"Yes," Thompson answered briefly.

He wondered what was coming. Were they going to offer him the chauffeur's job? Did they require a bruiser to drive the gray car?

"Know anything about motors?"

"Not the first principles, even." Thompson declared himself frankly. He did possess a little such knowledge, but held a little knowledge to be a dangerous admission.

"So much the better," the stout man commented.

He fished out a cardcase, and handed his card to Thompson.

"Call on me at ten o'clock to-morrow morning," he said briskly. "I'll make you a proposition."

He did not permit inquiry into his motive or anything else, in fact, for he got quickly into the car and it started off instantly, leaving Mr. Wesley Thompson, a little bewildered by the rapidity of these proceedings, staring at the card, which read:

John P. Henderson, Inc.

Van Ness at Potter Groya Motors

A westbound street car bore down on the corner. Thompson gave over reflecting upon this latest turn of affairs, gathered up his things, boarded the car, and was set off a few minutes later near the Globe Rooms.

At precisely 8 p.m. he arrived at the address Sophie had given him and found it to be an apartment house covering half a block, an enormous structure clinging upon the slope which dips from Nob Hill down to the heart of the city. An elevator shot him silently aloft to the fifth floor. As silently the elevator man indicated the location of Apartment 509. The whole place seemed pitched to that subdued note, as if it were a sanctuary from the clash and clamor without its walls. Thompson walked down a hushed corridor over a velvet carpet that muffled his footfalls and so came at last to the proper door, where he pressed a black button in the center of a brass plate. The door opened almost upon the instant. A maid eyed him interrogatively. He mentioned his name.

"Oh yes," the maid answered. "This way, please."

She relieved him of his hat and led him down a short, dusky hall into a bright-windowed room, in which, from the depths of two capacious leather chairs, Sophie and her father rose to greet him.



CHAPTER XVIII

MR. HENDERSON'S PROPOSITION

Late that evening Thompson walked into his room at the Globe. He seated himself in a rickety chair under a fly-specked incandescent lamp, beside a bed that was clean and comfortable if neither stylish nor massive. Over against the opposite wall stood a dresser which had suffered at the hands of many lodgers. Altogether it was a cheap and cheerless abode, a place where a man was protected from the weather, where he could lie down and sleep. That was all.

Thompson smiled sardonically. With hands clasped behind his head he surveyed the room deliberately, and the survey failed to please him.

"Hell," he exploded suddenly. "I'd ten times rather be out in the woods with a tent than have to live like this—always."

He had spent a pleasant three hours in surroundings that approximated luxury. He had been graciously received and entertained. However, it was easy to be gracious and entertaining when one had the proper setting. A seven-room suite and two servants were highly desirable from certain angles. Oh, well—what the devil was the difference!

Thompson threw off his clothes and got into bed. But he could not escape insistent thought. Against his dull walls, on which the street light cast queer patterns through an open window, he could see, through drowsy eyes, Sophie half-buried in a great chair, listening attentively while he and her father talked. Of course they had fallen into argument, sometimes triangular, more often solely confined to himself and Carr. Thompson was glad that the Grant Street orators had driven him to the city library that winter. A man needed all the weapons he could command against that sharp-tongued old student who precipitated himself joyfully into controversy.

But of course they did not spend three hours discussing abstract theories. There was a good deal of the personal. Thompson had learned that they were in San Francisco for the winter only. Their home was in Vancouver. And Tommy Ashe was still in Vancouver, graduated from an automobile salesman to an agency of his own, and doing well in the venture. Tommy, Carr said, had the modern business instinct. He did not specify what that meant. Carr did not dwell much on Tommy. He appeared to be much more interested in Thompson's wanderings, his experiences, the shifts he had been put to, how the world impressed him, viewed from the angle of the ordinary man instead of the ministerial.

"If you wish to achieve success as modern society defines success, you've been going at it all wrong," he remarked sagely. "The big rewards do not lie in producing and creating, but in handling the results of creation and production—at least so it seems to me. Get hold of something the public wants, Thompson, and sell it to them. Or evolve a sure method of making big business bigger. They'll fall on your neck and fill your pockets with money if you can do that. Profitable undertakings—that's the ticket. Anybody can work at a job."

That sounded rather cynical and Thompson said so. Carr laughed genially. One couldn't escape obvious conclusions, he declared. Perhaps youth and enthusiasm saw it differently.

Thompson, through sleep-heavy eyes, saw Carr hold a glass of port wine, glowing like a ruby, up between himself and the light and sip it slowly. Carr was partial to that wine. Wonder if the old chap didn't get properly lit up sometimes? He looked as if—well, as if he enjoyed easy living—easy drinking. There was brandy and soda and a bottle of Scotch on the sideboard too.—And Sophie was beautiful. All the little feminine artifices of civilization accentuated the charm that had been potent enough in the woods. Silk instead of gingham. Dainty shoes instead of buckskin moccasins.—What an Aladdin's lamp money was, anyway. Funny that they had settled upon Vancouver for a home. Tommy was there too. Of course. Should a fellow stick to his hunch? Vancouver might give birth to an opportunity. Profitable undertakings.—At any rate he would see her now and then. But would he—working? Did he want to? Would a cat continue to stare at a king if the king's crown rather dazzled the cat's eyes? Suppose—just suppose—

Thompson sat up in bed with a start. It seemed to him that he had just lain down, that the train of his thought was still racing. But it was broad day, a dull morning, gloomy with that high fog which in spring often rides over the city and the bay till near noon.

He stretched his arms, yawning. All at once he recollected that he had something to do, a call to make upon Mr. John P. Henderson at ten o'clock. Groya Motors—he wondered what significance that held. At any rate he proposed to see.

It lacked just forty minutes of the appointed time. Thompson bounced out of bed. Within twenty minutes he had swallowed a cup of coffee at a near-by lunch counter and was on his way up Van Ness.

The corner of Van Ness and Potter revealed a six-story concrete building, its plate-glass frontage upon the sidewalk displaying three or four beautifully finished automobiles upon a polished oak floor. The sign across the front bore the heraldry of the card. He walked in, accosted the first man he saw, and was waved to a flight of stairs reaching a mezzanine floor. Gaining that he discovered in a short corridor a door bearing upon its name-plate the legend:

Mr. John P. Henderson.

Private.

Thompson looked at his watch. It lacked but two minutes of ten. He knocked, and a voice bade him enter. He found himself face to face with the master of the gray car. Mr. John P. Henderson looked more imposing behind a mahogany desk than he did on the street. He had a heavy jaw and a forehead-crinkling way of looking at a man. And—although Thompson knew nothing of the fact and at the moment would not have cared a whoop—John P. was just about the biggest toad in San Francisco's automobile puddle. He had started in business on little but his nerve and made himself a fortune. It was being whispered along the Row that John P. was organizing to manufacture cars as well as sell them—and that was a long look ahead for the Pacific coast.

He nodded to Thompson, bade him be seated. And Thompson sank into a chair, facing John P. across the desk. He wanted nothing, expected nothing. He was simply smitten with a human curiosity to know what this stout, successful man of affairs had to propose to him.

"My name is Thompson," he stated cheerfully. "It is ten o'clock. I have called—as you suggested."

Henderson smiled.

"I have been accused of hastiness in my judgment of men, but it is admitted that I seldom make mistakes," he said complacently. "In this organization there is always a place for able, aggressive young men. Some men have ability without any force. Some men are aggressive with no ability whatever. How about you? Think you could sell motor-cars?"

"How the deuce do I know?" Thompson replied frankly. "I have never tried. I'm handicapped to begin. I know nothing about either cars or salesmanship."

"Would you like to try?"

Thompson considered a minute.

"Yes," he declared. "I've tried several things. I'm willing to try anything once. Only I do not see how I can qualify."

"We'll see about that," John P.'s eyes kept boring into him. "D'ye mind a personal question or two?"

Thompson shook his head.

He did not quite know how it came about, but he passed under Henderson's deft touch from reply to narration, and within twenty minutes had sketched briefly his whole career.

Henderson sat tapping the blotter on his desk with a pencil for a silent minute.

"You have nothing to unlearn," he announced abruptly. "All big commercial organizations must to a certain extent train their own men. A man who appears to possess fundamental qualifications is worth his training. I have done it repeatedly. I am going to proceed on the assumption that you will become a useful member of my staff, ultimately with much profit to yourself. I propose that you apply yourself diligently to mastering the sale of motor cars to individual purchasers. I shall pay you twenty-five dollars a week to begin. That's a mechanic's wages. If you make good on sales—there's no limit to your earning power."

"But, look here," Thompson made honest objection. "I appreciate the opportunity. At the same time I wonder if you realize what a lot I have to learn. I don't know a thing about cars beyond how to change a tire and fill grease cups. I've never driven, never even started a motor. How can I sell cars unless I know cars?"

"You overestimate your handicap," John P. smiled. "Knowing how to build and repair cars and knowing how to sell cars are two entirely different propositions. The first requires a high degree of technical knowledge and a lot of practical experience. Selling is a matter of personality—of the power to convince. You can learn to drive in two or three days. In a month you will handle a machine as well as the other fellow, and you will learn enough about the principal parts and their functions—not only of our line, but of other standard machines—to enable you to discuss and compare them intelligently. The rest will depend upon a quality within yourself that has nothing to do with the mechanical end."

"You should know." Thompson could not help a shade of doubt in his tone. "But I must say I could approach a man with a proposition to sell him an article with more confidence if I knew that article inside and out, top and bottom. If I really knew a thing was good, and why, I could sell it, I believe."

