fitted for such a work, or if it were a useful and worthy task if he were gifted with a fitness for it. He had been taught that preaching the gospel was a divinely appointed function. He had not questioned that. But he had now a lively sense of difficulties hitherto unreckoned, and an ill-stifled doubt of the good that might accrue. His blank ignorance of the salient points of human contact, of why men work and play, why they love and fight and marry and bend all their energies along certain given lines until they grow old and gray and in the end cease to be, only served to bewilder him. His association with Tommy Ashe and with Carr and Carr's daughter—especially with Carr's daughter—further accentuated the questioning uncertainty of his mind.

But that was all—merely an uncertainty which he tried to dissipate by prayer and stern repression of smoldering doubts. At the same time while he decried and resented their outspoken valuation of material considerations he found himself constantly subject to those material factors of daily living.

The first of these was food. When Mr. Thompson outfitted himself for that spiritual invasion of Lone Moose he brought in four months' supplies. He discovered now that his supply of certain articles was not so adequate as he had been told it would be. Also he had learned from Carr and Lachlan that if a man wintered at Lone Moose it was well to bring in a winter's grub before the freeze-up—the canoe being a far easier mode of transport than a dog-team and sled.

So Thompson stopped his building activities long enough to make a trip to Pachugan. He got Lachlan's oldest son to go with him. His quarterly salary was due, and he had a rather reluctant report of his work to make. With the money he would be able to replenish his stock of sugar and tea and dried fruit and flour. He decided too that he would have to buy a gun and learn to use it as the source of his meat supply.

His sublime confidence in the organization which had sent him there suffered a decided shock when he reached Fort Pachugan, and found no remittance awaiting him. There was a letter from the Board secretary breathing exhortations which sounded rather hollow in conjunction with the absence of funds. Mr. Thompson, for the first time in his career, found himself badly in need of money, irritated beyond measure by its lack, painfully cognizant of its value. But he was too diffident to suggest a credit on the strength of the cheque which, upon reflection, he decided was merely delayed in the more or less uncertain mails. He could make shift with what he had for another month. Nor did he mention this slight difficulty to MacLeod.

That gentleman had greeted him heartily enough.

"Man, but ye look as if the country agreed wi' you," he observed, after an appraising glance. "How goes the good work at Lone Moose?"

"There are difficulties," Thompson responded with an unintentional touch of ambiguity. "But I daresay I'll manage in time to overcome them."

He discovered in himself a disinclination to talk about his labors in that field.

MacLeod smiled and forbore to press the subject. There were sundry parcels for Sam Carr, a letter or two, and a varied assortment of magazines. Thompson took these, after tarrying overnight at the post, and started home, refusing MacLeod's cordial invitation to stay over a day or two. He would be back again when the next mail was due, a matter of four or five weeks. And late that same evening, by dint of a favorable breeze that kept the canoe flying, and some hard pulling up Lone Moose Creek, Thompson and the breed boy reached home.

Young Lachlan went off to his cabin. Mr. Thompson conscientiously lugged the assortment of parcels and magazines over to Sam Carr's house, duly delivered the three letters to Carr himself, and—for reasons that he could not define as anything but an unwarrantable access of shyness—declining the first invitation he had ever received to break bread at Carr's table, hurried back to his own primitive quarters. Perhaps the fact that Sophie Carr, curled up in a big chair, smiled at him in a way that made his pulses quicken had something to do with his hasty retreat. He was wary of the impulses and emotions she never failed to stir in him when he was near her. There were times when he suspected that she was aware of this power—which in his naive conception of women he believed almost uncanny in her—and that she amused herself by exercising it upon him. And he resented that.

So he did not stay long enough to observe Carr lay two of his letters on the table after a brief glance, and sit looking fixedly at the third, which by the length of envelope and thickness of enclosure might conceivably have contained some document of a legal or official nature.

Carr looked at this letter a long time before he tore it open. He took a still longer time to peruse its contents. He sat for several minutes thereafter turning the sheets over and over in his lean fingers, until in fact he became aware that his daughter's eyes were fixed on him with a lively curiosity in their gray depths.

"What is it, Dad?" she asked, as he tucked envelope and foolscap pages into the inside pocket of his coat.

"Oh, nothing much," he said shortly.

But he leaned back in his chair and immediately became absorbed in thought that accentuated the multitude of fine lines about his eyes and drew his lips together in a narrow line. Sophie sat regarding him with a look of wonder.

This trifling incident, naturally, did not come under the notice of Mr. Thompson. Conceivably he would not have noticed had he been present, nor have been in any degree interested.

He was, as a matter of fact, fully occupied at that precise moment with the painful and disagreeable consequences of attempting to split kindling by lantern light. To be specific the axe had glanced and cut a deep gash in one side of his foot.

At about the particular moment in which Sam Carr leaned back in his chair and fell into that brown study of a matter that was to have a far-reaching effect, Mr. Thompson was seated on his haunches on his cabin floor, his hands stained with blood and a considerable trail of red marking his progress from woodpile to cabin. His face was white, and his hands rather shaky by the time he finished binding up the wound. The cut stung and burned. When he essayed to move he found himself quite effectually crippled.

For the first time in his twenty-five years of carefully directed existence Mr. Thompson swore a loud, round, Anglo-Saxon oath. Whether this relieved his pent-up feelings or not he appeared to suffer no remorse for the burst of profanity. Instead, he rose and limped painfully about the building of a fire and the preparation of his supper.



