Mr. A.H. Markham, Sec. M.E. Board of Home Missions, 412 Echo St., Toronto, Ont.

He laid the letter on the bed and regarded it with an expression in which regret and relief were equally mingled.

"They'll say—they'll think," he muttered disconnectedly.

He got up, paced across the small room, swung about to look at the letter again.

"I've got to do it," he said aloud defiantly. "It's the only thing I can do. Burn all my bridges behind me. If I can't honestly be a minister, I can at least be a man."



CHAPTER XII

A FORTUNE AND A FLITTING

Christmas had come and gone before Thompson finished his job at Porcupine Lake, some ninety-odd miles, as the crow flies, north of Fort Pachugan. The Porcupine was a marshy stretch of water, the home of muskrat and beaver, a paradise for waterfowl when the heavy hand of winter was lifted, a sheet of ice now, a white oval in the dusky green of the forest. Here the free trader had built a fair-sized structure of logs with goods piled in the front and the rearward end given over to a stove, a table, and two bunks. In this place Thompson and Joe Lamont plied their traffic. MacLeod sent them Indian and half-breed trappers bearing orders for so much flour, so much tea, so many traps, so much powder and ball and percussion caps for their nigh obsolete guns. They took their "debt" and departed into the wilderness, to repay in the spring with furs.

So, by degrees, the free-trader's stock approached depletion, until there remained no more than two good dog teams could haul. With that on sleds, and a few bundles of furs traded in by trappers whose lines radiated from the Porcupine, Thompson and Joe Lamont came back to Fort Pachugan.

The factor seemed well pleased with the undertaking. He checked up the goods and opined that the deal would show a rare profit for the Company.

"Ye have a hundred an' twenty-six dollars due, over an' above a charge or two against ye," he said to Thompson when they went over the accounts. "How will ye have it? In cash? If ye purpose to winter at Lone Moose a credit maybe'll serve as well. Or, if ye go out, ye can have a cheque on the Company at Edmonton."

"Give me the hundred in cash," Thompson decided. "I'll take the twenty odd in grub. I'm going to Lone Moose, but I don't know how long I'll stay there. There's some stuff of mine there that I want to get. After that—I'm a bit undecided."

In those long nights at the Porcupine he had done a good deal of pondering over his next move. He had not yet come to a fixed decision. In a general way he knew that he was going out into the world from whence he had come, with an altogether different point of view, to work out his future along altogether different lines. But he had not made up his mind to do this at once. He was clearly conscious of one imperative craving. That was for a sight of Sophie Carr and a chance to talk to her again. His heart quickened when he thought of their parting. He knew she was anything but indifferent. He was not an egotist, but he knew she harbored a feeling akin to his own, and he built hopes on that, despite her blunt refusal, the logical reasons she had set forth. He hoped again. He saw himself in the way of becoming competent—as the North, which is a keen judge, appraises competence. He had chucked some of his illusions about relative values. He conceived that in time he might approximate to Sophie Carr's idea of a man.

He wanted to see her, to talk with her, to make her define her attitude a little more clearly. Looking back with his mind a great deal less confused by emotion, he wondered why he had been so dumb, why he had not managed to convey to her that the things she foresaw as denying them happiness or even toleration for each other were not a final state in him, that his ideas and habits and pursuits were in a state of flux that might lead him anywhere. She had thrown cold water on the flame of his passion. But he remembered with a glow of happiness that she had kissed him.

He pondered deeply upon this, wondering much at the singular attraction this girl held for him, the mystery of that strange quality that drew him so. He lacked knowledge of the way and power of women. It had never touched him before. It was indeed as if he had been asleep and had wakened with a start. He was intensely curious about that, curious to know why he, who had met nice girls and attractive women by the score, had come into the North woods to be stirred out of all reason by a slip of a girl with yellow hair and expressive gray eyes and a precocious manner of thinking.

He looked forward eagerly to seeing her again. He somehow felt a little more sure of himself now. He could think of a number of things he wished to ask her, of ideas he wanted to expand into speech. The hurt of her blank refusal had dulled a little. He could anticipate a keen pleasure just in seeing her.

In the morning he set about outfitting. He had come down from Porcupine with dogs. He had seen dog teams bearing the goods and chattels of innumerable natives. He perceived the essential usefulness of dogs and snowshoes and toboggans in that boundless region of snow. Canoes when the ice went out, dogs and toboggans when winter came again to lock tight the waterways. So during his stay at Porcupine he had accepted the gift of a dog from a Cree, traded tobacco for another, and he and Lamont had whiled away the long evenings in making two sets of harness and a small toboggan. A four-dog team will haul a sizable load. Two would move all the burden of food and gear that he had in his possession. He had learned painfully to walk upon snowshoes—enough so that he was over the poignant ache in the calf of the leg which the North calls mal de racquette. Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the wilderness alone. Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.

Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was lonely still—but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the woodsman to his woods, and the boulevardier to his beloved avenues! Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on a man's soul.

Thompson's preparation for the trail was simple. That lesson he had learned from two months' close association with Joe Lamont. He had acquired a sleeping bag of moosehide, soft tanned. This, his gun and axe, the grub he got from the Pachugan store, he had lashed on the toboggan and put his dogs in harness at daybreak. There would be little enough day to light his steps. Dusk came at midafternoon.

When he had tied the last lashing he shook hands with MacLeod and set out.

He traversed the sixty miles between Pachugan and Lone Moose in two days, by traveling late the first night, under a brilliant moon. It gave him a far vision of the lake shore, black point after black point thrusting out into the immense white level of the lake. Upon that hard smooth surface he could tuck the snowshoes under his lashings and trot over the ice, his dogs at his heels, the frost-bound hush broken by the tinkle of a little bell Joe Lamont had fastened on the lead dog's collar. It rang sweetly, a gay note in that chill void.

That night he drew into a spruce grove, cleared a space for his fire and bed, fed himself hot tea and a bannock, and the hindquarters of a rabbit potted by his rifle on the way. He went to sleep with drowsy eyes peeping at the cold stars from under the flap of his sleeping bag, at the jagged silhouette of spruce tops cut sharp against the sky.

He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The cabin sat squat and brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green. Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some one laughed.

The frost stirred him out of this momentary inaction. In a few minutes he had a fire glowing in the stove, a lamp lighted, the chill driven from that long deserted room. Except for that chill and a slight closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near the cabin wall.

Thompson had achieved a hair-cut at Pachugan. Now he got out his razor and painstakingly scraped away the accumulated beard. He had allowed it to grow upon Joe Lamont's assertion that "de wheesker, she's help keep hout de fros', Bagosh." Thompson doubted the efficiency of whiskers as a protection, and he wanted to appear like himself. He made that concession consciously to his vanity.

He did not waste much time. While he shaved and washed, his supper cooked. He ate, drew the parka over his head, hooked his toes into the loops of his snowshoes and strode off toward Carr's house. The timidity that made him avoid the place after his fight with Tommy Ashe and subsequent encounter with Sophie had vanished. The very eagerness of his heart bred a profound self-confidence. He crossed the meadow as hurriedly as an accepted lover.

For a few seconds there was no answer to his knock. Then a faint foot-shuffle sounded, and Carr's Indian woman opened the door. She blinked a moment in the dazzle of lamp glare on the snow until, recognizing him, her brown face lit up with a smile.

"You come back Lone Moose, eh?" she said. "Come in."

Thompson put back the hood of his parka and laid off his mitts. The room was hot by comparison with outdoors. He looked about. Carr's woman motioned him to a chair. Opposite him the youngest Carr squatted like a brown Billiken on a wolfskin. Every detail of that room was familiar. There was the heavy, homemade chair wherein Sam Carr was wont to sit and read. Close by it stood Sophie's favorite seat. A nickel-plated oil lamp gave forth a mellow light under a pale birch-bark shade. But he missed the old man with a pipe in his mouth and a book on his knee, the gray-eyed girl with the slow smile and the sunny hair.

"Mr. Carr and Sophie—are they home?" he asked at length.

The Indian woman shook her head.

"Sam and Sophie go 'way," she said placidly. "No come back Lone Moose long time—maybe no more. Sophie leave sumpin' you. I get."