"He has the right hunch, Dad."

Thompson had not heard young Henderson come in. He saw him now a step behind his chair, garbed in overalls that bore every sign of intimate contact with machinery.

He nodded to Thompson and continued to address his father.

"It's true. Take two men of equal selling force. On the year's business the one who can drive mechanical superiority home because he knows wherein it lies will show the biggest sales, and the most satisfied customers. I believe six months' shop work would just about double the efficiency of half our sales staff."

John P. gazed good-naturedly at his son.

"I know, Fred," he drawled. "I've heard those sentiments before. There's some truth in it, of course. But Simons and Sam Eppel and Monk White are products of my method. You cannot deny their efficiency in sales. What's the idea, anyway?"

Young Henderson grinned.

"The fact is," he said, "since I listened in on this conversation I have come to the conclusion that you've good material here. I need a helper. He'll get a thorough grounding. Whenever you and he decide that he has absorbed sufficient mechanics he can join the sales end. I'd like to train one man for you, properly."

"Well," John P. remarked judicially, "I can't waste the whole morning discussing methods of training salesmen in the way they should go. I've made Mr. Thompson a proposition. What do you say?"

He turned abruptly on Thompson.

"Or," young Henderson cut in. "You have the counter proposition of an indefinite mechanical grind in my department—which is largely experimental. If you take to it at all I guarantee that in six months you will know more about the internal combustion motor and automobile design in general than any two salesmen on my father's staff. And that," he added, with a boyish grimace at his father, "is saying a lot."

It seemed to Thompson that both men regarded him with a considerable expectancy. It perplexed him, that embarrassment of opportunity. He was a little dazed at the double chance. Here was Opportunity clutching him by the coat collar. He had nothing but impulse, and perhaps a natural craving for positive knowledge, to guide his choice. He wasted few seconds, however, in deciding. Among other things, he had outgrown vacillation.

"It is just as I said," he addressed Henderson senior. "I'd feel more competent to sell cars if I knew them. I'd rather start in the shop."

"All right," Henderson grunted. "You're the doctor. Be giving Fred a chance to prove one of his theories. Personally I believe you'd make a go of selling right off the bat, and a good salesman is wasted in the mechanical line. When you feel that you've saturated your system with valve clearances and compression formulas and gear ratios and all the rest of the shop dope, come and see me. I'll give you a try-out on the selling end. For the present, report to Fred."

He reached for some papers on the desk. His manner, no less than his words, ended the interview. Thompson rose.

"When can you start in?" young Henderson inquired.

"Any time," Thompson responded quickly. He was, in truth, a trifle eager to see what made the wheels go round in that establishment. "I only have to change my clothes."

"Come after lunch then," young Henderson suggested. "Take the elevator to the top floor. Ask one of the men where you'll find me. Bring your overalls with you. We have a dressing room and lockers on each floor."

He nodded good-by and turned to his father. Thompson made his exit.

Half a block away he turned to look back at the house of Henderson. It was massive, imposing, the visible sign of a prosperous concern, the manifestation of business on a big scale. Groya Motors, Inc. It was lettered in neat gilt across the front. It stood forth in four-foot skeleton characters atop of the flat roof—an electric sign to burn like a beacon by night. And he was about to become a part of that establishment, a humble beginner, true, but a beginner with uncommon prospects. He wondered if Henderson senior was right, if there resided in him that elusive essence which leads some men to success in dealings with other men. He was not sure about it himself. Still, the matter was untried. Henderson might be right.

But it was all a fluke. It seemed to him he was getting an entirely disproportionate reward for mauling an insolent chauffeur. That moved him to wonder what became of Pebbles. He felt sorry for Pebbles. The man had probably lost his job for good measure. Poor devil!

As he walked his thought short-circuited to Sophie Carr. Whereat he turned into a drugstore containing a telephone booth and rang her up.

Sophie herself answered.

"I guess my saying good-by last night was a little premature," he told her. "I'm not going north after all. In fact, if things go on all right I may be in San Francisco indefinitely. I've got a job."

"What sort of a job?" Sophie inquired.

He hadn't told her about the ten o'clock appointment with Henderson. Nor did he go into that now.

"I've been taken on in an automobile plant on Van Ness," he said. "A streak of real luck. I'm to have a chance to learn the business. So I won't see you in Vancouver. Remember me to Tommy. I suppose you'll be busy getting ready to go, so I'll wish you a pleasant voyage."

"Thanks," she answered. "Wouldn't it be more appropriate if you wished that on us in person before we sail?"

"I don't know," he mumbled. "I—"

A perfectly mad impulse seized him.

"Sophie," he said sharply into the receiver.

"Yes."

He heard the quick intake of her breath at the other end, almost a gasp. And the single word was slightly uncertain.

"What did you mean by a man standing on his own feet?"

She did not apparently have a ready answer. He pictured her, receiver in hand, and he did not know if she were startled, or surprised—or merely amused. That last was intolerable. And suddenly he felt like a fool. Before that soft, sweet voice could lead him into further masculine folly he hung up and walked out of the booth. For the next twenty minutes his opinion of John P. Henderson's judgment of men was rather low. He did not feel himself to be an individual with any force of character. In homely language he said to himself that he, Wesley Thompson, was nothing but a pot of mush.

However, there in the offing loomed the job. He turned into the first clothing store he found, and purchased one of those all-covering duck garments affected by motor-car workers. By that time he had recovered sufficiently to note that an emotional disturbance does not always destroy a man's appetite for food.



CHAPTER XIX

A WIDENING HORIZON

This is not a history of the motor car business, nor even of the successive steps Wes Thompson took to win competent knowledge of that Beanstalk among modern industries. If it were there might be sound reasons for recounting the details of his tutelage under Fred Henderson. No man ever won success without knowing pretty well what he was about. No one is born with a workable fund of knowledge. It must be acquired.

That, precisely, is what Thompson set out to do in the Groya shop. In which purpose he was aided, abetted, and diligently coached by Fred Henderson. The measure of Thompson's success in this endeavor may be gauged by what young Henderson said casually to his father on a day some six months later.

"Thompson soaks up mechanical theory and practice as a dry sponge soaks up water."

"Wasted talent," John P. rumbled. "I suppose you'll have him a wild-eyed designer before you're through."

"No," Henderson junior observed thoughtfully. "He'll never design. But he will know design when he sees it. Thompson is learning for a definite purpose—to sell cars—to make money. Knowing motor cars thoroughly is incidental to his main object."

John P. cocked his ears.

"Yes," he said. "That so? Better send that young man up to me, Fred."

"I've been expecting that," young Henderson replied. "He's ripe. I wish you hadn't put that sales bug in his ear to start with. He'd make just the man I need for an understudy when we get that Oakland plant going."

"Tush," Henderson snorted inelegantly. "Salesmen are born, not made—the real high-grade ones. And the factories are turning out mechanical experts by the gross."

"I know that," his son grinned. "But I like Thompson. He gives you the feeling that you can absolutely rely on him."

"Send him up to me," John P. repeated—and when John P. issued a fiat like that, even his son did not dispute it.

And Thompson was duly sent up. He did not go back to the shop on the top floor where for six months he had been an eager student, where he had learned something of the labor of creation—for Fred Henderson was evolving a new car, a model that should have embodied in it power and looks and comfort at the minimum of cost. And in pursuance of that ideal he built and discarded, redesigned and rebuilt, putting his motors to the acid test on the block and his assembled chassis on the road. Indeed, many a wild ride he and Thompson had taken together on quiet highways outside of San Francisco during that testing process.

No, Thompson never went back to that after his interview with John P. Henderson. He was sorry, in a way. He liked the work. It was fascinating to put shafting and gears and a motor and a set of insentient wheels together and make the assembled whole a thing of pulsing power that leaped under the touch of a finger. But—a good salesman made thousands where a good mechanic made hundreds. And money was the indispensable factor—to such as he, who had none.

Fred Henderson had the satisfaction of seeing his theory verified. Thompson made good from the start. In three months his sales were second in volume only to Monk White, who was John P.'s one best bet in the selling line. Henderson chuckled afresh over this verification of his original estimate of a man, and Fred Henderson smiled and said nothing. From either man's standpoint Wes Thompson was a credit to the house. An asset, besides, of reckonable value in cold cash.

"New blood counts," John P. rumbled in confidence to his son. "Keeps us from going stale, Fred."

When a twelvemonth had elapsed from the day Sophie Carr's red roadster blew a tire on the San Mateo road and set up that sequence of events which had landed him where he was, Thompson had left his hall bedroom at the Globe for quarters in a decent bachelor apartment. He had a well-stocked wardrobe, a dozen shelves of miscellaneous books, and three thousand dollars in the bank. Considering his prospects he should have been a fairly sanguine and well-contented young man.

As a matter of fact he had become so, within certain limits. A man whose time is continuously and profitably occupied does not brood. Thompson had found a personal satisfaction in living up to John P. Henderson's first judgment of him. Through Fred Henderson and through his business activities he had formed a little group of pleasant acquaintances. Sophie Carr was growing shadowy—a shadow that sometimes laid upon him certain regrets, it is true, but the mere memory of her no longer produced the old overpowering reactions, the sense of sorry failure, of a dear treasure lost because he lacked a man's full stature in all but physical bulk.

It could easily have happened that Thompson would have embraced with enthusiasm a future bounded by San Francisco, a future in which he would successfully sell Groya cars until his amassed funds enabled him to expand still further his material success. If that future embraced a comfortable home, if a mate and affection suggested themselves as possibilities well within his reach, the basis of those tentative yearnings rested upon the need that dwells within every normal human being, and upon what he saw happening now and then to other young men—and young women—within the immediate radius of his observation.