CHAPTER VIII

—AND THE FRUITS THEREOF

Mr. Thompson slept fitfully that night. A hard day's paddling had left him tired and sleepy, but the swarm of pain-devils in his slashed foot destroyed his rest. When he got up at daylight and examined the wound again he found himself afflicted with a badly swollen foot and ankle, and a steady dull ache that extended upward past the knee. He was next to helpless since every movement produced the most acute sort of pain—sufficiently so that when he had made shift to get some breakfast he could scarcely eat. In the course of his experiments in self-aid he discovered that to lie flat on his back with the slashed foot raised higher than his body gave a measure of ease. So he adopted this position and stoically set out to endure the hurt. He lay in that position the better part of the day—until, in fact, four in the afternoon brought Sam Carr, shotgun in hand, to his door.

Carr had seldom been in the cabin. This evening, for some reason, he put his head in the door, and whistled softly at sight of Thompson's bandaged foot cocked up on a folded overcoat.

"Well, well," he said, standing his gun against the door casing and coming in. "What have you done to yourself now?"

"Oh, I cut my foot with the axe last night, worse luck," Thompson responded petulantly.

"Bad?" Carr inquired.

"Bad enough."

"Let me see it," Carr suggested. "It's a long way to a sawbones, and Providence never seems quite able to cope with germs of infection. Have you any sort of antiseptic dressing on it?"

Thompson shook his head. He would not confess that the pain and swelling had caused him certain misgivings, brought to his mind uneasily a good deal that he had read and heard of blood-poisoning from cuts and scratches. He was secretly glad to let Carr undo the rude bandage and examine the wound. A man who had spent fifteen years in the wilderness must have had to cope with similar cases.

"You did give yourself a nasty nick and no mistake," Carr observed. "You won't walk on that foot comfortably for two or three weeks. Just grazed a bone. No carbolic, no peroxide, or anything like that, I suppose?"

Thompson shook his head. He had not reckoned on cuts and bruises. Carr put back the wrapping and sat whittling shavings of tobacco off a brown plug, while Thompson got up, hopped on one foot across to the stove and began to lay a fire. He had eaten nothing since morning, and was correspondingly hungry. In addition, a certain unministerial pride stirred him to action. He was ashamed to lie supinely enduring, to seem helpless before another man's eyes. But the effort showed in his face.

Carr lit his pipe and watched silently. His gaze took in every detail of the cabin's interior, of Thompson's painful movements, of the poorly cooked remains of breakfast that he was warming up.

"You'll put that foot in a bad way if you try to use it much," he said at last. "The best thing you can do is to come home with me and lie around till you can walk again. I've got stuff to dress it properly. Think you can hobble across the clearing if I make you a temporary crutch?"

Thompson at first declined to be such a source of trouble. He was grateful enough, but reluctant. Carr, however, went about it in a way that permitted nothing short of a boorish refusal, and presently Mr. Thompson found himself, with a crutch made of a forked willow, crossing the meadow to Sam Carr's house.

His instincts had more or less subconsciously warned him that it would not be well for his peace of mind or the good of his soul to be in intimate daily contact with Sophie Carr. But his general inability to cope with emergencies—which was patent enough to a practical man if not wholly so to himself—culminating in this misadventure with a sharp axe, had brought about that very circumstance.

He had not looked for such a kindly office on the part of Sam Carr. That individual's caustic utterances and critical attitude toward theology had not forewarned Thompson that sympathy and kindliness were fundamental attributes with Sam Carr. If he had an acid tongue his heart was tender enough. But Carr was no sentimentalist. When he had bestowed Thompson in a comfortable room and painstakingly dressed the injured foot he left his patient much to his own devices—and to the ministrations of his daughter.

As a consequence, while the wound in his foot healed rapidly, Mr. Thompson suffered a more grievous injury to his heart. Sophie Carr affected him much as strong drink affects men with weak heads. The more he saw of her the more he desired to see, to feast his eyes on her loveliness—and invariably, when alone, to berate himself for such a weakness. He had never dreamed that a man could feel that way about a woman. He did not see why he, of all men, should succumb to the fascination of a girl like Sophie Carr.

But the emotion was undeniable. Perhaps Sophie would have been surprised if she could have known the amount of repression Mr. Thompson gradually became compelled to practice when she was with him.

That was frequently enough. They were all good to him. From Carr's Indian woman—who could, he now learned, speak passable English—down to the sloe-eyed youngest Carr of mixed blood, they accepted him as one of themselves. However, it happened to be Sophie who waited on him most, who impishly took the greatest liberties with him, who was never averse to an argument on any subject Thompson cared to touch. He had never supposed there was a normal being with views on religion and economics, upon any manifestation of human problems, with views so contrary to his own. The maddening part of it was her ability to cite facts and authorities whose existence he was not aware of, to confute him with logic and compel him to admit that he did not know, that much of what he asserted so emphatically was based on mere belief rather than demonstrable fact or rational processes of arriving at a conclusion. Sometimes both Sam Carr and Tommy Ashe were present at these oral tilts, sitting back in silent amusement at Mr. Thompson's intellectual floundering.

A clean cut in the flesh of a healthy man heals quickly. In two weeks Thompson could put his full weight on the injured member without pain or any tendency to reopening the wound. Whereupon he repaired to his cabin again, in a state of mind that was very disturbing. Without accepting any of the Carr dictums upon theology and theological activities, he was fast growing doubtful of his fitness for the job of herding other people into the fold. He found himself with a growing disinclination for such a task as his life work. Since that was the only thing he had any aptitude for or training in, when he thought of cutting loose and facing the world at large without the least idea of what he should do or how he should do it, he perceived himself in a good deal of a dilemma.