She crossed the room to a shelf above the serried volumes of Sam Carr's library, lifted the cover of a tin tobacco box and took out a letter. This she gave to Thompson. Then she sat down cross-legged on the wolfskin beside her youngster, looking up at her visitor impassively, her moon face void of expression, except perhaps the mildest trace of curiosity.

Thompson fingered the envelope for a second, scarcely crediting his ears. The letter in his hands conveyed nothing. He did not recognize the writing. He was acutely conscious of a dreadful heartsinking. There was a finality about the Indian woman's statement that chilled him.

"They have gone away?" he said. "Where? When did they go?"

"Long time. Two moon," she replied matter-of-factly. "Dunno where go. Sam say he go—don't know when come back. Leave me house, plenty blanket, plenty grub. Next spring he say he send more grub. That all. Sophie go too."

Thompson stared at her. Perhaps he was not alone in facing something that numbed him.

"Your man go away. Not come back. You sorry? You feel bad?" he asked.

Her lips parted in a wide smile.

"Sam he good man," she said evenly. "Leave good place for me. I plenty warm, plenty to eat. I no care he go. Sam, pretty soon he get old. I want ketchum man, I ketchum. No feel bad. No."

She shook her head, as if the idea amused her. And Mr. Thompson, perceiving that a potential desertion which moved him to sympathy did not trouble her at all, turned his attention to the letter in his hand. He opened the envelope. There were half a dozen closely written sheets within.

Dear freckle-faced man: there is such a lot I want to say that I don't know where to begin. Perhaps you'll think it queer I should write instead of telling you, but I have found it hard to talk to you, hard to say what I mean in any clear sort of way. Speech is a tricky thing when half of one's mind is dwelling on the person one is trying to talk to and only the other half alive to what one is trying to express. The last time we were together it was hard for me to talk. I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't like to tell you. I wanted to talk and when I tried I blundered. Too much feeling—a sort of inward choking. And the last few days, when I have become accustomed to the idea of going away and familiar with the details of the astonishing change which has taken place in my life, you have been gone. I dare not trust to a casual meeting between here and Pachugan. I do not even know for sure that you have gone to Pachugan, or that you will come back—of course I think you will or I should not write.

But unless you come back to-night you will not see me at Lone Moose. So I'm going to write and leave it with Cloudy Moon to give you when you do come.

Perhaps I'd better explain a little. Dad had an old bachelor brother who—it seems—knew me when I was an infant. Somehow he and dad have kept in some sort of touch. This uncle, whom I do not remember at all, grew moderately wealthy. When he died some six months ago his money was willed equally to dad and myself. It was not wholly unexpected. Dad has often reminded me of that ultimate loophole when I would grow discontented with being penned up in these dumb forests. I suppose it may sound callous to be pleased with a dead man's gift, but regardless of the ways and means provided it seems very wonderful to me that at last I am going out into the big world that I have spent so many hours dreaming of, going out to where there are pictures and music and beautiful things of all sorts—and men.

You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a preacher—if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital—I—but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.

It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you—but it was under protest—under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of that same passion stirred me—I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands—yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering: "Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."

There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me. But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate protection—as he has often made plain—to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong—I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in that sort of atmosphere.

Even if you were not a minister—if you were just plain man—and I wish you were—I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (vide Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I know myself, within certain limits—but men I do not know at all, except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately—and that alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you—and mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other.

And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.

Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity. I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go.

I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself—looking at it from your own peculiar angle—you will say: "She is not worth thinking about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still—knowing all this—I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you—and that is often.

I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love doesn't endure to death—unless it is nurtured by association, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.

Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different. But—a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by.

Sophie.

P.S. Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the books he left. He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all if you want them, or any of them, any time.

Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He rose to go. He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it hurt him terribly to recall. His eye fell upon the rows of Carr's books, orderly upon their shelves. The postscript, fresh in his sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books, roused him to a swelling fury of anger.

The heresies of Huxley and Darwin! The blasphemies of Tom Paine! The economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial intellects in every civilized corner of the earth. The bulky, bitter tomes of Marx and Engels! The Lorias and Leacocks, the tribe of Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual realm—and which generally leave gods and religions out of account except to analyze them as manifestations of social phenomena. Those damnable documents which he had never read, but which he had been taught to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!

He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt "good evening" to Cloudy Moon, and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat within.

The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon. The teeth of the frost nipped at him. A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow. And his anger died. That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion. She had loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil—tempted by a fortune untimely directed to her hands.

He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.

A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure. He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically—set his teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much the same.

He turned for a look at the yellow windows of Sam Carr's house. It was a hollow, empty place now, one that he never wanted to see again, like a room in which a beloved person has died and from which the body has been carried away. His eyes lingered on the dim bulk of the house, dusky black and white like a sketch in charcoal.

"Another bridge burned," he said wistfully to himself.

He faced about, crossed the dividing fringe of timber, passing near the walls of his unfinished church. A wry smile twisted his lips. That would remain, the uncompleted monument of his good intentions, the substance of an unrealizable, impractical dream.

Beyond that, as he came out into his own clearing, he saw a light in his cabin, where he had left no light. When he came to the door another toboggan lay beside his own. Strange dogs shifted furtively about at his approach. Warned by these signs he opened the door full of a curiosity as to who, in the accustomed fashion of the North, had stopped and made himself at home.

When the man sitting before the stove with his feet on the rusty front turned his head at Thompson's entrance, he saw, with a mild turn of surprise, that his visitor was Tommy Ashe.



CHAPTER XIII

PARTNERS

"Hello, old man," Tommy greeted cheerfully. "How goes it?"

If it occurred to either of them that the last time they faced each other it had been in hot anger and in earnest endeavor to inflict bodily damage, they were not embarrassed by that recollection, nor did either man hold rancor. Their hands gripped sturdily. It seemed to Thompson, indeed, that a face had never been so welcome. He did not want to sit alone and think. Even apart from that he was uncommonly glad to see Tommy Ashe.

"It doesn't go much at all," he said. "As a matter of fact, I just got back to Lone Moose to-night after being away for weeks."

"Same here," Tommy responded. "I've been trapping. Heard you'd gone to Pachugan, but thought it was only for supplies. I got in to my own diggings to-night, and the shack was so infernally cold and dismal I mushed on down here on the off chance that you'd have a fire and wouldn't mind chinning awhile. Lord, but a fellow surely gets fed up with his own company, back here. At least I do."

Thompson awoke to hospitable formalities.

"Have you had supper?" he asked.

"Stopped and made tea about sundown," Tommy replied. "Thanks just the same. Gad, but it was cold this afternoon. The air fairly crackled."

"Yes," Thompson agreed. "It was very cold."

He drew a stool up to the stove and sat down. Tommy got out his pipe and began whittling shavings of tobacco off a plug.

"Did you know that Carr and his daughter have gone away?" Thompson asked abruptly.

Tommy nodded.

"Donald Lachlan—I've been trapping partners with him, y'know—Donald was home a month or so since. Told me when he came back that the Carrs were gone. I wasn't surprised."

"No?" Thompson could not forbear an inquiring inflection on the monosyllable.

"No," Tommy continued a bit wistfully. "I was talking to Carr a few days after you and I had that—that little argument of ours." He smiled. "He told me then that after fifteen years up here he was inclined to try civilization again. Mostly to give Sophie a chance to see what the world was like, I imagine. I gathered from his talk that some sort of windfall was coming his way. But I daresay you know more about it than I do."

"No," Thompson replied. "I've been away—a hundred miles north of Pachugan—for two months. I didn't know anything about it till to-night."

Tommy looked at him keenly.

"Jolted you, eh, old man?" There was a quiet sympathy in his tone.

"A little," Thompson admitted grimly. "But I'm getting used to jolts. I had no claim on—on them."

"We both lost out," Tommy Ashe said thoughtfully. "Sophie Carr is one woman in ten thousand. I think she's the most remarkable girl I ever came across anywhere. She knows what she wants, and neither of us quite measured up. She liked me too—but she wouldn't marry me. Before you came she tried to convince me of that. And I wasn't slow to see that you interested her, that as a man she gave you a good deal of thought, although your—er—your profession's one she rather makes light of. Women are queer. I didn't know but you might have taken her by storm. And then again, I rather imagined she'd back off when you got serious."