But upon this particular May morning his mind was questing far afield. The prime cause of that mental projection was a letter in his hand, a letter from Tommy Ashe. Thompson had a lively imagination, tempered by the sort of worldly experience no moderately successful man can escape. And Tommy's letter—the latest in a series of renewed correspondence—opened up certain desirable eventualities. The first page of Tommy's screed was devoted to personal matters. The rest ran thus:

Candidly, old man, your description of the contemplated Henderson car makes a hit with me. The line I handle now is a fair seller. But fair isn't good enough for me. I really need—in addition—to have a smaller machine, to supply a pretty numerous class of prospects. I should like to get hold of just such a car as you describe. I am feeling around for the agency of a small, good car. Send me all the dope on this one, and when it will be on the market. There is a tremendous market here for something like that. I'd prefer to take up a line with an established reputation behind it. But the main thing is to have a car that will sell when you push it. And this listens good.

Aren't you about due for a vacation? Why don't you take a run up here? I'd enjoy a chin-fest. The fishing's good, too—and we are long on rather striking scenery. Do come up for a week, when you can get off. Meantime, by-by.

Tommy

Thompson laid down the letter and stared out over the roof-tops. He couldn't afford to be a philanthropist. A rather sweeping idea had flashed into his mind as he read that missive. His horizon was continually expanding. Money, beyond cavil, was the key to many doors, a necessity if a man's eyes were fixed upon much that was desirable. If he could make money selling machines for Groya Motors Inc., why not for himself? Why not?

The answer seemed too obvious for argument. The new car which had taken final form in Fred Henderson's drafting room and in the Groya shop was long past the experimental stage. All it required was financing and John P. Henderson had attended efficiently to that. There was a plant rising swiftly across the bay, a modern plant with railway service, big yards, and a testing track, in which six months hence would begin an estimated annual production of ten thousand cars a year. John P. had remarked once to his son that for the Henderson family to design, produce, manufacture and market successfully a car they could be proud of would be the summit of his ambition. And the new car was named the Summit.

It was a good car, a quality car in everything but sheer bulk. Thompson knew that. He knew, too, that people were buying motor cars on performance, not poundage, now. He knew too that he could sell Summits—if he could get territory in which to make sales.

He had thought about this before. He knew that in the Groya files lay dealers' contracts covering the cream of California, Oregon and Washington. These dealers would handle Summits. There had not seemed an opening wide enough to justify plans. But now Tommy's letter focused his vision upon a specific point.

If he could get that Vancouver territory! Vancouver housed a hundred thousand people. A Vancouver agency for the Summit, with a live man at the helm, would run to big figures.

No, he decided, he would not hastily grasp his fountain pen and say to Tommy Ashe, "Jump in and contract for territory and allotment, old boy. The Summit is the goods." Not until he had looked over the ground himself.

He had two weeks' vacation due when it pleased him. And it pleased him to ask John P. as soon as he reached the office that very morning if it was convenient to the firm to do without him for the ensuing fortnight.



CHAPTER XX

THE SHADOW

Thompson went to Vancouver to spy out the land. He made no confidants. He went about the Terminal City with his mouth shut and his ears and eyes open. What he saw and heard soon convinced him that like the Israelites of old he stood upon the border of a land which—for his business purpose—flowed with milk and honey. It was easy to weave air castles. He could visualize a future for himself in Vancouver that loomed big—if he could but make the proper arrangements at the other end; that is to say, with Mr. John P. Henderson, President of the Summit Motors Corporation. Thompson had faith enough in himself to believe he could make such an arrangement, daring as it seemed when he got down to actual figures.

It gave him a curious sense of relief to find Tommy Ashe flirting with the Petit Six people, apparently forgetful of the Summit specifications. Thompson hadn't quite taken as his gospel the sound business ethic that you must look out for number one first, last and always. If Tommy had broached the subject personally, if he had shown anxiety to acquire selling rights in the Summit, Thompson would have felt impelled by sheer loyalty of friendship to help Tommy secure the agency. That would have been quixotic, of course. Nevertheless, he would have done it, because not to do it would have seemed like taking a mean advantage. As it was—

For the rest he warmed to the sheer beauty of the spot. Vancouver spreads largely over rolling hills and little peninsular juttings into the sea. From its eminences there sweep unequalled views over the Gulf of Georgia and northwestward along towering mountain ranges upon whose lower slopes the firs and cedars marshal themselves in green battalions. From his hotel window he would gaze in contented abstraction over the tidal surges through the First Narrows and the tall masts of shipping in a spacious harbor, landlocked and secure, stretching away like a great blue lagoon with motor craft and ferries and squat tugs for waterfowl. Thompson loved the forest as a man loves pleasant, familiar things, and next to the woods his affection turned to the sea. Here, at his hand, were both in all their primal grandeur. He was very sure he would like Vancouver.

Whether the fact that he encountered the Carrs before he was three days in town, had dinner at their home, and took Sophie once to luncheon at the Granada Grill, had anything to do with this conclusion deponent sayeth not. To be sure he learned with the first frank gleam in Sophie's gray eyes that she still held for him that mysterious pulse-quickening lure, that for him her presence was sufficient to stir a glow no other woman had ever succeeded in kindling ever so briefly. But he had acquired poise, confidence, a self-mastery not to be disputed. He said to himself that he could stand the gaff now. He could face facts. And he said to himself further, a little wistfully, that Sophie Carr was worth all the pangs she had ever given him—more.

He could detect no change in her. That was one of the queer, personal characteristics she possessed—that she could pass beyond his ken for months, for years he almost believed, and when he met her again she would be the same, voice, manner, little tricks of speech and gesture unchanged. Meeting Sophie after that year was like meeting her after a week. Barring the clothes and the surroundings that spoke of ample means tastefully expended, the general background of her home and associates, she seemed to him unchanged. Yet when he reflected, he was not so sure of this. Sophie was gracious, friendly, frankly interested when he talked of himself. When their talk ran upon impersonal things the old nimbleness of mind functioned. But under these superficialities he could only guess, after all, what the essential woman of her was now. He could not say if she were still the queer, self-disciplined mixture of cold logic and primitive passion the Sophie Carr of Lone Moose had revealed to him. He was not sure if he desired to explore in that direction. The old scars remained. He shrank from acquiring new ones, yet perforce let his thought dwell upon her with reviving concentration. After all, he said to himself, it was on the knees of the gods.

At any rate he was not to be deterred from his project. He had served his apprenticeship in the game. He was eager to try his own wings in a flight of his own choosing.

Since he had evolved a definite plan of going about that, he entered decisively upon the first step. Upon reaching San Francisco he bearded John P. Henderson in his mahogany den and outlined a scheme which made that worthy gentleman's eyes widen. He heard Thompson to an end, however, with a growing twinkle in those same, shrewd, worldly-wise orbs, and at the finish thumped a plump fist on his desk with a force that made the pen-rack jingle.

"Damned if I don't go you," he exclaimed. "I said in the beginning you'd make a salesman, and you've made good. You'll make good in this. If you don't it isn't for lack of vision—and nerve."

"Nerve," he chuckled over the word. "You know it isn't good business for me. I'll be losing a valuable man off my staff, and I'll be taking longer chances than it has ever been my policy to take. Your only real asset is—yourself. That isn't a negotiable security."

"Not exactly," Thompson returned. "Still in your business you are compelled—every big business is compelled—to place implicit trust in certain men. From a commercial point of view this move of mine should prove even more profitable to you than if I remain on your staff as a salesman—provided your estimate of me, and my own estimate of myself, is approximately correct. You must have an outlet for your product. I will still be making money for you. In addition I shall be developing a market that will, perhaps before so very long, absorb a tremendous number of cars."

"Oh, there's no argument. I'm committed to the enterprise," Henderson declared. "I believe in you, Thompson. Otherwise I couldn't see your proposition with a microscope. Well, I'll embody the various points in a contract. Come in this afternoon and sign up."

As easily as that. Thompson went down the half-flight of stairs still a trifle incredible over the ease with which he had accomplished a stroke that meant—oh, well, to his sanguine vision there was no limit.

He felt pretty much as he had felt when he sold his first Groya to an apparently hopeless prospect, elated, a little astonished at his success, brimful of confidence to cope with the next problem.

The ego in him clamored to be about this bigger business. But that was not possible. He came back to earth presently with the recollection that the Summits would not be ready for distribution before late October—and for the next five months the more Groyas he sold the better position he would be in when he went on his own.

So when he finally had in his hands a dealer's contract covering the Province of British Columbia he put the matter out of his mind—except for occasional day-dreamings upon it in idle moments—and gave himself whole-heartedly to serving the house of Henderson.

Time passed uneventfully enough. June went its way with its brides and flowers. July drove folk upon vacations to the seaside resorts.

And in August there burst upon an incredulous world the jagged lightnings and cannon-thunder of war.

It would be waste words to describe here the varying fortunes of the grappling armies during the next few months. The newspapers and current periodicals and countless self-appointed historians have attended to that. It is all recorded, so that one must run to read it all. It is as terribly vivid to us now as it was distant and shadowy then—a madness of slaughter and destruction that raged on the other side of the earth, a terror from which we stood comfortably aloof.

There was something in the war unseen by Thompson and the Hendersons and a countless host of intelligent, well-dressed, comfortable people who bought extras wet from the press to read of that merciless thrust through Belgium, the shock and recoil and counter-shock of armies, of death dealt wholesale with scientific precision, of 42-centimeter guns and poison gas and all the rest of that bloody nightmare—they did not see the dread shadow that hung over Europe lengthening and spreading until its murky pall should span the Atlantic.