He was growing sure of one thing. Over and above the good of his soul and other people's souls, a man must eat—to put it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman. He would rather love and struggle and suffer than stand aloof, thanking God that he was not, like the Pharisees, as other men. Sitting moodily by his rusty stove he confessed to himself that a man who would gladly give up his hopes of eternal salvation for the privilege of folding Sophie Carr close in his arms had no business in the ministry—unless he simply wanted to hold down an easy, salaried job.

Whatever other sorts of a fool he might have been Thompson was no hypocrite. He had never consciously looked upon the ministry as a man looks upon a business career—a succession of steps to success, to an assured social and financial position. Yet when he turned the searchlight of analysis upon his motives he could not help seeing that this was the very thing he had unwittingly been doing—that he had expected and hoped for his progress through missionary work and small churches eventually to bestow upon him a call to a wider field—a call which Sam Carr had callously suggested meant neither more nor less than a bigger church, a wider social circle, a bigger salary. And Thompson could see that he had been looking forward to these things as a just reward, and he could see too how the material benefits in them were the lure. He had been coached and primed for that. His inclination had been sedulously directed into that channel. His enthusiasm had been the enthusiasm of one who seeks to serve and feels wholly competent.

But he doubted both his fitness and his inclination now. He said to himself that when a man loses heart in his work he should abandon that work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her. And she was a rank infidel—a crass materialist—an intellectual Circe. Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must he lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and he a man.

Mr. Thompson had not as yet discovered what a highly important factor that last was.

He managed to get a partial insight into that some three days later, and the vision was vouchsafed him in a simple and natural manner, although to him at the time it seemed the most wonderful and unaccountable thing in the world.



CHAPTER IX

UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES

Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank. He was on his way to Carr's house, driven thither by pure pressure of loneliness, born of three days' solitary communion within the limits of his own shack. He wanted to hear a human voice again. And it was a vagrant, unaccountable impulse that sent him after Sophie instead of directing him straight to Carr's living room, where her father would probably be sitting, pipe in mouth, book in hand.

He hurried with long strides after Sophie. She dipped below the sloping bank before he came up, and when he came noiselessly down to the grassy bank she stood leaning against a tree, gazing at the sluggish flow of Lone Moose.

He had seen her in moods that varied from feminine pettishness to the teasingly mischievous. But he had never seen her in quite the same pitch of spirits that caught his attention as soon as he reached her side.

There was something bubbling within her, some repressed excitement that kindled a glow in her gray eyes, kept a curiously happy smile playing about her lips.

And that magnetic something that drew the heart out of Thompson, afflicting him with a maddening surge of impulses, had never functioned so strongly.

"What is it?" he asked abruptly. "You seem—you look—"

He stopped short. It was not what he meant to say. He tried to avoid the intimately personal when he was with her. He knew the danger of those sweet familiarities—to himself. But he had blurted out the question before he was aware. He was standing so close to her that a little whirling breeze blew a strand of her yellow hair across his face. That tenuous contact made him quiver, gave him a queer intoxicating thrill.

"Does it show so plainly as that?" she smiled. "It's a secret. A really wonderful secret. I'm just bursting to talk about it, but I mustn't. Talking might break the spell. Do you—along with your other naive beliefs—believe in spells, Mr. Thompson?"

"Yes," he answered simply. "In yours."

Her eyes danced. She laughed softly, deep in her throat, like a meadow lark in spring.

"That's the first time I ever knew you to indulge in irony," she said.

"It isn't irony," he answered moodily. "It's the honest truth."

"Poor man," she said gaily. "I'd be flattered to death to think a simple backwoods maiden could make such a profound impression on a young man from the city—but it isn't so."

She turned her head sidewise, like a saucy bird, regarding him with mock gravity, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Mr. Thompson had a long arm and he stood close to her, tantalizingly close. She was smiling. Her lips parted redly over white, even teeth, and as Thompson bent that moody somber gaze on her, her breath seemed to come suddenly a little faster, making her round breast flutter—and a faint tinge of pink stole up to color the soft whiteness of her neck, up into the smooth round of her cheeks.

Thompson's arm closed about her, his lips grazed her cheek as she twisted her head to evade him. That minor show of resistance stirred all the primitive instincts that active or dormant lurk in every strong man. He twisted her head roughly, and as naturally as water flows down hill their lips met. He felt the girl's body nestle with a little tremor closer to his, felt with an odd exaltation the quick hammer of her heart against his breast. He held her tight, and her face slowly drew away from him, and turned shyly against his shoulder.

"It is so, and you know it's so," he whispered hoarsely. "Sophie, I wish—"

She freed herself from his embrace with a sudden twist. Her breath went out in a little gasp. She looked over her shoulder once, and up at Thompson, and a wave of red swept up over her fresh young face and dyed it to the roots of her sunny hair. For a brief instant her hand lingered in Thompson's, bestowing a quick and tender pressure. Then she was gone up the bank with a bound like a startled deer.

Thompson turned. Ten yards out in the stream Tommy Ashe's red canoe drifted, and Tommy sat in the stern, his wet paddle poised as if he had halted it midway of a stroke, his body bent forward, tense as that of a beast crouched to spring.

The bow of the canoe grounded. Ashe laid down his paddle, stepped forward and ashore, hauling the craft's nose high with one hand. His gaze never left Thompson's face. He came slowly up, his round, boyish countenance white and hard and ugly, his eyes smoldering. Thompson felt his own face hardening into the same ugly lines. He felt himself threatened. Without being fully aware of his act he had dropped into a belligerent pose, head and shoulders thrust forward, one foot drawn back, hands clenched. This was purely instinctive. That Tommy Ashe had seen him kiss Sophie Carr and was advancing upon him in jealous fury did not occur to Thompson at all.