"I was a fool," Thompson muttered.

"I wouldn't say that," Tommy responded gently. "A man couldn't resist her. I've known a lot of women one way and another. I never knew one could hold a candle to her. She has a mind like a steel trap, that girl. She understood things in a flash, moods and all that. She'd make a real chum, as well as a wife. Most women aren't, y'know. They're generally just one or the other. No, I'd never call myself a fool for liking Sophie too well. In fact a man would be a fool if he didn't.

"She likes men too," Tommy went on musingly. "She knew it. I suppose she'll be friendly and curious and chummy, and hurt men without meaning to until she finds the particular sort of chap she wants. Oh, well."

"How's the trapping?"

Thompson changed the subject abruptly. He could not bear to talk about that, even to Tommy Ashe who understood out of his own experience, who had exhibited a rare and kindly understanding.

"I've been wondering if I could make a try at that. I've got to do something. I've quit the ministry."

Tommy looked at him for a second.

"Why did you get out?" he asked bluntly.

"I'm not fitted for it," Thompson returned. "I've been through hell for four months, and I've lost something—some of that sublime faith that a man must have. I'm not certain about a lot of things I have always taken for granted. I'm not certain I have an immortal soul which is worth saving, let alone considering myself peculiarly fitted to save other people's souls. I'd be like a blind man leading people with good eyes. It has come to seem to me that I've been trained for the ministry as a carpenter is trained for his trade. I can't go on feeling like that. I'm too much interested in my own personal salvation. I'm too keenly conscious of a tremendous ignorance about tremendously important things to continue setting myself up as a finger post for other men's spiritual guidance. If I stay with the church now it seems to me it will only be because I lack courage to get out and make my living along lines that won't be so easy. I'd despise myself if I did that. So I've resigned—quite a while ago, to be exact. I've been working for the H.B. two months. That's why I asked about the trapping. I've been casting about for what I'd best try next."

Tommy sat silent. When he did speak he touched very briefly on Thompson's confession of faith—or rather the lack of it.

"When a man's heart isn't in a thing," said he, "it's better for him to drop it. About the trapping, now—I don't think you'd do much at that with the season so far along. This district is pretty well covered by the natives. You'd get into difficulties right off the bat over setting traps on their territory. They have a rude sort of understanding about where their several trap lines shall run. And for some reason or other furs are getting scarce. Up where young Lachlan and I were it was pretty fair for awhile. We took some good skins. Lately we did a lot of trap-tending for nothing much. I got fed up with it. Fact is, I'm about fed up with this region. I think I'll pull out."

"I've been thinking the same thing," Thompson observed. "There isn't much here for a man."

"Not now," Tommy amended. "I'd have been gone long ago only for Sophie Carr. That was the magnet that held me. It happens that I've come to something of your pass, right now. I can't afford to loaf any longer, living off the wilderness. I had a bit of an income to keep me in loose change when I wanted a taste of towns. But that's been chopped off—probably for good. I'm strictly on my own henceforth. Every penny I spend will first have to be earned. And so," he hesitated briefly, "I've considered a move to the Coast, the Pacific, y'know. Going over the continental divide while the snow makes a dog team useful. Then I'd go down the western streams by boat—dugout canoe or bateaux, or whatever simple craft a man could make himself in the woods. Probably be the last big trip I'll get a chance at. I'll have roughed it clear across North America then, and I rather fancy winding up that way. But it's a big undertaking single-handed. I'm not so partial to an Indian for company; besides the fact that I'd have to pay him wages and dollars count with me now. A fellow likes some one he can talk to. If you've cut the cloth and are at loose ends, why not come along?"

Thompson looked at him a second.

"Do you mean it?" he asked. "I'm not what you'd call a good hand on the trail. You might find me a handicap."

Tommy grinned.

"I've got the impression you're a chap that can hold his end up," he drawled. "I've an idea we'd make a go of it, all right."

"I believe we would," Thompson asserted impulsively. "Hanged if I haven't a mind to take you at your word."

"Do," Tommy urged earnestly. "The Pacific coast has this part of the interior frazzled when it comes to opportunities. That's what we're both after, isn't it? An opportunity to get on—in plain English, to make some money? It's really simple to get up the Peace and through the mountains and on down to southeastern Alaska or somewhere in northern B.C. It merely means some hard mushing. And neither of us is very soft. You've begun to cut your eyeteeth on the wilderness. I can see that."

"Yes, I believe I have," Thompson assented, "I'm learning to take as a matter of course a good many things that I used to rather dread. I find I have a hankering to be on the move. Maybe I'll end up as a tramp. If you want a partner for that journey I'm your man."

"Shake," Tommy thrust out his hand with a boyish sort of enthusiasm. "We'll have no end of a time."

They sat up till a most unseemly hour talking over the details of that long trek. Tommy Ashe was warmed with the prospect, and some of his enthusiasm fired Thompson, proved strangely infectious. The wanderlust, which Wesley Thompson was only beginning to feel in vague stirrings, had long since become the chief motif in Tommy's life. He did not unburden himself at length. It was simply through stray references, offhand bits of talk, as they checked up resources and distances, that Thompson pieced out the four years of Ashe's wanderings across Canada—four years of careless, happy-go-lucky drifting along streams and through virgin forest, sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner; four years of hunting, fishing, and camping all the way from Labrador to Lone Moose. Tommy had worked hard at this fascinating game. He confessed that with revenue enough to keep him going, to vary the wilderness with an occasional month in some city, he could go on doing that sort of thing with an infinite amount of pleasure.

But something had gone wrong with the source of the funds that came quarterly. Tommy did not appear to regret that. But he realized its significance. He would have to work. Having to work he meant to work as he had played, with all his heart and to some purpose. He had an ambitious idea of pressing Fortune to her lair. He was young and very sanguine. His cheerful optimism was the best possible antidote for the state of mind in which he found Thompson.

They went to bed at last. With breakfast behind them they went up to Ashe's cabin and brought down to Thompson's a miscellaneous collection of articles that Tommy had left behind when he went trapping. Tommy had four good dogs in addition to the brown retriever. By adding Thompson's pair and putting all their goods on one capacious toboggan they achieved a first-class outfit.

In the North when a man sets out on a winter journey, or any sort of journey, in fact, his preparations are speedily made. He loads his sled, hitches his dogs, takes his rifle in hand, hooks his toes in his snowshoes and goes his way.

This is precisely the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed. Having decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in the deep of winter across a primitive land.

To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a capacity load of grub. West of the lake head they bore across a low, wooded delta and debouched upon Peace River's frozen surface.

After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern Lights, that strange glow that flashes and shimmers above the Pole, now a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen. Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that those cold white spaces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with flowers.

But there were compensations. Two men cannot eat out of the same pot—figuratively speaking—sleep huddled close together for the warmth that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months—no two men born of woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without acquiring a positive attitude toward each other. They achieve a contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friendship. It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game fair and square.

So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges—not in the depths—of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard enough in order to succeed. They had conquered an ominous stretch of wilderness. They would conquer with equal facility whatever barriers they found between them and fortune.

The sweep of Spring's progress across the land found them west of the Coast Range by May, in a wild and forbidding region where three major streams—the Skeena, the Stikine, and the Naas—take their rise. For many days their advance was through grim canyons, over precipitous slopes, across glaciers, bearing always westward, until the maps with which Tommy Ashe was equipped showed them they were descending the Stikine. Here they rested in a country full of game animals and birds and fish, until the height of the spring torrents had passed. During this time they fashioned a canoe out of a cedar tree, big enough to carry them and the dogs which had served so faithfully as pack animals over that last mountainous stretch. The Stikine was swift and forbidding, but navigable. Thus at last, in the first days of the salmon run, they came out upon tidewater, down to Wrangel by the sea.

There was in Thompson's mind no more thought of burned bridges, no heartache and empty longing, only an eagerness of anticipation. He had come a long way, in a double sense. He had learned something of the essential satisfaction of striving. A tough trail had served to toughen the mental and moral as well as the physical fiber of him. He did not know what lay ahead, but whatever did so lie would never dismay him again as things had done in the past, in that too-recent vivid past.