Thompson was a Canadian. He knew by the papers that Canada was at war, a voluntary participant. But it did not strike him that he was at war. He felt no call to arms. In San Francisco there was no common ferment in the public mind, no marching troops, no military bands making a man's feet tingle to follow as they passed by. Men discussed the war in much the same tone as they discussed the stock market. If there was any definite feeling in the matter it was that the European outbreak was strictly a European affair. When the German spearhead blunted its point against the Franco-British legions and the gray hosts recoiled upon the Marne, the Amateur Board of Strategy said it would be over in six months.

In any case, American tradition explicitly postulated that what occurred in Europe was not, could not, be vital to Americans. But in the last test blood proves thicker than water. Sentimentally, the men Thompson knew were pro-Ally. Only, in practice there was no apparent reason why they should do otherwise than as they had been doing. And in effect San Francisco only emulated her sister cities when she proceeded about "business as usual"—just as in those early days, before the war had bitten deep into their flesh and blood, British merchants flung that slogan in the face of the enemy.

So that to Wes Thompson, concentrated upon his personal affairs, the war never became more than something akin to a bad dream recalled at midday, an unreal sort of thing. Something that indubitably existed without making half the impression upon him that seeing a pedestrian mangled under a street car made upon him during that summer. The war aroused his interest, but left his emotions unstirred. There was nothing martial about him. He dreamed no dreams of glory on the battlefield. He had never thought of the British Empire as something to die for. The issue was not clear to him, just as it failed to clarify itself to a great many people in those days. The maiden aunts and all his early environment had shut off the bigger vision that was sending a steady stream of Canadian battalions overseas.

When the Battle of the Marne was past history and the opposing armies had dug themselves in and the ghastly business of the trenches had begun, Thompson was more than ever immersed in pursuit of the main chance, for he was then engaged in organizing Summit Motors in Vancouver. There had been a period when his optimism about his prospects had suffered a relapse. He had half-expected that Canada's participation in that devil's dance across the sea would spoil things commercially. There had been a sort of temporary demoralization on both sides of the line, at first. But that was presently adjusted. Through Tommy Ashe and other sources he learned that business in Vancouver was actually looking up because of the war.

He was a little surprised that Tommy was not off to the war. Tommy loved his England. He was forever singing England's praises. England was "home" to Tommy Ashe always. It was only a name to Thompson. And he thought, when he thought about it at all, that if England's need was not great enough to call her native-born, that the Allies must have the situation well in hand; as the papers had a way of stating.

He had other fish to fry, himself, without rushing off to the front. As a matter of fact he never consciously considered the question of going to the front. That never occurred to him. When he did think of the war he thought of it impersonally, as a busy man invariably does think of matters which do not directly concern him.

What did concern him most vitally was the project he had in hand. And next to those ambitions, material considerations, his fancy touched shyly now and then upon Sophie Carr.



CHAPTER XXI

THE RENEWED TRIANGLE

Even after Thompson reached Vancouver and the visible signs of a nation at war confronted him he experienced no patriotic thrill. After all, there was no great difference, on the surface, between San Francisco and Vancouver, save that Vancouver accepted as a matter of course the principle that when the mother country was at war Canada was also a belligerent and committed to support. Barring the recruiting offices draped in the Allied colors, squads of men drilling on certain public squares, successive tag days for the Red Cross, the Patriotic fund and such organizations, the war did not flaunt itself in men's faces. The first hot wave of feeling had passed. The thing had become a grim business to be gone about in grim determination. And side by side with those unostensible preparations that kept a stream of armed men passing quietly overseas, the normal business of a city waxed and throve in the old accustomed way. Thompson's most vivid impression was of accelerating business activity, and that was his chief concern. The other thing, which convulsed a far-off continent, was too distant to be a reality—like an earthquake in Japan, a reported famine in India.

He went about his business circumspectly, without loss of time. He leased a good location, wired the factory to ship at once, began a modest advertising campaign in the local papers, and as a business coup collared—at a fat salary and liberal commission—the best salesman on the staff of the concern doing the biggest motor-car business in town. Thompson had learned certain business lessons well. He had perceived long since that it was a cutthroat game when competition grew keen. And this matter of the salesman was his first blood in that line. The man brought with him a list of prospects as long as his arm, and a wide acquaintance in the town, both assets of exceeding value. Altogether Thompson got off to a flying start. The arrangement whereby Henderson consigned cars to him enabled him to concentrate all his small capital on a sales campaign. He paid freight and duty. His cars he paid for when they were sold—and the discount was his profit.

When his salesroom was formally opened to the public, with five Summits on the floor and twice as many en route, when his undertaking and his car models had received the unqualified approval of a surprising number of callers, Thompson left the place to his salesman and went to see Sophie Carr.

That was a visit born of sudden impulse, a desire to talk about something besides automobiles and making money. But Sophie was out. Her father, however, made him welcome, supplementing his welcome with red wine that carried a kick. Thompson sat down before a fireplace, glass in hand, stretched his feet to the fire, and listened to his host talk.

"Considering your early handicaps you have certainly shown some speed in adapting yourself to conditions," Carr observed facetiously. "There was a time when I didn't believe you could. Which shows that even wise men err. Material factors loom bigger and bigger on your horizon, don't they? Don't let 'em obscure everything though, Thompson. That's a blunder plenty of smart men make. Well, we've progressed since Lone Moose days, haven't we—the four of us that foregathered there that last summer?"

Thompson smiled. He liked to hear Carr in a philosophic vein. And their talk ran thence for an hour. At the end of which time Sophie came home.

She walked into the room, shook hands with Thompson, flung her coat, hat, and furs across a chair, and drew another up to the crackling fire. Outside, the long Northern twilight was deepening. Carr rose and switched on a cluster of lights in frosted globes. In the mellow glow he resumed his seat, and his glance came to rest upon his daughter with a curious fixity, as if he subtly divined something that troubled her.

"What is it?" he asked, after a minute of unbroken silence. "You look—"

"Out of sorts?" she interrupted. "Showing up poorly as a hostess?"

Her look included Thompson with a faint, impersonal smile, and her gaze went back to the fire. Sam Carr held his peace, toying with the long-stemmed glass in his hand.

"I went to a Belgian Relief Fund lecture in the Granada ballroom this afternoon," she said at last. "A Belgian woman—a refugee—spoke in broken English. The things she told. It was horrible. I wonder if they could be true?"

"Atrocities?" Carr questioned.

Sophie nodded.

"That's propaganda," her father declared judicially. "We're being systematically stimulated to ardent support of the war in men and money through the press and public speaking, through every available avenue that clever minds can devise. We are not a martial nation, so we have to be spurred, our emotions aroused. Of course there are atrocities. Is there an instance in history where an invading army did not commit all sorts of excesses on enemy soil?"

"I know," Sophie said absently. "But this woman's story—she wasn't one of your glib platform spouters, flag-waving and calling the Germans names. She just talked, groping now and then for the right word. And if a tithe of what she told is true—well, she made me wish I were a man."

One small, soft hand, outstretched over the chair-arm toward the fire, shut suddenly into a hard little fist. And for a moment Thompson felt acutely uncomfortable, without knowing why.

Carr eyed his daughter impassively. In a few seconds she went on.

"Of course I know that in any large army there is bound to be a certain percentage of abnormals who will be up to all sorts of deviltry whenever they find themselves free of direct restraint," she said. "The history of warfare shows that. But this Belgian woman's account puts a different face on things. These unmentionable brutalities weren't isolated cases. Her story gave me the impression of ordered barbarity, of systematic terrorizing by the foulest means imaginable. The sort of thing the papers have been publishing—and worse."

"Discount that, Sophie," Carr remarked calmly. "The Germans are reckoned in the civilized scale the same as ourselves. I'm not ready to damn sixty-five million human beings outright because certain members of the group act like brutes. The chances are that a German soldier would be shot by his own command, for robbery or rape or any of these brutalities, as promptly as one of our own offenders. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of hysterical people loose among us who seem to think they can kill German soldiers by calling them bad names. The Allies will win this war with cannon and bayonets, but up to the present we seem to think we must supplement our bullets with epithets. Doubtless the Germans do the same at home. It's part of the game."

"Oh, I suppose so," Sophie admitted. "But what a horror this war must be for those helpless people who are caught in its sweep."

"If it affects you like that, be thankful it isn't over here," Carr said lightly. "War is all that Sherman said it was. As a matter of fact modern warfare with every scientific and chemical means of destruction at its hand can't result in anything but horror piled on horror. I look for some startling—"

The faint whirr of a buzzer and the patter of a maid's feet along the hall, checked Carr's speech. He did not resume. Instead he reached for a box of cigars, and lighted one. By that time Tommy Ashe was being ushered in.

Tommy exuded geniality from every pore of his ruddy countenance. He accepted the drink Carr rose to offer. He lifted the glass and smiled at Thompson.

"Here's to success," he toasted. "I believe," he went on between sips of wine, "that things are going to look up finely for us. I sold a truck and two touring cars this afternoon. People seem to be loosening up for some reason. You ought to get your share with the Summit, Wes. Snappy little machine, that."

"You rising business men," Carr drawled, "want to learn to leave your business at the office when you come to my house. Now, we were just discussing the war. What sort of a prophet are you, Tommy? How long will it last? Sophie was wondering if it would be over before all the eligible young men depart across the sea."