"You beggar," Ashe gritted, "is it part of your system of saving souls to kiss a girl as if—"

The quality of his tone would have stung a less sensitive man. With Sophie Carr's lip-pressure fresh and warm upon his own Thompson was in that exalted mood wherein a man is like an open powder keg. And Tommy Ashe had supplied the spark. A most unchristian flash of anger shot through him. His reply was an earnest, if ill-directed blow. This Tommy dodged by the simplest expedient of twisting his head sidewise without moving his body, and launched at the same time a return jab which neatly smacked against Thompson's jaw.

Tommy Ashe was wonderfully quick on his feet and a powerful man to boot. Moreover he had a certain dexterity with his fists. He was in deadly earnest, as a man is when matters of sex lead him to a personal clash. But he found pitted against him a man equally powerful, a man whose extra reach and weight offset the advantage in skill, a man who gave and took blows with silent ferocity.

Thompson, in all his carefully ordered life, had never fought. He fought now as if his life depended upon it. Each blow he gave and took brought to the surface a furious determination. He was not conscious of real pain, although he knew that his lips were cut and bleeding, that his cheeks were bruised and cut where Tommy Ashe's hard-knuckled fists landed with impressive force, that his heart pounded sickeningly against his ribs, and that every breath was a rasping gasp. Nor was he conscious of pity when he saw that Tommy Ashe was in no better case. It seemed fit and proper that they should struggle like that. There was a strange sort of pleasure in it. It seemed natural, as natural an act as he had ever performed. The shock of his clenched fist driven with all his force against the other man's body thrilled him, gave him a curious satisfaction. And that satisfaction took on a keener edge when Ashe clinched and they fell to the earth a struggling, squirming heap—for Thompson felt a tremendous power in his arms, in those arms covered with flat elastic bands of muscle hardened by weeks of axe-slinging, of heaving on heavy logs. He wrapped his arms about Ashe and tried to crush him.

One trial of that fierce grip enlightened Tommy Ashe. He broke loose from Thompson by a trick known to every man who has ever wrestled, and clawed away to his feet. Thereafter he kept clear of grips. Quick, with some skill at boxing, he could get home two blows to Thompson's one. But he could not down his man. Nor could Thompson. They struck and parried, circling and dodging, till their lungs were on fire, and neither had strength enough left to strike a telling blow.

The rage had gone out of them by then. It had become a dogged struggle for mastery. And failing that, there came a moment when they staggered apart and stood glaring at each other, choking for breath. As they stood, Tommy Ashe spoke first.

"You're a tough bird—for a parson."

He gasped the words.

With the dying out of that senseless fury a peculiar feeling of elation came to Thompson, as if he had proved himself upon a doubtful matter. He was ready to go on. But why? That question urged itself upon him. He recalled that he had struck the first blow.

"I think—I started this, didn't I?" he said. "I'm willing to finish it, if you want to—but isn't it—isn't it rather foolish?"

"No end foolish. Don't think we'd ever finish," Ashe said with a gleam of his old humor. "Let's call it a draw. I feel a bit ashamed of myself by now."

Somewhere, sometime, Mr. Thompson had heard that men who fought shook hands when the struggle was ended—a little ceremony that served to restore the status quo. He had not the least rancor against Tommy Ashe. It had all seeped away in the blind fury of that clash. He thrust out a hand upon which the knuckles were cut and bloody. And the man upon whose countenance he had bruised those knuckles took it with a wry self-conscious smile.

Then they drew a little apart and squatted on the bank of the creek to lave their battered faces in the cold water.

For a period of possibly five minutes they sat dabbling water-soaked handkerchiefs upon their faces. The blood ceased to ooze from Thompson's nostrils. Tommy Ashe looked over at his late antagonist and remarked casually.

"We're a pair of capital idiots, eh, Thompson?"

Mr. Thompson tried to smile. But his countenance was swelling rapidly and was in no condition for smiling. He mustered up a grimace, nodding assent.

"I hope Sophie didn't see us making such asses of ourselves," Tommy continued ruefully.

"I hardly think she would," Thompson returned. "It couldn't have been the sort of spectacle a woman would care to watch."

"You never can tell about a woman," Ashe observed thoughtfully. "Nor," he added, "a man. I could never have imagined myself going off half-cocked like that. I suppose the primitive brute in us is never really far from the surface. Especially in this country. There's something," he looked up at the surrounding depths of forest, down along the dusky channel of Lone Moose, curving away among the spruce, "there's something about this infernal solitude that brings out the savage. I've noticed it in little things. We're loosed, in a way, from all restraint, except what we put upon ourselves. Funny world, eh? You couldn't imagine two chaps like us mauling each other like a pair of bruisers in Mrs. Grundy's drawing-room, could you? Over a girl—oh, well, it'll be all the same a hundred years from now."

There was nothing apologetic in either Tommy's tone or words. Thompson understood. Tommy Ashe was thinking out loud, that was all. And presently, after another silent interval, he stood up.

"I think I'll be getting back to my own diggings," he said. "So long, old man."

He nodded, pushed off his canoe and stepped aboard. In a minute he was gone around the bend, driving the red canoe with slow, deliberate strokes.