He was quite sure of this. His mood was tinctured with recklessness when he summed it up in words. A man must stand on his own feet!

He would never forget that sentence. It was burned into his memory. He was beginning to understand what Sophie Carr meant by it. Looking backward he could see that he never had stood on his own feet like a man. Always he had required props. And they had been forthcoming from the time the prim spinster aunts took his training in hand until he came to Lone Moose self-consciously, rather flauntingly, waving the banner of righteousness. Thompson could smile wryly at himself now. He could see the unreckonable element of chance functioning largely in a man's life.

And in the meantime he went about Wrangel looking for a job!



CHAPTER XIV

THE RESTLESS FOOT

Being in a town that was at once a frontier camp and a minor seaport, and being there at a season when the major industry of salmon-packing was at its height, the search of Tommy Ashe and Thompson for a job was soon ended. They were taken on as cannery hands—a "hand" being the term for unskilled laborers as distinguished from fishermen, can machine experts, engineers and the like. As such they were put to all sorts of tasks, work that usually found them at the day's end weary, dirty with fish scales and gurry, and more than a little disgusted. But they were getting three dollars and a half a day, and it was practically clear, which furnished a strong incentive to stick it out as long as the season lasted—a matter of two more months.

"By that time," said Tommy Ashe, "we'll have enough coin to venture into fresh fields. My word, but we do earn this money. It's the nastiness I object to, not the work. I shan't forget this first hundred dollars I've earned by the sweat of my manly brow."

In the fullness of time the salmon run came to an end. The pack being finished the hands were paid off. In company with half a hundred others, Ashe and Thompson were shipped from the Suchoi Bay Canneries back to Wrangel again.

In Wrangel, before they had been there four hours, Thompson got the offer of work in a pile camp. He took his prospective job under advisement and hunted up Tommy Ashe. Tommy dangled his legs over the edge of the bed in their room, and considered the matter.

"No," he said finally. "I don't believe I'll take it on. I think I'll go down to Vancouver. I'm about two hundred dollars strong, and I don't really see anything but a poor sort of living in this laboring-man stuff. I'm going to try some business proposition. I've got a pretty fair acquaintance with motor cars. I might be able to get in on the selling end of the game, and there is good money in that in the way of commissions. I know some people there who should be able to show me the ropes. In a big live seaport like that there must be chances. Yes, I think I'll try Vancouver. You'd better come too, Wes."

Thompson shook his head. He knew nothing of business. He had no trade. For a time—until he came face to face with an opportunity he could recognize as such—he shrank from tackling a city. He had not quite Tommy's confidence in himself.

"No," he said. "I'd like to—but I don't believe I'd make good. And I don't want to get in a position where I'd have to be looking for somebody to throw me a life line. I don't seem to mind common hard work so much. I don't imagine I could jump right into a town and be any better off than I would be here. When I get a little more money ahead I'll be tempted to take a chance on a city. But not yet."

From this position Tommy's persuasion failed to move him. Tommy was earnest enough, and perfectly sincere in promising to see him through. But that was not what Thompson wanted. He was determined that in so far as he was able he would make his own way unaided. He wanted to be through with props forever. That had become a matter of pride with him. He went back and told the pile-camp boss that he would report in two days.

A southbound steamer sailed forty-eight hours later. She backed away from the Wrangel wharf with Tommy waving his hand to his partner on the pierhead. Thompson went back to their room feeling a trifle blue, as one does at parting from a friend. But it was not the moodiness of uncertainty. He knew what he was going to do. He had simply got used to Tommy being at his elbow, to chatting with him, to knowing that some one was near with whom he could try to unravel a knotty problem or hold his peace as he chose. He missed Tommy. But he knew that although they had been partners over a hard country, had bucked a hard trail like men and grown nearer to each other in the stress of it, they could not be Siamese twins. His road and Tommy's road was bound to fork. A man had to follow his individual inclination, to live his own life according to his lights. And Tommy's was for town and the business world, while his—as yet—was not.

So for the next four months Thompson lived and worked on a wooded promontory a few miles north of Wrangel, very near the mouth of the river down which he and Tommy Ashe had come to the sea. He was housed with thirty other men in a bunkhouse of hand-split cedar; he labored every day felling and trimming tall slender poles for piling that would ultimately hold up bridges and wharves. The crew was a cosmopolitan lot so far as nationality went. In addition they were a tougher lot than Thompson had ever encountered. He never quite fitted in. They knew him for something of a tenderfoot, and they had not the least respect for his size—until he took on and soundly whipped two of them in turn before the bunkhouse door, with the rest of the thirty, the boss and the cook for spectators. Thompson did not come off scathless, but he did come off victor, although he was a bloody sight at the finish. But he fought in sheer desperation, because otherwise he could not live in the camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different attitude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights would be respected.

Along with this incidental light upon the ways of his fellow working-men he learned properly how to swing an axe; he grew accustomed to dragging all day on the end of a seven-foot crosscut saw, to lift and strain with a cant hook. The hardening process, begun at Lone Moose, continued unceasingly. If mere physical hardihood had been his end, he could easily have passed for a finished product. He could hold his own with those broad-shouldered Swedes and Michigan loggers at any turn of the road. And that was a long way for a man like Thompson to come in the course of twelve months. If he could have been as sure of a sound, working philosophy of life as he was of the fitness of his muscles he would have been well satisfied. Sometimes it was a puzzle to him why men existed, why the will to live was such a profound force, when living was a struggle, a vexation, an aimless eating and sleeping and working like a carthorse. Where was there any plan, any universal purpose at all?

Having never learned dissipation as a form of amusement, nor having yet been driven to it by the sheer deadliness of incessant, monotonous labor, Thompson was able to save his money. When he went to Wrangel once a month he got a bath, a hair-cut, and some magazines to read, perhaps an article or two of necessary clothing. That was all his financial outlay. He came back as clear-eyed as when he left, with the bulk of his wages in his pocket, where some of his fellows returned with empty pockets and aching heads.

Wherefore, when the winter snows at last closed down the pile camp Thompson had accumulated four hundred dollars. Also he had made an impression on the contractor by his steadiness, to such an extent that the man offered him a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to come back and take charge of a similar camp in the spring. But Thompson, like Tommy Ashe, had grown troubled with the wandering foot. The money in hand gave him security against want in strange places. He would not promise to be on hand in the spring. Like Tommy, he had a notion to try town, to see for himself what opportunity town afforded. And he pitched on Vancouver, not alone because Tommy Ashe was there, but because it was the biggest port on Canada's western coast. He had heard once from Tommy. He was a motor-car salesman now, and he was doing well. But Tommy's letter was neither long nor graphic in its descriptions. It left a good deal of Vancouver to Thompson's imagination. However, like the bear that went over the mountain, Thompson thought he would go and see what he could see.

Wrangel lies well within the Inside Passage, that great waterway which is formed between the mainland and a chain of islands that sweeps from Cape Flattery in the south to the landward end of the Aleutians. All the steamers that ply between Puget Sound and Skagway take that route. Seldom do the vessels plying between southern ports and the far beaches of Nome come inside. They are deep-sea craft, built for offshore work. So that one taking a steamer at Wrangel can travel in two directions only, north to Skagway, south to Puget Sound.

The booking facilities at Wrangel are primitive, to say the least. When Thompson inquired about southbound passage, he was told to go down and board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at eleven that night. So he took all his meager belongings, which he could easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled, clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.

There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in mackinaws and heavy laced boots. Thompson, habitually diffident, asked no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner of the North. He laid down his bag and roll, sat awhile listening to the shift of feet and the clatter of cargo winches on deck and pierhead. Then, growing drowsy, he stretched himself on a cushioned seat with his bag for a pillow and fell asleep.

He woke with an odd sensation of his bed dropping out from under him. Coming out of a sound slumber he was at first a trifle bewildered, but instinctively he grasped a stanchion to keep himself from sliding across the floor as the vessel took another deep roll. The smoking room was deserted. He gained his feet and peered out of a window. All about him ran the uneasy heave of the sea. Try as he would his eyes could pick up no dim shore line. And it was not particularly dark, only a dusky gloom spotted with white patches where a comber reared up and broke in foam. He wondered at the ship's position. It did not conform to what he had been told of the Inside Passage.