"Well," Tommy grinned cheerfully, "I'm no prophet. Not being in the confidence of the Allied command, I can't say. I'd hazard a guess, though, that there'll be plenty of good men left for Sophie to make a choice among. I can pass on another man's prophecy, though. Had a letter from one of my brothers yesterday. He was at Mons, got pinked in the leg, and is now training Territorials. He is sure the grand finale will come about midsummer next. The way he put it sounds logical. Neither side can make headway this winter. Germany has made her maximum effort. If she couldn't beat us when she took the field equipped to the last button she never can. By spring we'll be organized. France and England on the west front. The Russian steam roller on the east. The fleet maintaining the blockade. They can't stand the pressure. It isn't possible. The Hun—confound him—will blow up with a loud bang about next July. That's Ned's say-so, and these line officers are pretty conservative as a rule. War's their business, and they don't nurse illusions about it."

"In the meantime, let's talk about selling automobiles, or the weather, anything but the war," Sophie said suddenly. She pressed a button on the wall. "We're going to drink tea and forget the war," she continued almost defiantly. "I won't ask either of you to stay for dinner, because I'm going out."

Carr's house sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that latitude when the year is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds, and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the war.

Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw through them and into vast distances beyond.

And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and laughter—and he was glad just to look at her, to be near. For he was beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate, that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be wholly free. Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free. He wanted that spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her too, make love beget love. There was quickening in him again that desire to pursue, to conquer, to possess. The ego in him whispered that once for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and would, again. But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse. The time was not yet. Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague, unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr. He was aware intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical reason, against any emotional appeal—just as he, himself, was learning to weigh things and men. He did not know this. He only felt it. But he felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.

And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near her. Some day—

Sophie looked at him. For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly.

"I was thinking of you," he answered truthfully.

He looked up as he spoke and his heart leaped at the faint flush that rose slowly over Sophie's face. Indeed all the high resolve that had been shaping in his soul for the past ten minutes came near going by the board. It would have been so easy to imprison the hand that lay along the chair-arm next his own, to utter words that trembled on his tongue, to break through the ice that Sophie used as a shield—for the instant he felt sure of that—and dare what fires burned beneath.

While he stood, poised as it were, upon the tip-toe of indecision, Carr and Tommy Ashe came back.

Afterward, on his way home, Thompson wondered at the swift challenging glance Tommy shot at Sophie in that moment. As if Tommy detected some tensity of feeling that he resented.



CHAPTER XXII

SUNDRY REFLECTIONS

That winter and the summer which followed, and the period which carried him into the spring of 1916, was materially a triumphal procession for Wes Thompson. Tommy's forecast of the war's ending had fallen short as so many other forecasts did. The war went on, developing its own particular horrors as it spread. But the varying tides of war, and the manifold demands of war, bestowed upon Vancouver a heaping measure of prosperity, and Vancouver, in the person of its business men, was rather too far from the sweat and blood of the struggle to be distracted by the issues of that struggle from its own immediate purposes. Business men were in business to make money. They supported the war effort. Every one could not go to the trenches. Workers were as necessary to victory as fighters. People had to be fed and clothed. The army had to be fed and clothed, transported and munitioned. And the fact that the supplying and equipping and transporting was highly profitable to those engaged in such pursuits did not detract from the essentially patriotic and necessary performance of these tasks.

The effect on Vancouver was an industrial rejuvenation. Money flowed in all sorts of channels hitherto nearly dry. A lot of it flowed to Wesley Thompson in exchange for Summit cars. Thompson was like many other men in Vancouver. He was very busy. The business stood on its feet by virtue of his direction. If he dropped it and rushed off to the war—well there was no lack of men, men who had no particular standing, men who could not subscribe to war charities, to Dominion war-bond issues. There was plenty of man-power. There was never a surplus of brain-power. Business was necessary. So a man with a live, thriving business was fighting in his own way—doing his bit to keep the wheels turning—standing stoutly behind the fellow with a bayonet. And a lot of them let it go at that. A lot of them saw no pressing need to don khaki and let everything else go to pot. A lot of them were so intent upon making the most of their opportunities that they never brought their innermost thoughts out on the table and asked themselves point-blank: "Should I go? Why shouldn't I?" And there were some who saw dimly—as the months slid by with air raids and submarine sinkings and all the new, terrible devices of death and destruction which transgressed the old usages of war—there were some who were troubled without knowing why. There were men who hated bloodshed, who hated violence, who wished to live and love and go their ways in peace, but who began uneasily to question whether these things they valued were of such high value after all.

And Wes Thompson was one of these. Deep in him his emotions were stirring. The old tribal instinct—which sent a man forth to fight for the tribe no matter the cause—was functioning under the layer of stuff that civilization imposes on every man. His reason gainsaid these stirrings, those instinctive urgings, but there was a stirring and it troubled him. He did not desire to die in a trench, nor vanish in fragments before a bursting shell, nor lie face to the stars in No Man's Land with a bayonet hole in his middle. He would not risk these fatalities for any such academic idea as saving the world for democracy.

Always when that queer, semi-dormant tribe instinct suggested that he go fight with the tribe against the tribal enemy his reason swiftly choked the impulse. He would not fight for a political abstraction. He had read history. It is littered with broken treaties. If he fought it would be because he felt there was need to strike a blow for something righteous. And his faith in the righteousness of the Allied cause was still unfired. He saw no mission to compel justice, to exact retribution, only a clash of Great Powers, in which the common man was fed to the roaring guns.

But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future. The Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack. It might be—remotely—that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting. He saw that cloud on the horizon. Sometimes he wished that he could muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war. He saw men who had it and wondered privately how they came by it.

If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would have settled certain matters out of hand. Chief among these would have been the problem of Sophie Carr.

Sophie eluded and mystified him. Not wholly in a physical sense—although, to be exact, she did become less accessible in a purely physical sense. But it went deeper than that. During the eighteen months following Thompson's motor-sales debut he never succeeded in establishing between them the same sense of spiritual communion that he had briefly glimpsed those few minutes in Carr's home on the way he opened his salesroom.

There was Tommy, for instance. Tommy was far closer to Sophie Carr than he, Thompson, could manage to come, no matter how he tried. He and Tommy were friends. They had apartments in the same house. They saw each other constantly. The matter of competition in business was purely nominal. They were both too successful in business to be envious of each other in that respect. But where Sophie Carr was concerned it was a conflict, no less existent because neither man ever betrayed his consciousness of such a conflict. Indeed Thompson sometimes wondered uneasily if Ashe's serenity came from an understanding with her. But he doubted that. Tommy had not won—yet. That intangible yet impenetrable wall which was rising about Sophie was built of other, sterner stuff.

She seldom touched on the war, never more than a casual sentence or two. Perhaps a phrase would flash like a sword, and then her lips would close. Carr would discuss the war from any angle whatsoever, at any time. It became an engrossing topic with him, as if there were phases that puzzled him, upon which he desired light. He ceased to be positive. But his daughter shunned war talk.

Yet the war levied high toll on her waking hours, and for that reason Thompson seldom saw her save in company. His vision of little dinners, of drives together, of impromptu luncheons, of a steady siege in which the sheer warmth of that passion in him should force capitulation to his love—all those pleasant dreams went a-glimmering. Sophie was always on some committee, directing some activity growing out of the war, Red Cross work, Patriotic Fund, all those manifold avenues through which the women fought their share of Canada's fight. For a pleasure-loving creature Sophie Carr seemed to have undergone an astonishing metamorphosis. She spent on these things, quietly, without parade or press-agenting, all the energy in her, and she had no reserve left for play. War work seemed to mean something to Sophie besides write-ups in the society column and pictures of her in sundry poses. These things besides, surrounded her with all sorts of fussy people, both male and female, and through this cordon Thompson seldom broke for confidential talk with her. When he did Sophie baffled him with her calm detachment, a profound and ever-increasing reserve—as if she had ceased to be a woman and become a mere, coldly beautiful mechanism for seeing about shipments of bandage stuff, for collecting funds, and devising practical methods of raising more funds and creating more supplies.

Thompson said as much to her one day. She looked at him unmoved, unsmiling. And something that lurked in her clear gray eyes made him uncomfortable, sent him away wondering. It was as if somehow she disapproved. A shadowy impression at best. He wondered if Tommy fared any better, and he was constrained to think Tommy did because Tommy went in for patriotic work a good deal, activities that threw him in pretty close contact with Sophie.

"I can spare the time," he confided to Thompson one day. "And it's good business. I meet some pretty influential people. Why don't you spread yourself a little more, Wes? They'll be saying you're a slacker if you don't make a noise."

"I don't fight the Germans with my mouth," Thompson responded shortly. And Tommy laughed.

"That's a popular weapon these days," he returned lightly. "It does no harm to go armed with it."

Thompson refrained from further speech. That very morning in the lobby of the Granada Thompson had heard one man sneer at another for a slacker—and get knocked down for his pains. He did not want to inflict that indignity on Tommy, and he felt that he would if Tommy made any more cynical reflections.

Of course, that was a mere flaring-up of resentment at the fact that, to save his soul, he could not get off the fence. He could not view the war as a matter vital to himself; nor could he do like Tommy Ashe, play patriotic tunes with one hand while the other reached slyly forth to grasp power and privilege of whatever degree came within reach.

And in the meantime both men, and other men likewise, went about their daily affairs. Vancouver grew and prospered, and the growth of Summit sales left an increasing balance on the profit side of Thompson's ledger. Moreover the rapid and steady growth of his business kept his mind on the business. It worked out—his business preoccupation—much in the manner of the old story of fleas and dogs, to wit: a certain number of fleas is good for a dog. They keep him from brooding over the fact that he is a dog.