Mr. Thompson gave over musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy's words and attitude, and began to take stock of himself. It seemed to him that Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his earlier life and the code he had assimilated during that formative period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of shame. And he felt no shame. On the contrary he experienced nothing more than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration. Why, he could not determine. It was un-Christian, undignified, brutal, to give and take blows, to feel that vicious determination to smash another man with his bare fists, to know the unholy joy of getting a blow home with all the weight of his body behind it. Mr. Thompson was a trifle dazed, a trifle uncertain. His face was puffed out of its natural contours, and very tender in spots to touch. He knew that he must be a sight. There was a grievous stiffness creeping over his arms and shoulders, an ache in his ribs, as his heated body began to cool. But he was not sorry for anything. He experienced no regrets. Only a heady feeling that for once in his life he had met an emergency and had been equal to the demand.

Perhaps the sweet memory of Sophie Carr's warm lips on his had something to do with this.

At any rate he rose after a little and followed the creek bank to a point well down stream, whence he crossed through the fringe of timber to his cabin.



CHAPTER X

THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted, and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night. As a consequence he slept late. Dawn had grown old before he wakened.

When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of the north that he had yet seen. The sky was banked full of slate-gray clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men, the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to look at that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.

He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten breakfast it was glowing red. When he sat with his feet cocked up on the stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it seemed to him that he was passing a portentous milestone. To his unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon that—to him—most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's helpmate. He simply could not. He could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of "parasitical parsons", of "unthinking acceptance of priestly myths", of the Church, his Church, as "an organization essentially materialistic in its aims and activities", and many more such phrases which were new and startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has been written upon philosophy and theology.

Sophie didn't believe in his God, nor his work; he stopped short of asking if he himself any longer had full and implicit belief in these things, or if he had simply accepted them without question as he had accepted so many other things in his brief career. But she believed in him and cared for him. He took that for granted too. And love covers a multitude of sins. He had often had occasion to discourse upon various sorts of love—fatherly love and brotherly love and maternal affection and so on. But this flare of passionate tenderness focussing upon one slender bit of a girl was something he could not quite fathom. He would have contradicted with swift anger any suggestion that perhaps it was merely wise old Nature's ancient method efficiently at work for an appointed end. He had been so thoroughly grounded in the convention of decrying physical impulses, of putting everything upon a pure and spiritual plane, that in this first emotional crisis of his life he could no more help dodging first principles than a spaniel pup can help swimming when he is first tossed into deep water.

Still—he was not a fool. He knew that his concern was not for Sophie Carr's immortal soul, nor for the beauty and sweetness of her spirit, when he was near her, when he touched her hand, nor even in that supreme moment when he crushed her close to his unquiet heart and pressed that hot kiss on her lips. It was the sheer flesh and blood womanliness of her that made his heart beat faster, the sweet curve of her lips, the willowy grace of her body, the odd little gestures of her hands, the melody of her voice and the gray pools of her eyes, eyes full of queer gleams and curious twinkles—all these things were indescribably beautiful to him. He loved her—just the girl herself. He wanted her, craved her presence; not the pleasant memory of her, but the forthright physical nearness of her he desired with an intensity that was like a fever.

Just the excitement of feeling—as according to his lights he had a right to feel—that they stood pledged, made it hard for him to get down to fundamentals and consider rationally the question of marriage, of their future, of how his appointed work could be made to dovetail with the union of two such diverse personalities as himself and Sophie Carr.

A hodge podge of this sort was turning over in his mind as he sat there, now and then absently feeling the dusky puffiness under one eye and the tender spot on the bridge of his nose where Tommy Ashe's hard knuckles had peeled away the skin. He still had a most un-Christian satisfaction in the belief that he had given as good as he had got. He was not ashamed of having fought. He would fight again, any time, anywhere, for Sophie Carr. He did not ask himself whether the combative instinct once aroused might not function for lesser cause.

He came out of this reverie at the faint rustle of footsteps beyond his door—which was open because of the hot fire he had built.

He did not suspect that the source of those footsteps might be Sophie Carr until she stood unmistakably framed in the doorway. He rose to his feet with a glad cry of welcome, albeit haltingly articulated. He was suddenly reluctant to face her with the marks of conflict upon his face.

"May I come in?" she asked coolly—and suited her action to the request before he made reply.

She sat down on a box just within the door and looked soberly at him, scanning his face. Her hands lay quietly in her lap and she did not seem to see Thompson's involuntarily extended arms. There was about her none of the glowing witchery of yesterday. She lifted to him a face thoughtful, even a little sad. And Thompson's hands fell, his heart keeping them company. It was as if the somberness of those wind-swept woods had crept into his cabin. It stilled the rush of words that quivered on his lips. Sophie, indeed, found utterance first.

"I'm sorry that you and Tommy fought," she said constrainedly. "I didn't know until this morning. It was cowardly of me to run away. But it was foolish to fight. It didn't occur to me that you two would. I suppose you wonder what brought me here. I was worried for fear you had been hurt. I saw Tommy, but he wouldn't talk."

"I daresay I'm not a pretty object to look at," Thompson admitted. "But I'm really not much the worse."

"No. I can see that," she said. "Tommy is very quick and very strong—I was a little afraid."

The contrition, the hint of pity in her voice stirred up the queer personal pride he had lately acquired.

"I don't suppose Ashe has any monopoly of strength and quickness," he remarked. "That—but there, I don't want to talk about that."

He came over close beside her and looked down with all his troubled heart in his clear blue eyes—so that the girl turned her gaze away and her fingers wove nervously together.

"My dear," the unaccustomed phrase broke abruptly, with a fierce tenderness, from his lips. "I love you—which I think you know without my saying so. I want you. Will you marry me? I—"

Sophie warded off the impetuous outstretching of his arms and sprang to her feet, facing him with all the delicate color gone out of her cheeks, a sudden heave to her breast. She shook her head. "No," she said. "I won't penalize myself to that extent—nor you. I won't bind myself by any such promise. I won't even admit that I might."