And while he was wondering a ship's officer in uniform walked through the saloon. He cast a quick glance at Thompson and smiled slightly.

"This outside roll bother you?" he inquired pleasantly.

"Outside?" Thompson grasped at the word's significance. "Are we going down outside?"

"Sure," the man responded. "We always do."

"I wonder," Thompson began to sense what he had done, "I say—isn't this the Roanoke for Seattle?"

The mate's smile deepened. "Uh-uh," he grinned. "This is the Simoon, last boat of the season from outside northern points. We had to put into Wrangel, which we rarely do. The Roanoke berthed right across the wharf from us. Got aboard us by mistake, did you?"

Thompson nodded.

"Well," the officer continued, "sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home. We don't touch this side the Golden Gate. So you may as well see the purser when he gets up and have him assign you a berth. It's pretty near daylight now."

He nodded and went on. Thompson, holding fast, getting his first uncomfortable experience of the roll and recovery of a ship in a beam sea, made his way out on the after deck. Holding on the rail he peered over the troubled water that was running in the open mouth of Dixon Entrance, beyond which lay the vast breadth of the Pacific, an unbroken stretch to the coast of Japan.

Again Chance was playing the deuce with his calculations. For a few minutes he felt uncommonly irritated. He had not started for San Francisco. He did not want to go to San Francisco. Still—what was the odds? San Francisco was as good as any other town. He shrugged his shoulders, and feeling his way to a coiled hawser sat down in the bight of it to contend with the first, faint touch of seasickness.



CHAPTER XV

THE WORLD IS SMALL

For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare which is to San Francisco what the aorta is to the arterial system. Gazing down from a height of four stories he could see a never-ending stir, hear the roar of vehicular traffic which swelled from a midnight murmur to a deep-mouthed roar in the daylight hours. And on either side the traffic lane there swept a stream of people like the current of the Stikine River.

He was not a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of the globe. San Francisco—is San Francisco—a melting-pot of peoples, blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a great pace.

It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that environment, so he felt—as he had not at first felt in the North—that in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a forthright competitive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of environment.

How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the world.

He had no misgivings about making a living. He could always fall back on common labor. But a common laborer is socially of little worth, financially of still less value. Thompson had to make money—using the phrase in its commonly accepted sense. He subscribed to that doctrine, because he was beginning to see that in a world where purchasing power is the prime requisite a man without money is the slave of every untoward circumstance. Money loomed before Thompson as the key to freedom, decent surroundings, a chance to pursue knowledge, to so shape his life that he could lend a hand or a dollar to the less fortunate.

He still had those stirrings of altruism, a ready sympathy, an instinct to help. Only he saw very clearly that he could not be of any benefit to even a limited circle of his fellow men when at every turn of his hand economic pressure bore so hard upon him as an individual. He began to see that getting on in the world called for complete concentration of his efforts upon his own well-being. A pauper cannot be a philanthropist. One cannot take nothing from nothing and make something. To be of use to others he must first grasp what he required for himself.

Once he was settled and familiar enough with San Francisco to get from the Ferry Building to the Mission and from the Marina to China Basin without the use of a map he began to cast about for an opening. To make an apprentice beginning in any of the professions required education. He had that, he considered. It did not occur to him by what devious routes men arrived at distinction in the professions. He thought of studying for the law until the reception he got in various offices where he went seeking for information discouraged him in that field. Law students were a drug on the market.

"My dear young man," one kindly, gray-haired attorney told him, "you'd be wasting your time. The law means a tremendous amount of intellectual drudgery, and a slim chance of any great success unless you are gifted with a special aptitude for certain branches of it. All the great opportunities for a young man nowadays lie in business and salesmanship."

Business and salesmanship being two things of which Thompson knew himself to be profoundly ignorant, he made little headway. A successful business operation, so far as he could observe, called for capital which he did not possess. Salesmanship, when he delved into the method of getting his foot on that rung of the ladder, required special training, knowledge of a technical sort. That is, really successful salesmanship. The other kind consisted of selling goods over a counter for ten dollars per—with an excellent chance of continuing in that unenviable situation until old age overtook him. This was an age of specialists—and he had no specialty. Moreover, every avenue that he investigated seemed to be jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.

Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. He looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for him—fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.

When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer loneliness drove him out on the streets. His room was a cheerless place, a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more. Many a time, lacking any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco's streets. He sought out parks, beaches, public buildings. At night he would drift, a silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the downtown district that was a blaze of light.

That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the haunt of the soap-boxer. This curious thoroughfare lay upon the borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco's Chinatown. For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given over to an impromptu form of public assembly, a poor man's debating ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and quarters from the crowd.

But the street fakirs were in the minority. The percentage of gullible ones was small. Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of propagandists. Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites, syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men with social and economic theories of the extremist type. But they talked well. They had a grasp of their subject. They had on tap tremendous quantities of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every sort of ground—from biological complexities which he could not understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr had first aroused.

In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once started along this road he became an habitue, spending in a particular chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically into the fields of scientific conclusions.

He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple, concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious, the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a woman passing his seat.

Slowly, as a man roused from deep sleep looks about him for the cause of dimly heard noises, so now Thompson's eyes lifted from his book, and, with his mind still half upon the last sentence read, his gaze followed the girl now some forty feet distant in the long, quiet room.

There was no valid reason why the rustle of a woman's skirt in passing, the faint suggestion of some delicate perfume, should have focussed his attention. He saw scores of women and girls in the library every day. He passed thousands on the streets. This one, now, upon whom he gazed with a detached interest, was like many others, a girl of medium height, slender, well-dressed.

That was all—until she paused at a desk to have speech with a library assistant. She turned then so that her face was in profile, so that a gleam of hair showed under a wide leghorn hat. And Thompson thought there could scarcely be two women in the world with quite so marvellous a similarity of face and figure and coloring, nor with quite the same contour of chin and cheek, nor the same thick hair, yellow like the husks of ripe corn or a willow leaf in the autumn. He was just as sure that by some strange chance Sophie Carr stood at that desk as he was sure of himself sitting in an oak chair at a reading table. And he rose impulsively to go to her.

She turned away in the same instant and walked quickly down a passage between the rows of shelved books. Thompson could not drive himself to hurry, nor to call. He was sure—yet not too sure. He hated to make himself appear ridiculous. Nor was he overconfident that if it were indeed Sophie Carr she would be either pleased or willing to renew their old intimacy. And so, lagging faint-heartedly, he lost her in the maze of books.

But he did not quite give up. He was on the second floor. The windows on a certain side overlooked the main entrance. He surmised that she would be leaving. So he crossed to a window that gave on the library entrance and waited for an eternity it seemed, but in reality a scant five minutes, before he caught sight of a mauve suit on the broad steps. Looking from above he could be less sure than when she stood at the desk. But the girl halted at the foot of the steps and standing by a red roadster turned to look up at the library building. The sun fell full upon her upturned face. The distance was one easily to be spanned by eyes as keen as his. Thompson was no longer uncertain. He was suddenly, acutely unhappy. The old ghosts which he had thought well laid were walking, rattling their dry bones forlornly in his ears.

Sophie got into the machine. The red roadster slid off with gears singing their metallic song as she shifted through to high. Thompson watched it turn a corner, and went back to his table with a mind past all possibility of concentrating upon anything between the covers of a book. He put the volume back on its shelf at last and went out to walk the streets in aimless, restless fashion, full of vivid, painful memories, troubled by a sudden flaring up of emotions which had lain so long dormant he had supposed them dead.

Here in San Francisco he had not expected to behold Sophie in the enjoyment of her good fortune. Yet there was no reason why she should not be here. Thompson damned under his breath the blind chance which had set him aboard the wrong steamer at Wrangel.

But, he said to himself after a time, what did it matter? In a city of half a million they were as far apart as if he were still at Lone Moose and she God only knew where. That powerful roadster, the sort of clothes she wore, the general air of well-being which he had begun to recognize as a characteristic of people whose social and financial position is impregnable—these things served to intensify the gulf between them which their radical differences of outlook had originally opened. No, Sophie Carr's presence in San Francisco could not possibly make any difference to him. He repeated this emphatically—with rather more emphasis than seemed necessary.