So, save for the fact that he continued to make money and was busy and realized now and then that he had come to a disheartening impasse with Sophie, the late spring of 1916 found Thompson mentally, morally and spiritually holding fast by certain props.

He had come a long way, and he had yet a long way to go. He had come to Lone Moose very much after the fashion of St. Simeon Stylites all prepared to mount a spiritual pillar and make a bid for sainthood. But pillar hermits, he discovered, when harsh, material facts tore the evangelistic blinkers off his eyes, were neither useful in the world nor acceptable on high. He had been in a very bad way for awhile. When a man loses his own self-respect and the faith of his fathers at one stroke he is apt to suffer intensely. Thompson had not quite reached that pass, when he came down to Wrangel by the sea, but he was not far off. When he looked back, he could scarcely trace by what successive steps he had traveled. But he had got up out of that puddle into which a harsh environment and wounded egotism had cast him. He was in a way to be what the world called a success.

He was not so sure of that himself. But he stayed himself with certain props, as before mentioned. The base of more than one of these useful supports had been undermined some time before by a sequence of events which presented the paradox of being familiar to him and still beyond his comprehension.

He was a long way from being aware, in those early summer days of 1916, that before long some of the aforementioned props were to buckle under him with strange and disturbing circumstance.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE FUSE—

It was in this period that certain phases of the war began to shake the foundation of things. I do not recall who said that an army marches on its stomach, but it is true, and it is no less a verity that nations function primarily on food. The submarine was waxing to its zenith now, and Europe saw the gaunt wolf at its door. Men cried for more ships. Cost became secondary. A vessel paid for herself if she landed but two cargoes in an Allied port.

Every demand in the economic field produces a supply. On this side of the Atlantic great shipbuilding plants arose by some superior magic of construction in ports where the building of ships had been a minor industry. In this Vancouver did not lag. Wooden ships could be built quickly. Virgin forests of fir and cedar stood at Vancouver's very door. Wherefore yards, capable of turning out a three-thousand-ton wooden steamer in ninety days, rose on tidewater, and an army of labor sawed and hammered and shaped to the ultimate confusion of the Hun.

Thompson had seen these yards in the distance. He read newspapers and he knew that local shipbuilding was playing the dual purpose of confounding the enemy and adding a huge pay-roll to Vancouver's other material advantages. Both of which were highly desirable.

But few details of this came personally to his attention until an evening when he happened to foregather with Tommy Ashe and two or three others at Carr's home—upon one of those rare evenings when Sophie was free of her self-imposed duties and in a mood to play the hostess.

They had dined, and were gathered upon a wide verandah watching the sun sink behind the rampart of Vancouver Island in a futurist riot of yellow and red that died at last to an afterglow which lingered on the mountain tops like a benediction. A bit of the Gulf opened to them, steel-gray, mirror-smooth, more like a placid, hill-ringed lake than the troubled sea.

But there was more in the eye's cast than beauty of sea and sky and setting sun. From their seats they could look down on the curious jumble of long sheds and giant scaffolding that was the great Coughlan steel shipyard in False Creek. Farther distant, on the North Shore, there was the yellowish smudge of what a keen vision discerned to be six wooden schooners in a row, sister ships in varying stages of construction.

Some one said something about wooden shipbuilding.

"There's another big yard starting on the North Shore," Sophie said. "One of our committee was telling me to-day. Her husband has something to do with it."

"Yes. I can verify that," Tommy Ashe smiled. "That's my contribution—the Vancouver Construction Company. I organized it. We have contracted to supply the Imperial Munitions Board with ten auxiliary schooners, three thousand tons burden each."

The fourth man of the party, the lean, suave, enterprising head of a local trust company, nodded approval, eyeing Tommy with new interest.

"Good business," he commented. "We've got to beat those U-boats."

"Yes," Tommy agreed, "and until the Admiralty devises some effectual method of coping with them, the only way we can beat the subs is to build ships faster than they can sink them. It's quite some undertaking, but it has to be done. If we fail to keep supplies pouring into England and France. Well—"

He spread his hands in an expressive gesture. Tommy was that type of Englishman in which rugged health and some generations of breeding and education have combined to produce what Europe calls a "gentleman." He was above middle height, very stoutly and squarely built, ruddy faced—the sort of man one may safely prophesy will acquire a paunch and double chin with middle age. But Tommy was young and vigorous yet. He looked very capable, almost aggressive, as he sat there speaking with the surety of patriotic conviction.

"We're all in it now," he said simply. "It's no longer our army and navy against their army and navy and the rest of us looking on from the side lines. It's our complete material resources and man power against their complete resources and man power. If they win, the world won't be worth living in, for the Anglo-Saxon. So we've got to beat them. Every man's job from now on is going to be either fighting or working. We've got to have ships. I'm organizing that yard to work top-speed. I'm trying to set a pace. Watch us on the North Shore. The man in the trenches won't say we didn't back him up."

It sounded well. To Thompson it gave a feeling of dissatisfaction which was nowise lessened by the momentary gleam in Sophie's eyes as they rested briefly on Tommy and passed casually to him—and beyond.

He was growing slowly to understand that the war had somehow—in a fashion beyond his comprehension—bitten deep into Sophie Carr's soul. She thought about it, if she seldom talked. What was perhaps more vital, she felt about it with an intensity Thompson could not fathom, because he had not experienced such feeling himself. He only divined this. Sophie never paraded either her thoughts or her feelings. And divining this uneasily he foresaw a shortening of his stature in her eyes by comparison with Tommy Ashe—who had become a doer, a creator in the common need, while he remained a gleaner in the field of self-interest. Thompson rather resented that imputation. Privately he considered Tommy's speech a trifle grandiloquent. He began to think he had underestimated Tommy, in more ways than one.

Nor did he fail to wonder at the dry smile that hovered about Sam Carr's lips until that worthy old gentleman put his hand over his mouth to hide it, while his shrewd old eyes twinkled with inner amusement. There was something more than amusement, too. If Wes Thompson had not known that Sam Carr liked Tommy, rather admired his push and ability to hold his own in the general scramble, he would have said Carr's smile and eyes tinged the amusement with something like contempt.

That puzzled Thompson. The Dominion, as well as the Empire, was slowly formulating the war-doctrine that men must either fight or work. Tommy, with his executive ability, his enthusiasm, was plunging into a needed work. Tommy had a right to feel that he was doing a big thing. Thompson granted him that. Why, then, should Carr look at him like that?

He was still recurring to that when he drove down town with Tommy later in the evening. He was not surprised that Tommy sauntered into his rooms after putting up his machine. He had been in the habit of doing that until lately, and Thompson knew now that Tommy must have been very busy on that shipyard organization. It had been easy for them to drop into the old intimacy which had grown up between them on that hard, long trail between Lone Moose and the Stikine. They had a lot of common ground to meet on besides that.

This night Tommy had something on his mind besides casual conversation. He wasted little time in preliminaries.

"Would you be interested in taking over my car agencies on a percentage basis, Wes?" he asked point-blank, when he had settled himself in a chair with a cigar in his mouth. "I have worked up a good business with the Standard and the Petit Six. I don't like to let it go altogether. I shall have to devote all my time to the ship plant. That looms biggest on the horizon. But I want to hold these agencies as an anchor to windward. You could run both places without either suffering, I'm confident. Ill make you a good proposition."

Thompson reflected a minute.

"What is your proposition?" he asked at length. "I daresay I could handle it. But I can't commit myself offhand."

"Of course not," Tommy agreed. "You can go over my books from the beginning, and see for yourself what the business amounts to. I'd be willing to allow you seventy-five per cent. of the net. Based on last year's business you should clear twelve thousand per annum. Sales are on the up. You might double that. I would hold an option of taking over the business on ninety days' notice."

"It sounds all right," Thompson admitted. "I'll look into it."

"I want quick action," Tommy declared. "Say, to-morrow you arrange for some certified accountant to go over my books and make out a balance sheet. I'll pay his fee. I'm anxious to be free to work on the ship end."

"All right. I'll do that. We can arrange the details later if I decide to take you up," Thompson said.

Tommy stretched his arms and yawned.

"By jove," said he, "I'm going to be the busiest thing on wheels for awhile. It's no joke running a big show."

"I didn't know you were a shipbuilder," Thompson commented.

"I'm not," Tommy admitted, stifling another yawn. "But I can hire 'em—both brains and labor. The main thing is I've got the contracts. That's the chief item in this war business. The rest is chiefly a matter of business judgment. It's something of a jump, I'll admit, but I can negotiate it, all right."

"As a matter of fact," he continued presently, and with a highly self-satisfied note in his voice, "apart from the executive work it's what the Americans call a lead-pipe cinch. We can't lose. I've been fishing for this quite a while, and I put it over by getting in touch with the right people. It's wonderful what you can do in the proper quarter. The Vancouver Construction Company consists of Joe Hedley and myself. Joe is a very clever chap. Has influential people, too. We have contracts with the I.M.B. calling for ten schooners estimated to cost three hundred thousand dollars per. We finance the construction, but we don't really risk a penny. The contracts are on a basis of cost, plus ten per cent. You see? If we go above or under the estimate it doesn't matter much. Our profit is fixed. The main consideration is speed. The only thing we can be penalized for is failure to launch and deliver within specified dates."

Thompson did a rough bit of mental figuring.

"I should say it was a cinch," he said dryly. "Nobody can accuse you of profiteering. Yet your undertaking is both patriotic and profitable. I suppose you had no trouble financing a thing like that?"