He caught her by the shoulders and shook her roughly.

"Yesterday," he said hoarsely, "you let me kiss you—your lips burned me—you rested your head against me as if it belonged there. What sort of a woman are you? Sophie! Sophie!"

"I know," she returned. "But yesterday was yesterday. This is another day. Yesterday—oh, you wouldn't understand if I told you. Yesterday I was bursting with happiness, like a bird in the spring. I like you, big man with the freckled face. You came down here and stood beside me and smiled at me. And—and that's all—a minute's madness. We can't marry on that. I can't. I won't."

His fingers tightened on the rounded arms. He shook her again with a restrained savagery. If he hurt her she did not flinch, nor did her gray eyes, cloudy now and wistful, waver before the passionate fire in his.

"Sophie," he went on, "you don't know what this means to me. Don't you care a little?"

"Yes," she answered slowly. "Perhaps more than a little. I'm made that way, I suppose. It isn't hard for me to love. But one doesn't—"

"Then why," he demanded, "why refuse to give me a hope? Why, if you care in the least, is there no chance for me? It isn't just a sudden fancy. I've been feeling it grow and struggling to repress it, ever since I first saw you. You say you care—yet you won't even think of marrying me. I can't understand that at all. Why?"

"Do you want to know? Can't you see good grounds why we two, of all people, should not marry?" she asked evenly. "Can you see anything to make it desirable except a—a welling up of natural passion? Don't hold my arms so tight. You hurt."

He released his unthinking grip and stepped back a pace, his expression one of hurt bewilderment at the paradox of Sophie's admission and refusal.

"We're at opposite poles in everything," she went on. "I don't believe in the things you believe in. I don't see life with your vision at all. I never shall. We'd be in a continual clash. I like you but I couldn't possibly live with you—you couldn't live with me. I rebel at the future I can see for us. Apart from yourself, the things you'd want to share with me I despise. If I had to live in an atmosphere of sermons and shams, of ministerial sanctimoniousness and material striving for a bigger church and a bigger salary, I'd suffocate—I'd hate myself—and in the end I'd hate you too."

A little note of scorn crept into her voice, and she stopped. When she spoke again her tone had changed, deepened into uncertainty, freighted with wistfulness.

"I'm not good—not in your sense of the word," she said. "I don't even want to be. It would take all the joy out of living. I want to sing and dance and be vibrantly alive. I want to see far countries and big cities, to go about among people whose outlook isn't bounded by a forest and a lake shore, nor by the things you set store by. And I'll be a discontented pendulum until I do.

"Why," she burst out passionately, "I'd be the biggest little fool on earth to marry you just because—just because I like you, because you kissed me and for a minute made me feel that life could be bounded by you and kisses. You're only the second possible man I've ever seen. You and Tommy Ashe. And before you came I could easily have persuaded myself that I loved Tommy."

"Now you think perhaps you love me, but that you might perhaps care in the same way for the next attractive man who comes along? Is that it?" Thompson asked with a touch of bitterness.

"I might think so—how can one tell?" she sighed. "But I'm very sure my impulses will never plunge me into anything headlong, as you would have me plunge. Don't you see," she made an impatient gesture, "we're just like a couple of fledgling birds trying our wings. And you want to proceed on the assumption that we're equal to anything, sure of everything. I know I'm not. You—"

She made again that quick, expressive gesture with her hands. Something about it made Thompson suddenly feel hopeless and forlorn, the airy castles reared overnight out of the stuff of dreams a tumbled heap about him. He sat down on one of the rude chairs, and turned his face to look out the window, a lump slowly gathering in his throat.

"All right," he said. "Good-by."

If his tone was harsh and curt he could not help that. It was all he could say and the only possible fashion of saying it. He wanted to cry aloud his pain, the yearning ache that filled him, and he could not, would not—no more than he would have whined under pure physical hurt. But when he heard the faint rustle of her cotton dress and her step outside he put his face on his hands and took his breath with a shuddering sigh.

At that, he was mistaken. Sophie had not gone. There was the quick, light pad of her feet on the floor, her soft warm hands closed suddenly about his neck, and he looked up into eyes bright and wet. Her face dropped to a level with his own.

"I'm so sorry, big man," she whispered, in a small, choked voice. "It hurts me too."

He felt the warm moist touch of her lips on his cheek, the faint exhalation of her breath, and while his arms reached swiftly, instinctively to grasp and hold her close, she was gone. And this time she did not come back.



CHAPTER XI

A MAN'S JOB FOR A MINISTER

Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections, Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set about gathering himself together. He did a tremendous lot of thinking about things in general, about himself and Sophie Carr in particular. Moping in that isolated cabin his mind took on a sort of abnormal activity. He could not even stop thinking when he wanted to stop. He would lie awake in the silent darkness long after he should have been asleep, going over his narrow and uneventful existence, the unwelcome and anguished present, the future that was nothing but a series of blank pages which he had yet to turn in God only knew what bitterness and sorrow. That was the way he gloomily put it to himself. He had still to learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to pessimism.

He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first passionate yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his for the asking.

Sometimes he would have a vivid flash of jealousy when he thought about her and Tommy Ashe, when he recalled her admissions. And he would soften from that mood, twisting his lips wryly, when he remembered the pitying tenderness of her good-by.