CHAPTER XVI

A MEETING BY THE WAY

But he found it did make a difference, a profoundly disturbing difference. He had grown insulated against the memory of Sophie Carr tugging at his heartstrings as the magnetic north pulls on the compass needle. He had grown free of both thought and hope of her. There had been too many other vital things pressing upon him these months of adventure in toil, too many undeniable, everyday factors of living present at every turn, hourly insistent upon being coped with, for him to nurse old sad dreams and longings. So he had come at last to think of that passionate yearning as a disease which had run its course.

Now, to his dismay, it recurred in all its old virulence, at a mere glimpse of Sophie. The floodgates of memory loosed bitter waters upon him, to make his heart heavy and spoil his days of passive content. It angered him to be so hopelessly troubled. But he could not gainsay the fact.

It made San Francisco a dreary waste. Try as he would he could not keep Sophie Carr from being the sun around which the lesser nebulae of his thought continually revolved. He could no more help a wistful lookout for her upon San Francisco's streets than he could help breathing. Upon the rolling phalanxes of motor cars his gaze would turn with watchful expectation, and he took to scanning the faces of the passing thousands, a lonely, shy man with a queer glow in his eyes. That, of course, was only in moments of forgetfulness. Then he would pull himself together with a resentful irritation and tax himself with being a weak fool and stalk along about his business.

But his business had lost its savor, just as his soul had lost its slowly-won serenity. His business had no importance to any save himself. It had been merely to winter decently and economically with an eye cocked for such opportunities of self-betterment as came his way, and failing material opportunity in this Bagdad of the Pacific coast to make the most of his enforced idleness.

And now the magic of the colorful city had departed along with the magic of the books. The downtown streets ceased to be a wonderful human panorama which he loved to watch. The hushed reading room where he had passed so many contented hours was haunted by a presence that obscured the printed page. He would find himself staring absently at an open book, the words blurred and overlaid with mental pictures of Lone Moose, of Sophie sitting on the creek bank, of his unfinished church, forlorn and gaunt in the winter snows and the summer silences, of Tommy Ashe trudging across the meadow, gun in hand, of old Sam Carr in his moosehide chair, of the Indians, the forest, of all that goes to make the northern wilderness—and of himself moving through it all, an unheroic figure, a man who had failed in his work, in his love, in everything.

That, chiefly, was what stirred him anew to action, a suddenly acute sense of failure, of a consciousness that he was drifting instead of doing. He found himself jarred out of the even tenor of his way. San Francisco filled him with dissatisfaction now, knowing that she was there. If the mere knowledge that Sophie Carr dwelt somewhere within the city boundaries had power to make a mooning idiot of him, he said to himself testily, then he had better get out, go somewhere, get down to work, be at his fixed purpose of proving his mettle upon an obdurate world, and get her out of his mind in the process. He couldn't tune his whole existence to a sentimental craving for any woman—even such a woman as Sophie. He would, in the moment of such emotional genuflexions, have dissented with cynical bitterness from the poetic dictum that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Spurred by this mood he acted instinctively rather than with reasoned purpose. He gave up his room, packed his clothes and betook himself upon a work-seeking pilgrimage among the small, interior towns.

He left San Francisco in March. By May he had circulated all through the lower San Joaquin and farther abroad to the San Juan, and had turned his face again toward San Francisco Bay. At various jobs he had tried his hand, making a living such as it was, acquiring in addition thereto a store of first-hand experience in the social and monetary values of itinerant labor. He conceded that such experience might somehow be of use to a man. But he had had enough of it. He had a feeling of having tested California for his purposes—and of finding it wanting.

He had made up his mind to double on his tracks, to go north again, specifically to British Columbia, partly because Tommy was there, chiefly because Vancouver was a growing place on the edge of a vast, newly opened interior. He knew that if no greater thing offered, from that center there was always the avenue of the woods. He could qualify in that line. And in the woods even a common axeman exacted and received more democratic treatment than in this older region where industry ran in fixed channels, where class lines were more rigidly drawn, where common labor was cheap and unprivileged.

He hadn't been getting on in those three months. He had less money than when he started out—about enough now to get him up North and leave a hundred dollars or so for emergencies. No, decidedly he wasn't getting on—he was going down, he told himself. It dismayed him a little. It wasn't enough to be big and strong and willing. A mule could be that. The race was not to the swift or the strong. Not in modern industry, with its bewildering complexities. No, it fell to the trained, the specialist in knowledge, the man who could do something more efficiently, with greater precision than his fellows.

He could not do that—not yet. And so there was nothing in California for him, he decided. A man could no longer go West and grow up with the country—but he could go North.

Thompson was sitting on the border of a road that runs between San Mateo and the city when he definitely committed himself to doubling on his tracks, to counteracting the trick of fate which had sent him to a place where he did not wish to go. He was looking between the trees and out over an undulating valley floored with emerald fields, studded with oaks, backed by the bare Hamiltons to the east, and westward by the redwood-clad ruggedness of the Santa Cruz range. And he was not seeing this loveliness of landscape at all. He was looking far beyond and his eyes were full of miles upon miles of untrodden forest, the sanctuary of silence and furtive living things, of mountains that lifted snowy spires to heaven high over the glaciers that scarred their sides. And the smells that for a moment rose strongly in his nostrils were not the smells of palm and gum and poppy-dotted fields, but odors of pine and spruce and the smell of birchwood burning in campfires. He came out of that queer projection of mind into great distance with a slight shake of his head and a feeling of wonder. It had been very vivid. And it dawned upon him that for a minute he had grown sentimentally lonely for that grim, unconquered region where he had first learned the pangs of loneliness, where he had suffered in body and spirit until he had learned a lesson he would never forget while he lived.

The road itself, abutting upon stately homes and modest bungalows behind a leafy screen of Australian gums, ran straight as an arrow down the peninsula toward the city and the bay, a broad, smoothly asphalted highway upon that road where the feet of the Franciscan priests had traced the Camino Real. And down this highway both north and south there passed many motor cars swiftly and silently or with less speed and more noise, according to their quality and each driver's mood.

Thompson rested, watching them from the grassy level beneath a tree. He rather regretted now the impulse which had made him ship his bag and blanket roll from the last town, and undertake this solitary hike. He had merely humored a whim to walk through orchards and green fields in a leisurely fashion, to be a careless trudger for a day. True, he was saving carfare, but he observed dryly that he was expending many dollars' worth of energy—to say nothing of shoe leather. The pleasure of walking, paradoxically, was best achieved by sitting still in the shade. A midday sun was softening the asphalt with its fierce blaze. He looked idly at passing machines and wondered what the occupants thereof would say if he halted one and demanded a ride. He smiled.

He stared after a passing sedan driven by a uniformed chauffeur, one half the rear seat occupied by a fat, complacent woman, the other half of the ten-inch upholstery given over to an equally fat and complacent bulldog. And while he reflected in some little amusement at the circumstance which gave a pampered animal the seat of honor in a six-thousand-dollar car and sent an able-bodied young man trudging down the road in the heat and the dust, another machine came humming up from the south.

It was a red car, crowding the state limit for speed, and it swept down on Thompson with a subdued purr like a great cat before a fire. When it was almost abreast of him there burst from it a crack like the report of a shotgun. There was just a perceptible wabble of the machine. Its hot pace slackened abruptly. It rolled past and came to a stop beside the road fifty yards along—a massive brute of a red roadster driven by a slim girl in a pongee suit, a girl whose bare head was bound about with heavy braids of corn-yellow hair.

Thompson half rose—then sank back in momentary indecision. Perhaps it were wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Then he smiled at the incongruity of that proverb applied to Sophie Carr.

He sat watching the machine for a minute. The halting of its burst of speed was no mystery to Thompson. Miss Carr proceeded with calm deliberation. She first resurrected a Panama hat from somewhere in the seat beside her and pinned it atop of her head. Then she got out, walked around to the front wheel, poked it tentatively once or twice, and proceeded about the business of getting out a jack and a toolkit.