"I should say not. The banks," Tommy replied with cynical emphasis, "would fall over themselves to get their finger in our pie. But they won't. Hedley and I have some money. Sam Carr is letting us have fifty thousand dollars at seven per cent. No bank is going to charge like the Old Guard at Waterloo on overdrafts and advances—and dictate to us besides. I'm too wise for that. I'm not in the game for my health. I see a big lump of money, and I'm after it."

"I suppose we all are," Thompson reflected absently.

"Certainly," Tommy responded promptly. "And we'd be suckers if we weren't."

He took a puff or two at his cigar and rose.

"Run over to the plant on the North Shore with me to-morrow if you have the time. We'll give it the once over, and take a look at the Wallace yard too. They're starting on steel tramps there now. I'm going over about two o'clock. Will you?"

"Sure. I'll take time," Thompson agreed.

"Come down to MacFee's wharf and go over with me on the Alert," Tommy went on. "That's the quickest and easiest way to cross the Inlet. Two o'clock. Well, I'm off to bed. Good night, old man."

"Good night."

The hall door clicked behind Ashe. Thompson sat deep in thought for a long time. Then he fished a note pad out of a drawer and began pencilling figures.

Ten times three hundred thousand was three million. Ten per cent. on three million was three hundred thousand dollars. And no chance to lose. The ten per cent. on construction cost was guaranteed by the Imperial Munitions Board, behind which stood the British Empire.

Didn't Tommy say the ten schooners were to be completed in eight months? Then in eight months Tommy Ashe was going to be approximately one hundred and fifty thousand dollars richer.

Thompson wondered if that was why Sam Carr looked at Tommy with that ambiguous expression when Tommy was chanting his work or fight philosophy. Carr knew the ins and outs of the deal if he were loaning money on it.

And Thompson did not like to think he had read Carr's look aright, because he was uncomfortably aware that he, Wes Thompson, was following pretty much in Ashe's footsteps, only on a smaller scale.

He tore the figured sheet into little strips, and went to bed.



CHAPTER XXIV

—AND THE MATCH THAT LIT THE FUSE—

At a minute or two of ten the next morning Thompson stopped his car before the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The bolt-studded doors were still closed, and so he kept his seat behind the steering column, glancing idly along Hastings at the traffic that flowed about the gray stone pile of the post-office, while he waited the bank's opening for business.

A tall young man, a bit paler-faced perhaps than a normal young fellow should be, but otherwise a fine-looking specimen of manhood, sauntered slowly around the corner of the bank, and came to a stop on the curb just abreast the fore end of Thompson's motor. He took out a cigarette and lighted it with slow, deliberate motions. And as he stood there, gazing with a detached impersonal air at the front of the Summit roadster, there approached him a recruiting sergeant.

"How about joining up this morning?" he inquired briskly.

"Oh, I don't know," the young man responded casually. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Every man should be thinking about it," the sergeant declared. "The army needs men. Now a well-set-up young fellow like you would get on capitally at soldiering. It's a great life. When we get the Germans whipped every man will be proud to say he had a hand in it. If a man struck you you wouldn't stand back and let some other fellow do your fighting for you, now would you? More than that, between you and me, it won't be long before an able-bodied man can't walk these streets in civvies, without the girls hooting him. It's a man's duty to get into this war. Better walk along with me to headquarters and sign on."

The young man gazed across the street with the same immobility of expression.

"What's the inducement?" he asked presently.

The sergeant, taking his cue from this, launched forth upon a glowing description of army life, the pay, the glory, the manifold advantages that would certainly accrue. He painted a rosy picture, a gallant picture. One gathered from his talk that a private in khaki was greater than a captain of industry in civilian clothes. He dwelt upon the brotherhood, the democracy of arms. He spilled forth a lot of the buncombe that is swallowed by those who do not know from bitter experience that war, at best, is a ghastly job in its modern phases, a thing that the common man may be constrained to undertake if need arises, but which brings him little pleasure and less glory—beyond the consciousness that he has played his part as a man should.

The young man heard the recruiting sergeant to an end. And when that worthy had finished he found fixed steadily upon him a pair of coldly speculative gray-green eyes.

"How long have you been in the army?" he asked.

"About eighteen months," the sergeant stated.

"Have you been over there?"

"No," the sergeant admitted. "I expect to go soon, but for the present I'm detailed to recruiting."

The young man had a flower in the lapel of his coat. He removed it, the flower, and thrust the lapel in the sergeant's face. The flower had concealed a bronze button.

"I've been over there," the young man said calmly. "There's my button, and my discharge is in my pocket—with the names of places on it that you'll likely never see. I was in the Princess Pats—you know what happened to the Pats. You have hinted I was a slacker, that every man not in uniform is a slacker. Let me tell you something. I know your gabby kind. The country's full of such as you. So's England. The war's gone two years and you're still here, going around telling other men to go to the front. Go there yourself, and get a taste of it. When you've put in fourteen months in hell like I did, you won't go around peddling the brand of hot air you've shot into me, just now."

"I didn't know you were a returned man," the sergeant said placatingly. A pointed barb of resentment had crept into the other's tone as he spoke.

"Well, I am," the other snapped. "And I'd advise you to get a new line of talk. Don't talk to me, anyway. Beat it. I've done my bit."

The sergeant moved on without another word, and the other man likewise went his way, with just the merest suggestion of a limp. And simultaneously the great doors of the bank swung open. Thompson looked first after one man then after the other, and passed into the bank with a thoughtful look on his face.

He finished his business there. Other things occupied his attention until noon. He lunched. After that he drove to Coal Harbor where the yachts lie and motor boats find mooring, and having a little time to spare before Tommy's arrival, walked about the slips looking over the pleasure craft berthed thereat. Boats appealed to Thompson. He had taken some pleasant cruises with friends along the coast. Some day he intended to have a cruising launch. Tommy had already attained that distinction. He owned a trim forty-footer, the Alert. Thompson's wanderings presently brought him to this packet.

A man sat under the awning over the after deck. Thompson recognized in him the same individual upon whom the recruiting sergeant's eloquence had been wasted that morning. He was in clean overalls, a seaman's peaked cap on his head. Thompson had felt an impulse to speak to the man that morning. If any legitimate excuse had offered he would have done so. To find the man apparently at home on the boat in which he himself was taking brief passage was a coincidence of which Thompson proceeded to take immediate advantage. He climbed into the cockpit. The man looked at him questioningly.

"I'm going across the Inlet with Mr. Ashe," Thompson explained. "Are you on the Alert?"

"Engineer, skipper, and bo'sun too," the man responded whimsically. "Cook, captain, and the whole damn crew."

They fell into talk. The man was intelligent, but there was a queer abstraction sometimes in his manner. Once the motor of a near-by craft fired with a staccato roar, and he jumped violently. He looked at Thompson unsmiling.

"I'm pretty jumpy yet," he said—but he did not explain why. He did not say he had been overseas. He did not mention the war. He talked of the coast, and timber, and fishing, and the adjacent islands, with all of which he seemed to be fairly familiar.

"I heard that recruiting sergeant tackle you this morning," Thompson said at last. "You were standing almost beside my machine. What was it like over there?"

"What was it like?" the man repeated. He shook his head. "That's a big order. I couldn't tell you in six months. It wasn't nice."

He seemed to reflect a second or two.

"I suppose some one has to do it. It has to be done. But it's a tough game. You don't know where you're going nor what you're up against most of the time. The racket gets a man, as well as seeing fellows you know getting bumped off now and then. Some of the boys get hardened to it. I never did. I try to forget it now, mostly. But I dream things sometimes, and any sudden noise makes me jump. A fellow had better finish over there than come home crippled. I'm lucky to hold down a job like this, lucky that I happen to know gas engines and boats. I look all right, but I'm not much good. All chewed up with shrapnel. And my nerve's gone. I wouldn't have got my discharge if they could have used me any more. Aw, hell, if you haven't been in it you can't imagine what it's like. I couldn't tell you."

"Tell me one thing," Thompson asked quickly, spurred by an impulse for light upon certain matters which had troubled him. He wanted the word of an eye-witness. "Did you ever see, personally, any of those atrocities that have been laid to the Germans in Belgium?"

"Well, I don't know," the man replied. "The papers have printed a lot of stuff. Mind you, over there you hear about a lot of things you never see. The only thing I saw was children with their hands hacked off at the wrist."

"Good God," Thompson uttered. "You actually saw that with your own eyes."

"Sure," the man responded. "Nine of 'em in one village.

"Why, in the name of God, would men do such a thing?" Thompson demanded. "Was any reason ever given?"

"No. I suppose they were drunk or something. Fritz was pretty bad in spots, all right. Maybe they just wanted to put the fear of God in their hearts. A pal of mine in Flanders told me of a woman—in a place they took by a night raid—she had her breast slashed open. She said a Boche officer did it with his sword."

The man spoke of these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when Thompson ceased to question him he ceased to talk.

But in Thompson these calmly recounted horrors worked profound distress. His imagination became immediately shot with sinister pictures. All these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved, now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in the cockpit beside this veteran of Flanders.

The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside. Thompson sat silent beside him. But there was in Thompson none of the other's passivity. Unlike the returned soldier, who had seen blood and death until he was surfeited with it, until he wanted nothing but peace and quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and shell-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a passionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no fit name for such deeds.

And, responding so surely to that unexpected stimulus, he had no stomach for crossing the Inlet as Tommy's guest, to view the scene of Tommy's industrial triumph-to-be. He wasn't interested in that now.

Sitting under the awning, brooding over these things, he remembered how Sophie Carr had reacted to the story of the Belgian refugee that afternoon a year and a half ago. He understood at last. He divined how Sophie felt that day. And he had blandly discounted those things. He had gone about his individual concerns insulated against any call to right wrongs, to fight oppression, to abolish that terror which loomed over Europe—and which might very well lay its sinister hand on America, if the Germans were capable of these things, and if the German's military power prevailed over France and England. When he envisaged Canada as another Belgium his teeth came together with a little click.

He clambered out of the Alert's cockpit to the float.

"Tell Mr. Ashe I changed my mind about going over with him," he said abruptly, and walked off the float, up the sloping bank to the street, got in his car and drove away.

As he drove he felt that he had failed to keep faith with something or other. He felt bewildered. Those little children, shorn of their hands—so that they could never lift a sword against Germany—cried aloud to him. They held up their bloody stumps for him to see.



CHAPTER XXV

—AND THE BOMB THE FUSE FIRED

It took Thompson approximately forty-eight hours to arrange his affairs. He managed things with a precipitancy that would have shocked a sound, practical business man, for he put out no anchors to windward nor troubled himself about the future. He paid his bills, transferred the Summit agency to his head salesman—who had amassed sufficient capital to purchase the stock of cars and parts at cost. Thus, having deliberately sacrificed a number of sound assets for the sake of being free of them without delay, Thompson found himself upon the morning of the third day without a tie to bind him to Vancouver, and a cash balance of twenty thousand dollars to his credit in the bank.

He did not know how, or in what capacity he was going to the front, but he was going, and the manner of his going did not concern him greatly. It mattered little how he went, so long as he went in the service of his country. A little of his haste was born of the sudden realization that he had a country which needed his services—and that he desired to serve. It had passed an emotional phase with him. He saw it very clearly as a duty. He did not foresee or anticipate either pleasure or glory in the undertaking. He had no illusions about war. It was quite on the cards that he might never come back. But he had to go.

So then he had only to determine how he should go.

That problem, which was less a problem than a matter of making choice, was solved that very day at luncheon. As he sat at a table in a downtown cafe there came to him a figure in khaki, wearing a short, close-fitting jacket with an odd emblem on the left sleeve—a young fellow who hailed Thompson with a hearty grip and a friendly grin. He sat himself in a chair vis-a-vis, laying his funny, wedge-shaped cap on the table.

"I've been wondering what had become of you, Jimmie," Thompson said. "I see now. Where have you been keeping yourself?"

"East," the other returned tersely. "Training. Got my wings. Off to England day after to-morrow. How's everything with you, these days?"

Thompson looked his man over thoroughly. Jimmie Wells was the youngest of the four sons of a wealthy man. The other three were at the front, one of them already taking his long rest under a white, wooden cross somewhere in France. Jimmie looked brown and fit. A momentary pang of regret stung Thompson. He wished he too were standing in uniform, ready for overseas.

"I've just wound up my business," he said. "I'm going to the front myself, Jimmie."

"Good," Wells approved. "What branch?"

"I don't know yet," Thompson replied. "I made up my mind in a hurry. I'm just setting out to find where I'll fit in best."

"Why don't you try aviation?" Jimmie Wells suggested. "You ought to make good in that. There are a lot of good fellows flying. If you want action, the R.F.C. is the sportiest lot of all."

"I might. I didn't think of that," Thompson returned slowly. "Yes, I believe I could fly."

"If you can fly like you drive, you'll be the goods," Jimmie asserted cheerfully. "Tell you what, Thompson. Come on around to the Flying Corps headquarters with me. I know a fellow there rather well, and I'll introduce you. Not that that will get you anything, only Holmes will give you a lot of unofficial information."

Thompson rose from the table.

"Lead me to it," said he. "I'm your man."

Getting accepted as a cadet in the Royal Flying Corps was not so simple a matter as enlisting in the infantry. The requirements were infinitely more rigid. The R.F.C. took only the cream of the country's manhood. They told Thompson his age was against him—and he was only twenty-eight. It was true. Ninety per cent. of the winged men were five years younger. But he passed all their tests by grace of a magnificent body that housed an active brain and steady nerves.

All this did not transpire overnight. It took days. He told no one of his plans in the meantime, no one but Tommy Ashe, who was a trifle disappointed when Thompson declined to handle Tommy's exceedingly profitable motor business. Tommy seemed hurt. To make it clear that he had a vital reason, Thompson explained tersely.

"I can't do it because I'm going to the front."

"Eh? What the devil!"

Tommy looked all the astonishment his tone expressed.

"Well, what the devil?" Thompson returned tartly. "Is there anything strange about that? A good many men have gone. A good many more will have to go before this thing is settled. Why not?"

"Oh, if a man feels that he should," Tommy began. He seemed at a loss for words, and ended lamely: "There's plenty of cannon-fodder in the country without men of your caliber wasting themselves in the trenches. You haven't the military training nor the pull to get a commission."

Thompson's lips opened to retort with a sentence he knew would sting like a whiplash. But he thought better of it. He would not try plucking the mote out of another man's eye, when he had so recently got clear of the beam in his own.

Tommy did not tarry long after that. He wished Thompson good luck, but he left behind him the impression that he privately considered it a poor move. Thompson was willing to concede that from a purely material standpoint it was a poor move. But he could no longer adopt the purely materialistic view. It had suddenly become clear to him that he must go—and why he must go. Just as the citizen whose house gets on fire knows beyond peradventure that he must quench the flames if it lies in his power.

The Royal Flying Corps arrives at its ends slowly. Perhaps not too slowly for the niceness of choice that must be made. Presently there came to Wesley Thompson a brief order to report at a training camp in Eastern Canada.

When he held this paper in his hand and knew himself committed irrevocably to the greatest game of all, he felt a queer, inner glow, a quiet satisfaction such as must come to a man who succeeds in some high enterprise. Thompson felt this in spite of desperate facts. He had no illusions as to what he had set about. He knew very well that in the R.F.C. it was a short life and not always a merry one. Of course a man might be lucky. He might survive by superior skill. In any case it had to be done.

But he was moved likewise by a strange loneliness, and with his orders in his hand he understood at last the source of that peculiar regret which latterly had assailed him in stray moments. There were a few friends to bid good-by. And chief, if she came last on his round of calls that last day, was Sophie Carr.

He found Sophie at home about four in the afternoon, sitting in the big living room, making Red Cross bandages. She did not stop her work when he was ushered in. Beside her on a table stood a flat box and in this from time to time she put a finished roll. It occurred to Thompson that sometime one of those white bandages fabricated by her hands might be used on him.

He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the Flying Corps the man who lost in aerial combat needed little besides a coffin—and sometimes not even that.

Sophie looked at him almost somberly.

"I'm working, don't you see?" she said curtly.

He had never seen her in quite that unapproachable mood. He wanted her to forget the Red Cross and the war for a little while, to look and speak with the old lightness. He wasn't a sentimental man, but he did want to go away with a picture of her smiling. He had not told her he was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then only to say casually: "Well, good-by. I'm off for a training-camp to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero. But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her—if it should be his last—to be a pleasant one.

And Sophie was looking at him now, fixedly, a frosty gleam in her gray eyes. She looked a moment, and her breast heaved. She swept the work off her lap with a sudden, swift gesture.

"What is the matter with you—and dozens of men like you that I know?" she demanded in a choked voice. "You stay at home living easy and getting rich in the security that other men are buying with their blood and their lives, over there. Fighting against odds and dying like dogs in a ditch so that we can live here in peace and comfort. You don't even do anything useful here. There doesn't seem to be anything that can make you work or fight. They can sink passenger ships and bomb undefended towns and shell hospitals, and you don't seem to resent it. I've heard you prate about service—when you thought you walked with God and had a mission from God to show other men the way. Why don't you serve now? What is the matter with you? Is your skin so precious? If you can't fight, can't you make ammunition or help to build ships? Are you a man, or just a rabbit? I wish to God I were a man."

Thompson rose to his feet. The lash of her tongue had not lost its power to sting since those far-off Lone Moose days. Yet, though it stabbed like a spear, he was more conscious of a passionate craving to gather her into his arms than of anger and resentment. There were tears in Sophie's eyes—but there was no softness in her tone. Her red lips curled as Thompson looked at her in dazed silence. There did not seem to be anything he could say—not with Sophie looking at him like that.

"If you feel that way about it—"

He broke off in the middle of the muttered sentence, turned on his heel, walked out of the room. And he went down the street suffering from a species of shock, saying desperately to himself that it did not matter, nothing mattered.

But he knew that was a lie, a lie he told himself to keep his soul from growing sick.

He went back to his rooms for the last time, and tried with pen and paper to set down some justification of himself for Sophie's eyes. But he could not satisfy himself with that. His pride revolted against it. Why should he plead? Or rather, what was the use of pleading? Why should he explain? He had a case for the defence, but defence avails nothing after sentence has been pronounced. He had waited too long. He had been tried and found wanting.

He tore the letter into strips, and having sent his things to the station long before, put on his hat now and walked slowly there himself, for it lacked but an hour of train-time.

At the corner of Pender and Hastings he met Sam Carr.

"Welcome, youthful stranger," Carr greeted heartily. "I haven't seen you for a long time. Walk down to the Strand with me and have a drink. I've been looking over the Vancouver Construction Company's yard, and it's a very dry place."

Thompson assented. He had time and it was on his way. He reacted willingly to the suggestion. He needed something to revive his spirit, but he had not thought of the stimulus of John Barleycorn until Carr spoke.