He could not in the least understand the girl nor her motives, any more than he could understand the transformation that he felt vaguely was taking place in himself. She was too wise for her years and her experience. There was a stinging truth in some of the things she said. And it was his fault, not hers, that they were unpalatable truths. What did a man like himself have to offer a girl like her? Nothing. She had his measure in everything but sheer brute strength, most of all in the stoutness of her resolution. For Mr. Thompson, pondering soberly, realized that if he gave free play to the feelings Sophie Carr had stirred up in him, there was no folly he was not capable of committing. He, whose official creed it was to expound self-denial, would have followed his impulses blindly. He would have married out of hand.

And after that, what?

He could not see clearly, when he tried to see. He was no longer filled with the sublime faith that a beneficent Providence kept watch and ward over him, and all men. He was in fact now almost of the opinion that both sparrows and preachers might fall and the Great Intelligence remain unperturbed. It seemed necessary that a man should do more than have faith. He must imperatively make some conscious, intelligent effort on his own behalf. He was especially of this opinion since the Board of Home Missions had overlooked the matter of forwarding his quarterly salary on time. The faith that moveth mountains was powerless to conjure flour and sugar and tea out of those dusky woods and silent waterways—at least not without a canoe and labor and a certain requisite medium of exchange.

No, he did not blame Sophie Carr for refusing to allow her judgment to be fogged with sentiment. He only marvelled that she could do it where he had failed. He could not blame her—not if his speech and activities since he came to Lone Moose were the measure of his possible achievement.

He was taking grim, unsparing stock of himself, of what he had, of what he had accomplished altogether, by this time. It was not much. It was not even promising. A theological education, which, compared to the sort of culture Sam Carr and his daughter had managed to acquire, seemed rather inadequate and one-sided. They knew more about the principles he was supposed to teach than he knew himself. And their knowledge extended to fields where he could not follow. When he compared himself with Tommy Ashe—well, Tommy was an Oxford man, and although Oxford had not indelibly stamped him, still it had left its mark.

These people had covered all his ground—and they had gone exploring further in fields of general knowledge while he sat gazing smugly at his own reflection in a theological mirror. Upon that score certainly the count was badly against him.

As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally to boot.

As to his late accomplishments in the field of labor, Mr. Thompson looked out of his cabin door to where he could see dimly through the trees the uncompleted bulk of his church—and he set down a mental cipher against that account. It was waste effort. He felt in his heart that he would never finish it. What was the use?

He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church, to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish. And he could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.

Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed desires with his actions loomed paramount. In other words Mr. Thompson began, in a fashion scarcely apprehended, upon the painful process of formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was forcing itself upon his consciousness—not as he had hitherto conceived life to be.

But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan. He could not evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do. And in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare—that was gradually growing plainer, more restricted. Sometimes he varied this by long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone Moose Creek.

This hermit existence he kept up for over a fortnight. He had fought with Tommy Ashe and he felt diffident about inflicting his company on Tommy, considering the casus belli. Nor could he bring himself to a casual dropping in on Sam Carr. He shrank from meeting Sophie, from hearing the sound of her voice, from feeling the tumult of desire her nearness always stirred up in him. And there was nowhere else to go, no one with whom he could talk. He could not hold converse with the Crees. The Lachlan family relapsed into painful stiffness when he entered their house. There was no common ground between him and them.

He was really marking time until the next mail should arrive at Fort Pachugan. The days were growing shorter, the nights edged with sharp frosts. There came a flurry of snow that lay a day and faded slowly in the eye of the weakening sun.

Mr. Thompson, watching his daily diminishing food supply with sedulous consideration, knew that the winter was drawing near, a season merciless in its rigor. He knew that one of these days the northerly wind would bring down a storm which would blanket the land with snow that only the sun of the next May would banish. He was ill-prepared to face such an iron-jawed season.

If he stayed there it would just about take his quarterly salary to supply him with plain food and the heavier clothing he needed. But—he drew a long breath and asked himself one day why he should stay there. Why should he? He could not forbear a wry grimace when he tried to see himself carrying out his appointed task faithfully to the end—preaching vainly to uncomprehending ears month after month, year after year, stagnating mentally and suffocating spiritually in those silent forests where God and godly living was not a factor at all; where food, clothing, and shelter loomed bigger than anything else, because until these primary needs were satisfied a man could not rise above the status of a hungry animal.

Yet he shrank from giving up the ministry. He had been bred to it, his destiny sedulously shaped toward that end by the maiden aunts and the theological schools. It was, in effect, his trade. He could scarcely look equably upon a future apart from prayer meetings, from Bible classes, from carefully thought out and eloquently delivered sermons. He felt like a renegade when he considered quitting that chosen field. But he felt also that it was a field in which he had no business now.

He was still in this uncertain frame of mind a few days later when he borrowed a canoe from Lachlan and set out for the Fort. He had kept away from Carr's for nearly five weeks. Neither Sophie nor her father had come to his cabin again. Once or twice he had hailed Carr from a distance. In the height of his loneliness he had traversed the half-mile to Tommy Ashe's shack up Lone Moose, only to find it deserted. He learned later that Lachlan's oldest son and Ashe had gone partners to run a line of traps away to the north of the village. It occurred to Thompson that he might do the same—if—well, he would see about that when he got home from Pachugan.

The birch bark Lachlan let him have occasioned him many a rare tussle before he finally beached it at the Fort. The fall winds were roughening the lake. It was his first single-handed essay with the paddle. But he derived a certain satisfaction from winning alone against wind and water, and also gained food for thought in the odd circumstance of his growing tendency to get a glow out of purely physical achievements. It did not irk nor worry him now to sweat and strain for hours on end. Instead, he found in that continued, concentrated muscular effort a happy release from troublesome reflection.