By the time Thompson decided that in common decency he should offer to lend a hand and thus was moved to rise and approach the disabled car she had the jack under the front axle and was applying a brace wrench to the rim bolts. But the rim bolts that hold on a five-inch tire are not designed to unscrew too easily. Sophie had started one with an earnest tug and was twisting stoutly at the second when he reached her. He knew by the impersonal glance she gave him that he was to her merely a casual stranger.

"May I help you?" he said politely. "A big tire is rather hard to handle."

Sophie bestowed another level look upon him as she straightened up from her task. A puzzled expression showed briefly in her gray eyes. But she handed him the wrench without parley.

"Thanks, if you will," she said. "These rim bolts are fearfully stiff. I daresay I could manage it though. I've done it on a lighter car. But it's a man's job, really."

Thompson laid off his coat and set to work silently, withholding speech for a double reason. He could not trust his tongue, and he was not given to inconsequential chatter. If she did not recognize him—well, there was no good reason why she should remember, if she chose not to remember. He could lend a hand and go his way, just as he would have been moved to lend a hand to any one in like difficulty.

He twisted out the bolt-heads, turned the lugs, pulled the rim clear of the wheel. He stood up to get the spare tire from its place behind. And he caught Sophie staring at him, astonishment, surprise, inquiry all blended in one frank stare. But still she did not speak.

He trundled the blow-out casing to the rear, took off the one ready inflated, and speedily had it fast in its appointed position on the wheel.

And still Sophie Carr did not speak. She leaned against the car body. He felt her eyes upon him, questioning, appraising, critical, while he released the jack, gathered up the tools, and tied them up in the roll on the running board.

"There you are," he found himself facing her, his tongue giving off commonplace statements, while his heart thumped heavily in his breast. "Ready for the road again."

"Do you remember what Donald Lachlan used to say?" Sophie answered irrelevantly. "Long time I see you no. Eh, Mr. Thompson?"

She held out one gloved hand with just the faintest suggestion of a smile hovering about her mouth. Thompson's work-roughened fingers closed over her small soft hand. He towered over her, looking down wistfully.

"I didn't think you knew me," he muttered.

Sophie laughed. The smile expanded roguishly. The old, quizzical twinkle flickered in her eyes.

"You must think my memory poor," she replied. "You're not one of the peas in a pod, you know. I knew you, and still I wasn't sure. It seemed scarcely possible. It's a long, long way from the Santa Clara Valley to Lone Moose."

"Yes," he answered calmly. "A long way—the way I came."

"In a purely geographical sense?"

Her voice was tinged with gentle raillery.

"Perhaps," he answered noncommittally.

It dawned upon him that for all his gladness to see her—and he was glad—he nursed a tiny flame of resentment. He had come a long way measured on the map, and a far greater distance measured in human experience, in spiritual reckoning. If the old narrow faith had failed him he felt that slowly and surely he was acquiring a faith that would not fail him, because it was based on a common need of mankind. But he was still sure there must be a wide divergence in their outlook. He was getting his worldly experience, his knowledge of material factors, of men's souls and faiths and follies and ideals and weaknesses in a rude school at first hand—and Sophie had got hers out of books and logical deductions from critically assembled fact. There was a difference in the two processes. He knew, because he had tried both. And where the world at large faced him, and must continue to face him, like an enemy position, something to be stormed, very likely with fierce fighting, for Sophie Carr it had all been made easy.

So he did not follow up that conversational lead. He was not going to bare his soul offhand to gratify any woman's curiosity. It would be very easy to make a blithering ass of himself again—with her—because of her. Already he was on his guard against that. His pride was alert.

Sophie stowed the canvas tool roll under the seat cushion. She climbed to her seat behind the steering column and turned to Thompson.

"Which way are you bound?" she asked. "I'll give you a lift, and we can talk."

"I'm on my way to San Francisco," he said. "But time is no object in my young life right now, or I'd take the Interurban instead of walking. It would be demoralizing to me, I'm afraid, to whiz down these roads in a machine like this."

Sophie shoved the opposite door open.

"Get in," she let a flavor of reproof creep into her tone. "Don't talk that sort of nonsense."

Thompson hesitated. He was suddenly uncomfortable, conscious of his dusty clothes somewhat the worse for wear, his shoes from which the pristine freshness had long vanished, the day-old stubble on his chin. There was a depressing contrast between his outward condition and that of the smartly dressed girl whose gray eyes were resting curiously on him now.

"Do you make a practice of picking up tramps along the road?" he parried with an effort at lightness. He wanted to refuse outright, yet could not utter the words. "I'm not very presentable."

"Get in. Don't be silly," she said impatiently. "You don't think I've become a snob just because chance has pitchforked me into the ranks of the idle rich, do you?"

Thompson laughed awkwardly. There was real feeling in her tone, as if she had read correctly his hesitation and resented it. After all, why not? It would merely be an incident to Sophie Carr, and it would save him some hot and dusty miles. He got in.

"I'm quite curious to know where you've been and what you've been doing for the last year," she said, when the red car was once more rolling toward the city at a sedate pace. "And by the way, where did you learn to change a tire so smartly?"

"My last job," Thompson told her truthfully, "was washing cars, greasing up, and changing tires in a country garage down in the San Juan." He paused for a moment. "Before that I was chaperon to a stable full of horses on a Salinas ranch. I've tried being a carpenter's helper, an assistant gardener, understudy to a suburban plumber—and other things too numerous to mention—in the last three months. I think the most satisfactory thing I've tackled was the woods up north, last fall."

"You must have acquired experience, at least, even if none of those things proved an efficient method of making money," she returned lightly.

"A man like me," he remarked, "has first to learn how to make a living before he can set about making money."

"Making money is relative. Quite often it merely means making a living with an extended horizon," she observed. "I know a man with a ten-thousand-dollar salary who finds it a living, no more."

"Poor devil," he drawled sardonically. "When I get into the ten-thousand-a-year class I rather think it will afford me a few trifles beyond bare subsistence."

She smiled.

"Have you set that for a mark to shoot at?"

"I haven't set any limit," he replied. "I haven't got my sights adjusted yet."

"I can scarcely assure myself that you are really you," she said after a momentary silence. "I can't seem to disassociate you with Lone Moose and a blundering optimism, a mystical faith that the Lord would make things come out right if you only leaned on Him hard enough. Now your talk is flavored with both egotism and the bitterness of the cynic."

"How should a man talk?" he demanded. "Like a worm if he chance to be trodden on a few times? Does a man necessarily become cynical when he realizes that plugging from the bottom up is no child's play? As for egotism—Heaven knows you knocked that out of me pretty effectually when you left Lone Moose. You made me feel like a whipped puppy for months. I chucked myself out of the church because of that—that abased, disheartened feeling. For a year and a half I've been learning and discovering that life isn't a parlor game. Do you remember that letter you left with Cloudy Moon for me? I need only to recall a phrase here and there in that as a cure for incipient egotism. What do you think I should have become?" he flung at her, unconscious of the passion in his voice, "A poor thing glad of a ride in your car? Or a confirmed optimist in overalls?"

Sophie gave him a queer sidelong glance.

"Can't you let the dead past bury its dead?" she asked quietly.

Thompson kept his eyes on the smooth, green-bordered road for a minute. The quick wave of feeling passed. He stifled it—indeed, felt ashamed for letting it briefly master him.

"Of course," he answered at last, and turned to her with a friendly quirk of his lips. "It is buried pretty deep one way and another, isn't it? And it would hardly be decent to exhume the remains. Shall we talk about the weather?"

"Don't be sarcastic," she reproved gently. "Save that to cope with dad. He'll relish it coming from you."

"I don't know," Thompson said thoughtfully. "I wouldn't mind a chat with your father. We wouldn't agree on many things, by a good way, although I've discovered that some of his philosophy is sound enough. But I've got to make a move, and I'm so situated that I must make it quickly or not at all. I'm going to take the first north-bound steamer out of San Francisco. So I don't imagine Mr. Carr will have a chance at me soon."

"Oh, yes, he will," Sophie asserted confidently. "In about twenty minutes."

Thompson looked at her, startled a little by this bland assertion.

"We'll be home in about twenty minutes," she explained.

"But I'm—why take the trouble?" he asked bluntly. "I'm out of your orbit entirely. Or do you want to exhibit me as a horrible example?"

"You're downright rude," she laughed. "Or you would be if you were serious. Do you mind coming to see dad? And I'd like to hear more about your trip across the mountains with Tommy Ashe."

Thompson pricked up his ears.

"Oh, you know about that, eh?" he remarked. "How—"

"Not as much as I'd like to," she interrupted. "Will you come?"

"Yes," he agreed. "But give a fellow a chance. Don't drag me into your home looking like this. I'm not vain, but I'd feel more comfortable in clean clothes. I shipped all my things into town. They should be in the express office now. I'll come this afternoon or this evening, whichever you say. Drop me off at the first carline."

"I'll do better than that," she declared. "I'll drive you downtown myself."

"But it isn't necessary," he persisted. "I don't want to take up all your time, and—"

"For the rest of this day," Sophie murmured, "I have absolutely nothing to do but kill time. I get restless, and being out in the car cures that feeling. Do you mind if I chauff you a few miles more or less? Don't be ungallant. I love to drive."

"Oh, well."

Thompson mentally threw up his hands. In that gracious mood Sophie was irresistible. He sank back in the thick, resilient upholstery and resolved to take what the gods provided—to dance as it were, and reckon with the piper when he presented his bill.



CHAPTER XVII

THE REPROOF COURTEOUS(?)

For the few minutes it took the red roadster to slip under the green summits of Twin Peaks and by a maze of boulevards debouch at length upon Valencia and so into the busy length of Market Street their talk ran to commonplaces. Thompson placed himself unreservedly in Sophie's hands. He had to reach an express office on lower Market, get his things, and proceed thence to the house where he had roomed all winter. Since it suited Miss Carr's book to convey him to the first point, he accepted the gift of her company gladly. So in the fullness of time they came into the downtown press of traffic, among which, he observed, Sophie steered her machine like a veteran.

At Third and Market the traffic whistle blocked them with the front wheels over the safety line that guided the flow of cross-street pedestrians, and the point man, crabbed perhaps from a long trick amidst that roaring maze of vehicles, motioned autocratically for her to back up.

Sophie muttered impatiently under her breath and went into reverse. Behind her the traffic was piling up, each machine stealing every inch of vantage for the go-ahead signal, crowding up wheel to wheel, the nose of one thrusting at the rear fender of the other. On one side of Sophie rose the base of a safety station for street-car boarders. Between her car and the curb a long-snouted gray touring-car was edging in. And as she backed under the imperative command of the traffic officer, one rear hub clinked against the hind fender of the other, jarring both cars a little, dinting the gray one's fender, marring the glossy finish.

A chauffeur in a peaked cap drove the gray machine. He looked across at Sophie, scowling. He was young and red-faced, a pugnacious-looking individual.

"Back to the country, Jane, an' practice on the farm wagon," he snarled out of one corner of his mouth. "Yuh drive like a hick, yuh do."

"Talk civil to a woman," Thompson snapped back at him, "or keep your mouth shut."

The chauffeur bestowed upon him a rancorous glare. His sharp, ferret eyes gleamed. Then he deliberately spat upon the impeccably shining red hood of Sophie's roadster.

A scant arm's length separated him from Thompson. Thompson bridged that gap with his feet still on the running-board of the roadster. He moved so quickly that the chauffeur had no chance. He did try to slide out from behind the wheel and his fist doubled and drew back, but Thompson's work-hardened fingers closed about his neck, and the powerful arms back of those clutching hands twisted the man out of all position to strike any sort of blow. He yanked the chauffeur's head out over the side of the car, struck him one open-handed slap that was like an earnest cluff from a sizable bear, lifted again and banged the man's face down on the controls on his wheels, then pushed him back into his seat, limp and disheveled, all the insolent defiance knocked out of him.

Thompson stood on the running board, panting a little, the blaze of a quick anger bright in his blue eyes, and he became aware of two men in the rear seat of the gray car, gazing at him in open-mouthed astonishment. One was fat and long past forty, well fed, well dressed, a prosperous citizen. The other was a slim youngster in the early twenties, astonishingly like his older companion as to feature.

Thompson looked at them, and back at the cowed driver who was feeling his neck and face with shaky fingers. Just then three things happened—simultaneously. The traffic whistle blew. The younger man opened his mouth and uttered, "I say—" Sophie plucked at Thompson's arm, crying "Sit down, sit down."

Thompson was still fumbling the catch on the door when they swept over the cross street and raced down the next block. He looked back. The gray car was hidden somewhere in a rolling phalanx of other motors. The traffic had split and flowed about and past it, stalled there doubtless while the red-faced chauffeur wiped the blood out of his eyes and wondered if a street car had struck him.

"Do you habitually reprove ill-bred persons in that vigorous manner?"

He became aware of Sophie speaking. He looked at her. So far as he could gather from her profile she was quite unperturbed, making her way among the traffic that is always like a troubled sea between Third and the Ferry Building.

"No," he replied diffidently. "I daresay I'd be in jail or the hospital most of the time if I did. Still, that was rather a rank case. I'm not sorry I bumped him. He'll be civil to the next woman he meets."

What he did not attempt to explain to Sophie, a matter he scarcely fathomed himself, was his precipitancy, this going off "half-cocked", as he put it. He wasn't given to quick bursts of temper. It was as if he had been holding himself in and the self-contained pressure had grown acute when the insolent chauffeur presented himself as a relief valve. He felt a little ashamed now.

Sophie swung the roadster in to the curb before the express office. Thompson got out.

"Good-by till this evening, then," he said. "I'll be there if the police don't get me."

"If they do," she smiled, "telephone and dad will come down and bail you out. Good-by, Mr. Thompson."

Ten minutes or so later he emerged from the express office with a suitcase, a canvas bag, and a roll of blankets. He had no false pride about people seeing him with his worldly goods upon his back, so to speak, wherefore he crossed the street and trudged half a block to a corner where he could catch a car that would carry him out Market to his old rooming place.

And, since this was a day in which events trod upon each other's heels to reach him, it befell that as he loitered on the curb a gray touring car rolled up, stopped, and a short, stout man emerging therefrom disappeared hurriedly within the portals of an office building. Thompson's gaze rested speculatively on the machine. Gray cars were common enough. But without a doubt this was the same vehicle. The chauffeur in the peaked cap was not among those present—but Thompson could take oath on the other two. The young man sat behind the steering wheel.

He, too, it presently transpired, was spurred by recognition. His roving eyes alighted upon Thompson with a reminiscent gleam. He edged over in his seat. Thompson stood almost at the front fender.

"I say," the man in the car addressed him bluntly, "weren't you in a red roadster back at Third and Market about fifteen or twenty minutes ago?"

"I was," Thompson admitted.

Was he to be arrested forthwith on a charge of assault and battery? Policemen were plentiful enough in that quarter. All one had to do was crook his finger. People could not be expected to take kindly to having their chauffeur mauled and disabled like that. But Thompson stood his ground indifferently.

"Well, I must say," the young man drawled, producing a cigarette case as he spoke, "you squashed Pebbles with neatness and despatch, and Pebbles was supposed to be some scrapper, too. What do you weigh?"

Thompson laughed outright. He had expected a complaint, perhaps prosecution. He was handed a compliment.

"I don't know," he smiled. "About a hundred and eighty-five, I think."

"You must be pretty fit to handle a man like that," the other observed. "The beggar had it coming, all right. He gets an overnight jag, and is surly all the next day. I was going to apologize to the lady, but you were too quick for me. By the way, are you a working-man—or a capitalist in disguise?"

Before Thompson quite decided how he should answer this astonishingly personal inquiry, the young man's companion strode out of the lobby and entered the car. At least he had his hand on the open door and one foot on the running board. And there he halted and turned about at something his son said—Thompson assumed they were father and son. The likeness of feature was too well-defined to permit of any lesser relation.

The older man took his foot off the running board, and made a deliberate survey of Thompson.

"Just a second, Fred," he muttered, and took a step toward Thompson. His eyes traveled swiftly from Thompson's face down over the suitcase and blanket roll, and came back to that deliberate matching of glances.

"Do you happen to be looking for a position that requires energy, ability, and a fair command of the English language?" he demanded abruptly.