His cheque was waiting. As he fingered the green slip whose face value was one hundred and twenty dollars, one fourth of his yearly stipend, he felt relieved, and at the same time oddly reluctant. Not until late in the evening did he get at the root of that reluctance. MacLeod had hospitably insisted on putting him up. They sat in the factor's living room before a great roaring fireplace. Their talk had lapsed into silence. MacLeod leaned back in his chair, pipe in hand, frowning abstractedly.

"Man," he said at length, his bearded face wrinkled with a smile, "I wish ye were no a preacher wi' labors i' the vineyard of the Lord tae occupy yer time. I'd have ye do a job for me."

"A job?" Thompson came out of his preoccupation.

"Aye," MacLeod grunted. "A job. A reg'lar man's job. There'd be a reasonable compensation in't. It's a pity," he continued dryly, "that a parson has a mind sae far above purely mateerial conseederation."

"It may surprise you," Mr. Thompson returned almost as dryly, "to know that I have—to a certain extent—modified my views upon what you term material considerations. They are, I have found, more important than I realized."

The factor took his pipe out of his mouth and regarded Thompson with frank curiosity.

"Well," he remarked finally. "Yer a young man. It's no surprisin'." He paused a second.

"Would it interest ye—would ye consider givin' a month or two of yer time to a legitimate enterprise if it was made worth yer while?" he asked bluntly.

"Yes," Thompson answered with equal directness. "If I knew what it was—if it's something I can do."

"I'm just marking time at Lone Moose," he went on after a pause. There was a note of discouragement in his voice. "I'm—well, completely superfluous there. I'd be tempted—"

He did not go farther. Nor did MacLeod inquire into the nature of the suggested temptation. He merely nodded understandingly at the first part of Thompson's reply.

"Ye could do it fine, I think," he said thoughtfully, "wi' the use of yer head an' the bit coachin' and help I'd provide. It's like this. Pachugan's no so good a deestrict as it used tae be. The fur trade's slowin' down, an' the Company's no so keen as it was in the old days when it was lord o' the North. I mind when a factor was a power—but that time's past. The Company's got ither fish tae fry. Consequently there's times when we're i' the pickle of them that had tae make bricks wi'oot straw. I mean there's times when they dinna gie us the support needful to make the best of what trade there is. Difficulties of transportation for one thing, an' a dyin' interest in a decayin' branch of Company business. Forbye a' that they expect results, just the same.

"Now, I'm short of three verra necessary things, flour, tea, and steel traps. I canna get them frae Edmonton. They didna fully honor my fall requisitions, an' it's too late i' the season now. Yet they'll ask why I dinna get the skins next spring, ye understand. If the Indians dinna get fully supplied here, they'll go elsewhere; they can do that since there's a French firm strung a line o' posts to compete i' the region, ye see.

"Now I havena got the goods I need an' I canna get them frae Company sources. But there's a free trader set himsel' up tae the north o' here last season. The North's no a monopoly for the Company these days, ye ken. They canna run a free trader out i' the old high-handed fashion. But there's a bit of the old spirit left—an' this laddie's met wi' difficulties, in a way o' speakin'. He's discouraged tae the point where he'll sell cheap; an' he's a fair stock o' the verra goods I want. I'd tak' over his stock to-morrow—but he's ninety-odd miles away. I canna leave here i' the height o' the outfittin' season. I ha' naebody I can leave in charge.

"The job for ye wad be tae go up there, inventory his stock, take it over, an' stay there tae distribute it tae such folk as I'd send tae be supplied in that section. Wi' that completed, transfer the tag-ends doon here. I'd furnish ye a breed tae guide ye there an' interpret for ye, an' tae pass on the quality o' such furs as might offer. He'd grade them, an' ye'd purchase accordin'. Do ye see? It's no a job I can put on anny half-breed. There's none here can write and figure."

"As it sounds," Thompson replied, "I daresay I could manage. You said it would be worth my while. What do I gather from that?"

"Ye'd gather two dollars a day an' everything supplied," MacLeod returned dryly. "Will ye tak' it on?"

Thompson stared into the fire for a minute. Then he looked up at the Factor of Fort Pachugan.

"I'm your man," he said briefly.

"Good," MacLeod grunted. "An' when ye go back tae the preachin' ye'll find the experience has done ye no harm. Now, we'll go over the seetuation in detail to-morrow, an' the next day ye'll start north, wi' Joe Lamont. The freeze-up's due, an' it's quicker an' easier travelin' by canoe than wi' dogs."

They talked desultorily for half an hour, until MacLeod, growing drowsy before the big fire, yawned and went off to bed, after pointing out a room for his guest and employee-to-be.

Thompson shut the door of his bedroom and sat down on a stool. He was warm, comfortable, well-fed. But he was not happy, unless the look of him belied his real feelings. He raised his eyes and stared curiously at his reflection in a small mirror on the wall. The scars of Tommy Ashe's fists had long since faded. His skin was a ruddy, healthy hue, the freckles across the bridge of his nose almost wholly absorbed in a coat of tan. But the change that marked him most was a change of expression. His eyes had lost the old, mild look. They were hard and alert, blue mirrors of an unquiet spirit. There was a different set to his lips.

"I don't look like a minister," he muttered. "I look like a man who has been drunk. I feel like that. There must be a devil in me."

He had brought with him from Lone Moose a small bag. Out of this he now took paper, envelopes, a fountain pen, changed his seat to the edge of the bed, and using the stool for a desk began to write. When he had covered two sheets he folded them over the green slip he had that day received, and slid the whole into an envelope which he addressed: