In the Strand bar he poured himself half a glass of Scotch whisky. Carr regarded him meditatively over port wine.

"That's the first time I ever saw you touch the hard stuff," he observed.

"It will probably be the last," Thompson replied.

"Why?"

"I'm off," Thompson explained. "I have sold out my business and have been accepted for the Royal Flying Corps. I'm taking the train at six to report at Eastern headquarters."

Carr fingered the stem of his empty glass a second. "I hate to see you go, and still I'm glad you're going," he said with an odd, wistful note in his voice. "I'd go too, Thompson, if I weren't too old to be any use over there."

"Eh?" Thompson looked at him keenly. "Have you been revising your philosophy of life?"

"No. Merely bringing it up to date," Carr replied soberly. "We have what we have in the way of government, economic practice, principles of justice, morality—so forth and so on. I'm opposed to a lot of it. Too much that's obsolete. A lot that's downright bad. But bad as it is in spots, it is not a circumstance to what we should have to endure if the Germans win this war. I believe in my people and my country. I don't believe in the German system of dominating by sheer force and planned terror. The militarists and the market hunters have brought us to this. But we have to destroy the bogey they have raised before we can deal with them. And a man can't escape nationalism. It's bred in us. What the tribe thinks, the individual thinks. This thing is in the air. We are getting unanimous. Whether or not we approve the cause, we are too proud to consider getting whipped in a war that was forced on us. One way and another, no matter what we privately think of our politicians and industrial barons and our institutions generally, it is becoming unthinkable to the Anglo-Saxon that the German shall stalk rough-shod over us. We are beginning—we common people—to hate him and his works. Look at you and me. We were aloof at first. We are intelligent. We have learned to saddle feeling with logic. We have not been stampeded by military bands and oratory. Yet there is something in the air. I wish I could fight. You are going to fight. Not because you like fighting, but because you see something to fight for. And before long those who cannot see will be very few. Isn't that about right?"

"I think so," Thompson replied.

"There you are," Carr went on. "Myself, I have put philosophic consideration in abeyance for the time. I've got primitive again. Damn the Central Powers! If I had seven sons I'd send them all to the front."

They had another drink.

"Did you go and say good-by to Sophie?" Carr demanded suddenly.

"I saw her, but I don't think I said good-by," Thompson said absently. He was thinking about Carr's surprising outburst. He agreed precisely with what the old man said. But he had not suspected the old radical of such intensity. "I didn't tell her I was going."

"You didn't tell her," Carr persisted. "Why not?"

"For a variety of reasons." He found it hard to assume lightness with those shrewd old eyes searchingly upon him. "You can tell her good-by for me. Well, let's have a last one. It'll be a good many moons before you and I look over a glass at each other again. If I don't come back I'll be in honorable company. And I'll give them hell while I last."

Carr walked with him down to the train.

"When the war broke out," he said to Thompson at the coach steps, "if you had proposed to go I should privately have considered you a damned idealistic fool. Now I envy you. You will never have to make apologies to yourself for yourself, nor to your fellows. If I strike a blow that a free people may remain free to work out their destiny in their own fashion, I must do it by proxy. I wish you all the luck there is, Wes Thompson. I hope you come back safe to us again."

They shook hands. A voice warned all and sundry that the train was about to leave, and over the voice rose the strident notes of a gong. Thompson climbed the steps, passed within, thrust his head through an open window as the Imperial Limited gathered way. His last glimpse of a familiar face was of Carr standing bareheaded, looking wistfully after the gliding coaches.

* * * * *

The grandfather clock in the hall was striking nine when Sam Carr came home. He hung his hat on the hall-tree and passed with rather unsteady steps into the living room. He moved circumspectly, with the peculiar caution of the man who knows that he is intoxicated and governs his movements accordingly. Carr's legs were very drunk and he was aware of this, but his head was perfectly clear. He managed to negotiate passage to a seat near his daughter.

Sophie was sitting in a big chair, engulfed therein, one might say. A reading lamp stood on the table at her elbow. A book lay in her lap. But she was staring at the wall absently, and beyond a casual glance at her father she neither moved nor spoke, nor gave any sign of being stirred out of this profound abstraction.

Carr sank into his chair with a sigh of relief.

"I am just about pickled, I do believe," he observed to the room at large.

"So I see," Sophie commented impersonally. "Is there anything uncommon about that? I am beginning to think prohibition will be rather a blessing to you, Dad, when it comes."

"Huh!" Carr grunted. "I suppose one drink does lead to another. But I don't need to be legally safe-guarded yet, thank you. My bibulosity is occasional. When it becomes chronic I shall take to the woods."

"Sometimes I find myself wishing we had never come out of the woods," Sophie murmured.

"What?" Carr exclaimed. Then: "That's rich. You with a sure income beyond your needs, in your own right, with youth and health and beauty, with all your life before you, wishing to revert to what you used to say was a living burial? That's equivalent to holding that the ostrich philosophy is the true one—what you cannot see does not exist. That ignorance is better than knowledge—that—that—Hang it, my dear, are you going to turn reactionary? But that's a woman. Now why should—"

"Oh, don't begin one of your interminable, hair-splitting elucidations," Sophie protested. "I know it's showing weakness to desire to run away from trouble. I don't know that I have any trouble to run from. I'm not sure I should dodge trouble if I could. I was just voicing a stray thought. We were happy at Lone Moose, weren't we, Dad?"

"After a fashion," Carr replied promptly. "As the animal is happy with a full belly and a comfortable place to sleep. But we both craved a great deal more than that of life."

"And we are not getting more," Sophie retorted. "When you come right down to fundamentals we eat a greater variety of food, wear better clothes, live on a scale that by our former standards is the height of luxury. But not one of my dreams has come true. And you find solace in a wine glass where you used to find it in books. Over in Europe men are destroying each other like mad beasts. At home, while part of the nation plays the game square, there's another part that grafts and corrupts and profiteers and slacks to no end. It's a rotten world."

"By gad, you have got the blue glasses on to-night, and no mistake," Carr mused. "That's unmitigated pessimism, Sophie. What you need is a vacation. Let somebody else run this women's win-the-war show for awhile, and you take a rest. That's nerves."

"I can't. There is too much to do," Sophie said shortly. "I don't want to. If I sat down and folded my hands these days I'd go crazy."

Carr grunted. For a minute neither spoke. Sophie lay back in her chair, eyes half closed, fingers beating a slow rat-a-tat on the chair-arm.

"Have you seen Wes Thompson lately?" Carr inquired at last.

"I saw him this afternoon," Sophie replied.

"Did he tell you he was going overseas?"

"No." Sophie's interest seemed languid, judged by her tone.

"You saw him this afternoon, eh?" Carr drawled. "That's queer."

"What's queer?" Sophie demanded.

"That he would see you and not tell you where he was off to," Carr went on. "I saw him away on the Limited at six-o'clock. He told me to tell you good-by. He's gone to the front."

Sophie sat upright.

"How could he do that?" she said impatiently. "A man can't get into uniform and leave for France on two hours' notice. He called here about four. Don't be absurd."

"I don't see anything absurd except your incredulous way of taking it," Carr defended stoutly. "I tell you he's gone. I saw him take the train. Who said anything about two hours' notice? I should imagine he has been getting ready for some time. You know Wes Thompson well enough to know that he doesn't chatter about what he's going to do. He sold out his business two weeks ago, and has been waiting to be passed in his tests. He has finally been accepted and ordered to report East for training in aviation. He joined the Royal Flying Corps."

Carr did not know that in the circle of war workers where Sophie moved so much the R.F.C. was spoken of as the "Legion of Death." No one knew the percentage of casualties in that gallant service. Such figures were never published. All that these women knew was that their sons and brothers and lovers, clean-limbed children of the well-to-do, joined the Flying Corps, and that their lives, if glorious, were all too brief once they reached the Western front. Only the supermen, the favored of God, survived a dozen aerial combats. To have a son or a brother flying in France meant mourning soon or late. So they spoke sometimes, in bitter pride, of their birdmen as the "Legion of Death", a gruesome phrase and apt.

Carr knew the heavy casualties of aerial fighting. But he had never seen a proud woman break down before the ominous cablegram, he had never seen a girl sit dry-eyed and ashy-white, staring dumbly at a slip of yellow paper. And Sophie had—many a time. To her, a commission in the Royal Flying Corps had come to mean little short of a death warrant.

She sat now staring blankly at her father.

"He closed up his business and joined the Flying Corps two weeks ago."

She repeated this stupidly, as if she found it almost impossible to comprehend.

"That's what I said," Carr replied testily. "What the devil did you do to him that he didn't tell you, if he was here only two hours before he left? Why, he must have come to say good-by."

"What did I do?" Sophie whispered. "My God, how was I to know what I was doing?"

She sat staring at her father. But she was not seeing him, and Carr knew she did not see him. Some other vision filled those wide-pupiled eyes. Something that she saw or felt sent a shudder through her. Her mouth quivered. And suddenly she gave a little, stifled gasp, and covered her face with her hands.



CHAPTER XXVI

THE LAST BRIDGE

Thompson received his preliminary training in a camp not greatly distant from his birthplace and the suburban Toronto home where the spinster aunts still lived. He did not go to see them at first, for two reasons. Primarily, because he had written them a full and frank account of himself when he got out of the ruck and achieved success in San Francisco. Their reply had breathed an open disappointment, almost hostility, at his departure from the chosen path. They made it clear that in their eyes he was a prodigal son for whom there would never be any fatted calf. Secondly, he did not go because there was seldom anything but short leave for a promising aviator.

Thompson speedily proved himself to belong in that category. There resided in him those peculiar, indefinable qualities imperative for mastery of the air. Under able instruction he got on fast, just as he had got on fast in the Henderson shops. And by the time the first fall snows whitened the ground, he was ready for England and the finishing stages of aerial work antecedent to piloting a fighting plane. He had practically won his official wings.

With his orders to report overseas he received ten days' final leave. And a sense of duty spurred him to look up the maiden aunts, to brave their displeasure for the sake of knowing how they fared. There was little other use to make of his time. The Pacific Coast was too far away. The only person he cared to see there had no wish to see him, he was bitterly aware. And nearer at hand circumstances had shot him clear out of the orbit of all those he had known as he grew to manhood. Recalling them, he had no more in common with them now than any forthright man of action has in common with narrow visionaries. It was not their fault, he knew. They were creatures of their environment, just as he had been. But he had outgrown all faith in creeds and forms before a quickening sympathy with man, a clearer understanding of human complexities. And as he recalled them his associates had been slaves to creed and form, worshippers of the letter of Christianity while unconsciously they violated the spirit of Christ. Thompson had no wish to renew those old friendships, not even any curiosity about them. So he passed them by and went to see his aunts, who had fed and clothed him, to whom he felt a vague sort of allegiance if no particular affection.

It seemed to Thompson like reliving a very vivid sort of dream to get off a street car at a certain corner, to walk four blocks south and turn into the yard before a small brick cottage with a leafless birch rising out of the tiny grass plot and the bleached vines of sweet peas draping the fence palings.

The woman who opened the door at his knock stood before him a living link with that dreamlike past, unchanged except in minor details, a little more spare perhaps and grayer for the years he had been gone, but dressed in the same dull black, with the same spotless apron, the same bit of a white lace cap over her thin hair, the same pince-nez astride a high bony nose.

Aunt Lavina did not know him in his uniform. He made himself known. The old lady gazed at him searchingly. Her lips worked. She threw her arms about his neck, laughing and sobbing in the same breath.

"Surely, it's myself," Thompson patted her shoulder. "I'm off to the front in a few days and I thought I'd better look you up. How's Aunt Hattie?"

Aunt Lavina disengaged herself from his arms, her glasses askew, her faded old eyes wet, yet smiling as Thompson could not recall ever seeing her smile.

"What a spectacle for the neighbors," she said breathlessly. "Me, at my time of life, hugging and kissing a soldier on the front step. Do come in, Wesley. Harriet will be so pleased. My dear boy, you don't know how we have worried about you. How well you look."

She drew him into the parlor. A minute later Aunt Harriet, with less fervor than her sister perhaps, made it clear that she was unequivocally glad to see him, that any past rancor for his departure from grace was dead and buried.

They were beyond the sweeping current of everyday life, living their days in a back eddy, so to speak. But they were aware of events, of the common enemy, of the straining effort of war, and they were proud of their nephew in the King's uniform. They twittered over him like fond birds. He must stay his leave out with them.

At this pronunciamento of Aunt Lavina's a swift glance passed between the two old women. Thompson caught it, measured the doubt and uneasiness of the mutual look, and was puzzled thereby.

But he did not fathom its source for a day or two, and only then by a process of deduction. They treated him handsomely, they demonstrated an affection which moved him deeply because he had never suspected its existence. (They had always been so precise, almost harsh with him as a youngster.) But their living was intolerably meager. Disguise it with every artifice, a paucity of resource—or plain niggardliness—betrayed itself at every meal. Thompson discarded the theory of niggardliness. And proceeding thence on the first conclusion stood his two aunts in a corner—figuratively, of course—and wrung from them a statement of their financial status.

They were proud and reluctant. But Thompson had not moved among and dealt with men of the world to be baffled by two old women, so presently he was in possession of certain facts.

They had not been able to support themselves, to rear and educate him, on their income alone, and gradually their small capital had been consumed. They were about to negotiate the sale of their home, the proceeds of which would keep them from want—if they did not live too long. They tried to make light of it, but Thompson grasped the tragedy. They had been born in that brick cottage with the silver birch before the door.

"Well," he said at length, "I don't want to preempt the Lord's prerogative of providing. But I can't permit this state of affairs. I wish you had taken me into your confidence, aunties, when I was a youngster. However, that doesn't matter now. Can you live comfortably on eleven hundred dollars a year?"

Aunt Harriet held up her hands.

"My dear boy," she said, "such a sum would give us luxuries, us two old women. But that is out of the question. If we get five thousand for the place we shall have to live on a great deal less than that."

"Forget that nonsense about selling this place," Thompson said roughly. That grated on him. He felt a sense of guilt, of responsibility too long neglected. "Where I'm going I shall be supplied by the government with all I need. I've made some money. I own war-bonds sufficient to give you eleven hundred a year in interest. I'll turn them over to you. If I come back with a whole skin when the war's over, I'll be able to use the capital in a way to provide for all of us. If I don't come back, you'll be secure against want as long as you live."

He made good his word before his leave was up. He had very nearly lost faith in the value of money, of any material thing. He had struggled for money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to any man's struggle. He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons that were still a little obscure to him. Failure had made him a little bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure. Even if he had failed to achieve his heart's desire he had acquired power to make two lives content. Save that it ministered to his self-respect to know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old and helpless.

He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the port of Halifax. There was a lump in his throat because of those two old women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them. There was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed. And he would have sold his soul to feel her arms around his neck and her lips on his before he went.

"Oh, well," he muttered to himself as he watched the few harbor lights falling astern, yellow pin-points on the velvety black of the shore," this is likely to be the finish of that. I think I've burned my last bridge. And I have learned to stand on my own feet, whether she believes so or not."



CHAPTER XXVII

THOMPSON'S RETURN

"Anon we return, being gathered again Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."

On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.

Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the train below.

It was not a troop train, merely the regular express from the East. But it bore a hundred returned men, and news of their coming had been widely heralded. So the wives and sweethearts, the committees, and the curious, facile-minded crowd, were there to greet these veterans who were mostly the unfortunates of war, armless, legless men, halt and lame, gassed and shrapnel-scarred—and some who bore no visible sign only the white face and burning eyes of men who had met horror and walked with it and suffered yet from the sight. All the wounds of the war are not solely of the flesh, as many a man can testify.

From one coach there alighted a youngish man in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps. He carried a black bag. He walked a little stiffly. Beyond that he bore no outward trace of disablement. His step and manner suggested no weakness. One had to look close to discern pallor and a peculiar roving habit of the eyes, a queer tensity of the body. A neurologist, versed in the by-products of war, could have made a fair guess at this man's medical-history sheet. But the folk on the platform that night were not specialists in subtle diagnosis of the nervous system. Nor were the committees. They were male and female of those who had done their bit at home, were doing it now, welcoming their broken heroes. The sight of a man with a scarred face, a mutilated limb, elicited their superficial sympathy, while the hidden sickness of racked nerves in an unmaimed body they simply could not grasp.

So this man with the black bag and the wings on his left arm walked the length of the platform, gained the steel stairway which led to the main floor of the depot, and when he had climbed half-way stopped to rest and to look down over the rail.

Below, the mass of humanity was gravitating into little groups here and there about a khaki center. There was laughter, and shrill voices, with an occasional hysterical note. There were men surrounded by women and children, and there were others by twos and threes and singly who looked enviously at these little groups of the reunited, men who moved haltingly on their way to the city above, perfunctorily greeted, perfunctorily handshaken, and perfunctorily smiled upon by the official welcomers.

He looked at this awhile, with a speculative, pitying air, and continued his climb, passing at last through great doors into a waiting-room, a place of high, vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, beautiful tiled floors. He evaded welcoming matrons on the watch for unattached officers, to hale them into an anteroom reserved for such, to feed them sandwiches and doubtful coffee, and to elicit tales of their part in the grim business overseas. This man avoided the cordial clutches of the socially elect by the simple expedient of saying that his people expected him. He uttered this polite fiction in self-defense. He did not want to talk or be fed. He was sick of noise, weary of voices, irritated by raucous sounds. All he desired was a quiet place away from the confusion of which he had been a part for many days, to get speedily beyond range of the medley of voices and people that reminded him of nothing so much as a great flock of seagulls swooping and crying over a school of herring.

He passed on to the outer door which gave on the street where taxi drivers and hotel runners bawled their wares, and here in the entrance met the first face he knew. A man about his own age, somewhat shorter, a great deal thicker through the waist, impeccably dressed, shouldered his way through a group at the exit.

Their eyes met. Into the faces of both leaped instant recognition. The soldier pressed forward eagerly. The other stood his ground. There was a look which approached unbelief on his round, rather florid features. But he grasped the extended hand readily enough.

"By jove, it is you, Wes," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. So you're back alive, eh? You were reported killed, you know. Shot down behind the German lines. You made quite a record, didn't you? How's everything over there?"

There was a peculiar quality in Tommy Ashe's tone, a something that was neither aloofness nor friendliness, nor anything that Wes Thompson could immediately classify. But it was there, a something Tommy tried to suppress and still failed to suppress. His words were hearty, but his manner was not. And this he confirmed by his actions. Thompson said that things over there were going well, and let it go at that. He was more vitally concerned just then with over here. But before he could fairly ask a question Tommy seized his hand and wrung it in farewell.

"Pardon my rush, old man," he said. "I've got an appointment I can't afford to pass up, and I'm late already. Look me up to-morrow, will you?"

Two years is long for some things, over-brief for others. In Thompson those twenty-four months had softened certain perspectives. He had quickened at sight of Tommy's familiar face, albeit that face was a trifle grosser, more smugly complacent than he had ever expected to behold it. He could mark the change more surely for the gap in time. But Tommy had not been glad to see him. Thompson felt that under the outward cordiality.

He took up his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada Hotel. His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed. Thompson was high above the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, and the great hills across the Inlet looming duskily massive against the paler sky.

He stood by the window looking over roofs and traffic and the glow-worm light of shipping in the stream. He could smell the sea, the brown kelp bared on rocky beaches by a falling tide. And he fancied that even at that distance he could get a whiff of the fir and cedar that clothed the mountain flank.

"By God," he whispered. "It's good to be back."

He said it much as a man might breathe a prayer. All this that he saw now had lingered in his memory, had risen up to confront him as something beautiful and desirable, many times when he never expected to see it again. For it was not logical, he held, that he should survive where so many others had perished. It was just a whimsey of Fate. And he was duly and honestly grateful that it had been permitted him to outlive many gallant comrades in the perilous service of the air.

Three days and nights on a train close upon long months in hospital had left him very tired. Rest both his body and uneasy nerves craved insistently. Although it lacked some minutes of eight, he threw off his clothes and went to bed.

In the morning he rose refreshed, eager to be about, to look up men he knew, to talk of things beyond the scope of war.

But when he went out into Vancouver's highways and met people, his uniform gave them a conversational cue. And he found that here, six thousand miles from the guns, even less than among his fellows in the hangars behind the fighting line could he escape that topic. He did not want to talk about fighting and killing. He had lived those things and that was enough. So he came back to the Granada and read the papers and had his lunch and decided to look up Tommy Ashe.

He had learned casually that morning that Tommy's company had more than made good Tommy's prophecy of swift work. Tommy Ashe and Joe Hedley were rising young men.

"Oh, yes, they've got a mint," a broker he knew said to Thompson, with an unconcealed note of envy. "By gad, it's a marvel how a pair of young cubs like that can start on a shoestring and make half a million apiece in two years."

"How did they both manage to escape the draft?" Thompson asked. "I'm sure Ashe is a Class A man."

"Huh!" the broker snorted. "Necessary government undertakings. Necessary hell! All they had to do with the shipbuilding was to bank their rake-off. I tell you, Thompson, this country has supported the war in great style—but there's been a lot of raw stuff in places where you wouldn't suspect it. I'm not knocking, y' understand. This is no time to knock. But when the war's over, we've got to do some house-cleaning."

Thompson called the shipyard first. In the glow of a sunny September morning he felt that he must have imagined Tommy's attitude. He was a fair-minded man, and he gave Tommy the benefit of the doubt.

But he failed to get in touch with Tommy. A voice informed him politely that Mr. Ashe had left town that morning and would be gone several days.

Thompson hung up the receiver. For at least five minutes he sat debating with himself. Then he took it down again.

"Give me Seymour 365L," he said to Central.

"Hello."

"Is Mr. Carr at home?"

"You have the wrong number," he was answered, and he heard the connection break.

He tried again, and once more the same voice, this time impatiently, said, "Wrong number."

"Wait," Thompson said quickly. "Is this Seymour 365L, corner of Larch and First?"

"Yes."

"I beg pardon for bothering you. I'm just back from overseas and I'm rather anxious to locate Mr. Carr—Samuel A. Carr. This was his home two years ago."

"Just a minute," the feminine voice had recovered its original sweetness. "Perhaps I can help you. Hold the line."

Thompson waited. Presently he was being addressed again.

"My husband believes Mr. Carr still owns this place. We lease through an agent, however, Lyng and Salmon, Credit Foncier Building. Probably they will be able to give you the required information."

"Thanks," Thompson said.

He found Lyng and Salmon's number in the telephone book. But the lady was mistaken. Carr had sold the place. Nor did Lyng and Salmon know his whereabouts.

Tommy would know. But Tommy was out of town. Still there were other sources of information. A man like Carr could not make his home in a place no larger than Vancouver and drop out of sight without a ripple. Thompson stuck doggedly to the telephone, sought out numbers and called them up. In the course of an hour he was in possession of several facts. Sam Carr was up the coast, operating a timber and land undertaking for returned soldiers. The precise location he could not discover, beyond the general one of Toba Inlet.

They still maintained a residence in town, an apartment suite. From the caretaker of that he learned that Sophie spent most of her time with her father, and that their coming and going was uncertain and unheralded.

The latter facts were purely incidental, save one. Tommy Ashe had that morning cleared the Alert for a coastwise voyage.

Sam Carr and Sophie were up the coast. Tommy was up the coast. Thompson sat for a time in deep study. Very well, then. He, too, would journey up the coast. He had not come six thousand miles to loaf in a hotel lobby and wear out shoe leather on concrete walks.



CHAPTER XXVIII

FAIR WINDS

Within a gunshot of the heart of Vancouver lies a snug tidal basin where yachts swing to their moorings, where a mosquito fleet of motor craft lies along narrow slips, with the green woods of Stanley Park for a background. Thompson knew Coal Harbor well. He knew the slips and the boats and many of the men who owned them. He had gone on many a week-end cruise out of that basin with young fellows who looked their last on the sea when they crossed the English Channel. So he had picked up a working fund of nautical practice, a first-hand knowledge of the sea and the manner of handling small sail.

From the Granada he went straight to Coal Harbor. While the afternoon was yet young he had chartered a yawl, a true one-man craft, carrying plenty of canvas for her inches, but not too much. She had a small, snug cabin, was well-found as to gear, and was equipped with a sturdy single-cylinder gas engine to kick her along through calm and tideway.

Before six he had her ready for sea, his dunnage bag aboard, grub in the lockers, gas in the tanks, clearance from the customhouse. He slept aboard in a bunk softer than many a sleeping place that had fallen to his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half north, to clear Roger Curtis Point.

He blew through Welcome Pass at noon on the forefront of a rising gale, with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank. As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in the trough again.

But she made merry weather of it. And Thompson rode the tiller, an eye to his sheets, glorying in his mastery of the sea. It was good to be there with a clean wind whistling through taut stays, no sound but the ripple of water streaming under his lee, and the swoosh of breaking seas that had no power to harm him. Peace rode with him. His body rested, and the tension left his nerves which for months had been strung like the gut on a violin.

Between Welcome Pass and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.

He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a passage scarce twenty feet wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.

He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling rim of firs. Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes of darting fish.

Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his bunk.

Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream. He was falling, falling swiftly from a great height in the air. On the tail of his plane rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar—boom—boom—boom—boom!

Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk. The queer dream had given place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued. As he put his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the shore beyond. Back of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running lights laid dead for him. It sheered a little. The brilliant ray blinked out. He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse pipe. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

He rose with the sun. Beside him lay a sturdily built motor tug. A man leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl. Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.

Thompson emerged into the cockpit. The air was cool and he was fully dressed. At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in the military salute—the formality tempered by a friendly grin. Thompson saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have been. Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had plowed.

"It's a fine morning after a wild night," Thompson broke the conversational ice.

"It was a wild night outside and no mistake," the man replied. "We took cover about midnight—got tired of plowing into it, and wasn't too keen for wallowing through them rips off the Cape. Say, are you back long from over there?"

"Not long," Thompson replied. "I left England two weeks ago."

"How's it going?"

"We're over the hump," Thompson told him. "They're outgunned now. The Americans are there in force. And we have them beaten in the air at last. You know what that means if you've been across."

"Don't I know it," the man responded feelingly. "By the Lord, it's me that does know it. I was there when the shoe was on the other foot. I was a gunner in the Sixty-eighth Battery, and you can believe me there was times when it made us sick to see German planes overhead. Well, I hope they give Fritz hell. He gave it to us."

"They will," Thompson answered simply, and on that word their talk of the war ended. They spoke of Vancouver, and of the coast generally.

"By the way, do you happen to know whereabouts in Toba Inlet a man named Carr is located?" Thompson bethought him of his quest. "Sam Carr. He is operating some sort of settlement for returned men, I've been told."

"Sam Carr? Sure. The Squalla here belongs to him—or to the Company—and Carr is just about the Company himself."

A voice from the interior abaft the wheelhouse bellowed "Grub-pi-l-e."

"That's breakfast," the man said. "I see you ain't lighted your fire yet. Come and have a bite with us. Here, make this line fast and lay alongside."

The wind had died with the dawn, and the sea was abating. The Squalla went her way within the hour, and so did Thompson. There was still a small air out of the southeast, sufficient to give him steerageway in the swell that ran for hours after the storm. Between sail and power he made the Redonda Islands and passed between them far up the narrow gut of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that deep pass when night came on. And by late afternoon the following day he had traversed the mountain-walled length of Toba Inlet and moored his yawl beside a great boom of new-cut logs at the mouth of Toba River.

Thanks to meeting the Squalla he knew his ground. Also he knew something of Sam Carr's undertaking. The main camp was four miles up the stream. The deep fin-keel of the yawl barred him from crossing the shoals at the river mouth except on a twelve-foot tide. So he lay at the boom, planning to go up the river next morning in the canoe he towed astern in lieu of a dinghy.

He sat on his cushions in the cockpit that evening looking up at a calm, star-speckled sky. On either side of him mountain ranges lifted like quiescent saurians, heads resting on the summit of the Coast Range, tails sweeping away in a fifty-mile curve to a lesser elevation and the open waters of the Gulf. The watery floor of Toba Inlet lay hushed between, silvered by a moon-path, shimmering under the same pale rays that struck bluish-white reflections from a glacier high on the northern side. It was ghostly still at the mouth of the valley whence the Toba River stole down to salt water, with somber forests lining the beach and clinging darkly on the steep slopes. A lone light peeped from the window of a cabin on shore. The silence was thick, uncanny. But it was a comforting silence to Thompson. He felt no loneliness, he whom the lonely places had once appalled. But that was a long time ago. Sitting there thinking of that, he smiled.

No man lives by, for, or because of love alone. Nor does a woman, although the poets and romancers have very nearly led us to believe a woman does. Yet it is a vital factor upon some occasions, in many natures. There had been times in Thompson's life when the passion Sophie Carr kindled in him seemed a conflagration that must either transfigure or destroy him. It was like a volcano that slept, and woke betimes.

The last two years had rather blotted out those periods of eruption. He had given her up, and in giving up all hope of her, Sophie and everything that linked her with him from Lone Moose to the last time he saw her had grown dim, like a book read long ago and put by on the shelf. In the fierce usages of aerial warfare distracted thought, any relaxing from an eagle-like alertness upon the business in hand, meant death swift and certain. And no man, even a man whose heart is sore, wishes to die. The will-to-live is too strong in him. Pride spurs him. To come off victorious over a concrete enemy, to uphold the traditions of his race, to be of service—these things will carry any man over desperate places without faltering, if he feels them.

And Wes Thompson had experienced that sort of vision rather keenly. It had driven him, a man of peaceful tendency, to blood-drenched fields. For two years he had been in another world, in a service that demanded of a man all that was in him. He was just beginning to be conscious that for so long he had been detached from life that flowed in natural, normal channels.

He was conscious too, of a queer, impersonal manner of thinking about things and people, now that he was back. He wondered about himself. What particular motive, for instance, had driven him up here? To be sure there was the very plausible one of obeying a physician's order about living in the open, of keeping decent hours, of avoiding crowds and excitement until he was quite himself again. But he could have done that without coming to Toba Inlet.

Of course he wanted to see Sam Carr again. Also he wanted to see Sophie. Why he wished to see her was not so readily answered. He wanted to see her again, that was all—just as he had wanted to see Canada and his aunts, and the green slopes of the Pacific again. Because all these things and people were links with a past that was good and kindly by comparison with the too-vivid recent days. Yes, surely, he would be glad to see Sam Carr—and Sophie. When he recalled the last time he spoke with her he could smile a little wryly. It had been almost a tragedy then. It did not seem much now. The man who had piloted a battle-plane over swaying armies in France could smile reminiscently at being called a rabbit by an angry girl.

It was queer Sophie had never married. His thought took that turn presently. She was—he checked the years on his fingers—oh, well, she was only twenty-four. Still, she was no frail, bloodless creature, but a woman destined by nature for mating, a beautiful woman well fit to mother beautiful daughters and strong sons, to fill a lover with joy and a husband with pride.

A queer warmth flushed Thompson's cheek when he thought of Sophie this wise. A jealous feeling stabbed at him. The virus was still in his blood, he became suddenly aware. And then he laughed out loud, at his own camouflaging. He had known it all the time. And this trip it would be kill or cure, he said to himself whimsically.

Still it was odd, now he came to think of it, that Sophie had never in those years found a man quite to her liking. She had had choice enough, Thompson knew. But it was no more strange, after all, than for himself never to have looked with tender eyes on any one of the women he had known. He had liked them, but he hadn't ever got past the stage of comparing them with Sophie Carr. She had always been the standard he set to judge the others. Thompson realized that he was quite a hopeless case in this respect.

"I must be a sort of a freak," he muttered to himself when he was stowed away in his blankets. "I wonder if I could like another woman, as well, if I tried? Well, we'll see, we'll see."



CHAPTER XXIX

TWO MEN AND A WOMAN

Thompson drove his canoe around a jutting point and came upon a white cruiser swinging at anchor in an eddy. Her lines were familiar though he had not seen her in two years. In any case the name Alert in gold leaf on her bows would have enlightened him. He was not particularly surprised to find Tommy's motor boat there. He had half-expected to find Tommy Ashe hereabouts.

A man's head rose above the after companion-hatch as the canoe glided abreast.

"Is Mr. Ashe aboard?" Thompson asked.

The man shook his head.

"Went up to Carr's camp a while ago."

"When did you get in?" Thompson inquired further.

"Last night. Lost a day laying up at Blind Bay for a southeaster. Gee, she did blow."

Thompson smiled and passed on. Blind Bay was only two miles from Cape Coburn. Just a narrow neck of land had separated them that blustery night. It was almost like a race. Tommy would not be pleased to see him treading so close on his heels. Thompson felt that intuitively. All was fair in love and war. Still, even in aerial warfare, ruthless and desperate as it was, there were certain courtesies, a certain element of punctilio. Thompson had an intuition that Ashe would not subscribe to even that simple code. In fact he began to have a premonition of impending conflict as he thrust stoutly on his paddle blade. Tommy had changed. He was no longer the simple, straightforward soul with whom Thompson had fought man-fashion on the bank of Lone Moose, and with whom he had afterward achieved friendship on a long and bitter trail.

Three hundred yards past the Alert he came to a landing stage which fitted the description given by the skipper of the Squalla. Thompson hauled his canoe out on the float, gained the shore, and found a path bordering the bank. He followed this. Not greatly distant he could hear the blows of chopping, the shrill blasts of a donkey-engine whistle and the whirr of the engine itself as it shuddered and strained on its anchored skids, reeling up half a mile, more or less, of inch and a quarter steel cable, snaking a forty-foot log out of the woods as a child would haul a toothpick on the end of a string.

Before long the brush-floored forest opened on a small area of parked wood. In this pleasant place stood a square block of a house. From a tall staff fluttered the Union Jack. As Thompson came near this the door opened and a group of youngsters tumbled out pell-mell and began to frolic. Thompson looked at his watch. He had stumbled on a school in the hour of morning recess.

"Where does Mr. Carr live?" he asked one of these urchins when he got near enough to have speech with him.

The youngster pointed upstream.

"First house you come to," he said. "White house with shingles painted green. Say, mister, have you just come from the war? My dad was over there. Do you know my dad, mister?"

The boy stood gazing at him, apparently hopeful of paternal acquaintance, until he discovered that Thompson did not know his "dad." Then he darted back to join his fellows at their game.

Thompson walked on. The white house with green shingles loomed up near at hand, with a clump of flaming maples beside it. Past that stood other houses in an orderly row facing the river, and back of them were sheds and barns, and beyond the group of buildings spread a wide area of cleared land with charred stumps still dotting many an acre.

He had to enter the place he took to be Sam Carr's by the back yard, so to speak. That is, he came up from the rear, passed alongside the house—and halted abruptly, with his foot on the first of three steps rising to a roomy verandah.

He had not meant to eavesdrop, to listen to words not meant for his hearing. But he had worn the common footgear of yachtsmen, a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes, and so had come to the verandah end unseen and noiselessly. He was arrested there by the sight of two people and the mention of his own name by one of them.

Sophie was sitting on the rail, looking soberly down on the glacial gray of Toba River. There was a queer expression on her face, a mixture of protest and resignation. Tommy Ashe stood beside her. He had imprisoned one of her hands between his own and he was speaking rapidly, eagerly, passionately.

Thompson had heard without meaning to hear. And what he heard, just a detached sentence or two, shot him through with a sudden blaze of anger. He stepped up on the floor, took quickly the three strides that separated him from Tommy.

"You are nothing but a common liar," he challenged bluntly. "You know you are, when you speak of me as being dead. Is that why you scuttled out of Vancouver and hurried on here, as soon as you saw me back?"

Ashe shrank back a step. His naturally florid face grew purple. Thompson matched him glance for glance, wondering as the moments ticked off why Tommy glared and did not strike.

"Your heart has grown as flabby as your principles," he said at last contemptuously.

For the instant, in anger at a lie, in that fighting mood which puts other considerations into abeyance when it grips a man, Thompson gave no heed to Sophie—until he felt her hand on his arm and looked down into her upturned face, white and troubled, into gray eyes that glowed with some peculiar fire.

"It is really, truly you?" she said in a choked voice.

"Of course," he answered—and he could not help a little fling. "You see I am no longer a rabbit. I don't like your friend here. He has tried to sneak a march on me, and I suspect it is not the first. I feel like hurting him."

She paid not the least heed to that.

"You were officially reported dead," she went on. "Reported shot down behind the German lines a year ago."

"I know I was reported dead, and so have many other men who still live," he said gently. "I was shot down, but I escaped and flew again, and was shot down a second time and still am here not so much the worse."

Sophie slipped her hand into his and turned on Tommy Ashe.

"And you knew this?" she said slowly. "Yet you came here to me this morning—and—and—"

She stopped with a break in her voice.

"I didn't believe you were capable of a thing like that, Tommy," she continued sadly. "I'm ashamed of you. You'd better go away at once."

Ashe looked at her and then at Thompson, and his face fell. Thompson, watching him as a man watches his antagonist, saw Tommy's lips tremble, a suspicious blur creep into his eyes. Even in his anger he felt sorry for Tommy.

The next instant the two of them stood alone, Sophie's hand caught fast in his. She tried to withdraw it. The red leaped into her cheeks. But there was still that queer glow in her eyes.

Thompson looked down at the imprisoned hand.

"You'll never get that away from me again," he said whimsically. "You see, I am not a rabbit, but a man, no matter what you thought once. And when a man really wants a thing, he takes it if he can. And I want you—so—you see?"

For answer Sophie hid her hot face against his breast.

"Ah, I'm ashamed of myself too," he heard a muffled whisper. "I sent you away into that hell over there with a sneer instead of a blessing. And I was too ashamed, and a little afraid, to write and tell you what a fool I was, that I'd made a mistake and was sorry. I couldn't do anything only wait, and hope you'd come back. Didn't you hate me for my miserable holier-than-thou preachment that day, Wes?"

"Why, no," he said honestly. "It hurt like the devil, of course. You see it was partly true. I was going along, making money, playing my own little hand for all it was worth. I couldn't rush off to the front just to demonstrate to all and sundry—even to you—that I was a brave man and a patriot. You understand, don't you? It took me quite a while to feel, to really and truly feel, that I ought to go—which I suppose you felt right at the beginning. When I did see it that way—well, I didn't advertise. I just got ready and went. If you had not been out of sorts that day, I might have gone away with a kiss instead of your contempt. But I didn't blame you. Besides, that's neither here nor there, now. You're a prisoner. You can only be paroled on condition."

Sophie smiled up at him, and was kissed for her pains.

"Name the condition."

"That you love me. I've waited a long time for it."

"I've always loved you," she said gravely. "Sometimes more, sometimes less. I haven't always believed we could be happy together. Sometimes I have been positive we couldn't. But I've always measured other men by you, and none of them quite measured up. That was why it stung me so to see you so indifferent about the war. Probably if you had talked about it to me, if I had known you were thinking of going, I should have been afraid you would go, I should have been afraid for you. But you seemed always so unconcerned. It maddened me to think I cared so much for a man who cared nothing about wrongs and injustices, who could sit contentedly at home while other men sacrificed themselves. My dear, I'm afraid I'm an erratic person, a woman whose heart and head are nearly always at odds."

Thompson laughed, looking down at her with an air of pride.

"That is to say you would always rather be sure than sorry," he remarked. "Well, you can be sure of one thing, Sophie. You can't admit that you really do care for me and then run away, as you did at Lone Moose. I have managed to stand on my own feet at last, and your penalty for liking me and managing to conceal the fact these many moons is that you must stand with me."

She drew his face down to her and kissed it. Thompson held her fast.

"I can stand a lot of that," he said happily.

"You may have to," she murmured. "I am a woman, not a bisque doll. And I've waited a long time for the right man."



CHAPTER XXX

A MARK TO SHOOT AT

An hour or so later Sam Carr came trudging home with a rod in his hand and a creel slung from his shoulder, in which creel reposed a half dozen silver-sided trout on a bed of grass.

"Well, well, well," he said, at sight of Thompson, and looked earnestly at the two of them, until at last a slow smile began to play about his thin lips. "Now, like the ancient Roman, I can wrap my toga about me and die in peace."

"Oh, Dad, what a thing to say," Sophie protested.

"Figuratively, my dear, figuratively," he assured her. "Merely my way of saying that I am glad your man has come home from the war, and that you can smile again."

He tweaked her ear playfully, when Sophie blushed. They went into the house, and the trout disappeared kitchenward in charge of a bland Chinaman, to reappear later on the luncheon table in a state of delicious brown crispness. After that Carr smoked a cigar and Thompson a cigarette, and Sophie sat between them with the old, quizzical twinkle in her eyes and a smile hovering about the corners of her mouth.

"Come out and let's make the round of the works, you two," Carr suggested at last.

"You go, Wes," Sophie said. "I have promised to help a struggling young housewife with some sewing this afternoon."

So they set forth, Carr and Thompson, on a path through the woods toward where the donkey engines filled the valley with their shrill tootings and the shudder of their mighty labor. And as they went, Carr talked.

"All this was virgin forest when you went away," said he. "The first axe was laid to the timber a year ago last spring. I want you to take particular notice of this timber. Isn't it magnificent stuff? We are sending out a little aeroplane spruce, too. Not a great deal, but every little helps."

It was a splendid forest that they traversed, a level area clothed with cedar and spruce and fir, lifting brown trunks of six and seven-foot girth to a great height. And in a few minutes they came upon a falling gang at work. Two men on their springboards, six feet above the ground, plying an eight-foot saw. They stood to watch. Presently the saw ate through to the undercut, a deep notch on the leaning side, and the top swayed, moved slowly earthward. The sawyers leaped from their narrow footing. One cried "Tim-b-r-r-r." And the tree swept in a great arc, smiting the earth with a crash of breaking boughs and the thud of an arrested landslide.

Beyond that there was a logged space, littered with broken branches, stumps, tops, cut with troughs plowed deep in the soil, where the donkey had skidded out the logs. And there was the engine puffing and straining, and the steel cables running away among the trees, spooling up on the drums, whining and whistling in the iron sheaves. It was like war, Thompson thought, that purposeful activity, the tremendous forces harnessed and obedient to man—only these were forces yoked to man's needs, not to his destruction.

They lingered awhile watching the crew work, chatted with them in spare moments. Then Carr led Thompson away through the woods again, and presently took him across another stretch of stumps where men were drilling and blasting out the roots of the ravished trees, on to fields where grain and grass and root crops were ripening in the September sun, and at last by another cluster of houses to the bank of the river again. Here Carr sat down on a log, and began to fill a pipe.

"Well," he said, "what do you think of it?"

"For eighteen months' work you have made an astonishing amount of headway," Thompson observed. "This is hard land to clear."

"Yes," Carr admitted. "But it's rich land—all alluvial, this whole valley. Anything that can be grown in this latitude will grow like a village scandal here."

He lighted his pipe.

"I tried high living and it didn't agree with me," Carr said abruptly. "I have tried a variety of things since I left the North, and none of them has seemed worth while. I'm not a philanthropist. I hate charitable projects. They're so damned unscientific—don't you think so?"

Thompson nodded.

"You know that about the time you left, discharged soldiers were beginning to drift back," Carr continued. "Drift is about the word. The cripples of war will be taken care of. Their case is obvious, too obvious to be overlooked or evaded. But there are returned men who are not cripples, and still are unfit for military duty. They came back to civilian existence, and a lot of them didn't fit in. The jobs they could get were not the jobs they could do. As more and more of them came home the problem grew more and more acute. It is still acute, and I rather think it will grow more acute until the crisis comes with the end of the war and God knows how many thousands of men will be chucked into civil life, which cannot possibly absorb them again as things are going at present. It's a problem. Public-spirited men have taken it up. The government took the problem of the returned soldier into consideration. So far as I know they are still considering it. The Provincial Legislature talked—and has done nothing. The Dominion Government has talked a lot, but nothing more than temporary measures has come out of it. Nothing practical. You can't feed men with promises of after-the-war reconstruction.

"All this was apparent to me. So I talked it over with Sophie and one or two other men who wanted to do something, and we talked to returned soldiers. We couldn't do what it's the business of the country to do—and may perhaps do when the red tape is finally untangled. But we could do something, with a little brains and money and initiative. So we went at it.

"I formed a joint stock company. We secured all the timber limits in this valley. We got together a little group for a start. They were returned men, some physically handicapped, but eager to do something for themselves. A man with that spirit always makes good if he gets a chance. We put in machinery and gear, put up a small sawmill for ourselves, tore into the logging business, cleared land, built houses. You see we are quite a community. And we are a self-supporting community. Some of these men own stock in the company. Any returned men can find a place for himself here. There is room and work and security and ultimate independence here for any man willing to cooperate for the common welfare. This valley runs for miles. As fast as the land is logged off it is open for soldier entry. There is room here for five hundred families. So you see there is a lot of scope.

"It was in the nature of an experiment. There were people who sneered. And it is working out well. There is not the slightest taint of charity in it. If I used a lot of money that may be a long time coming back to me that is my own business. Everybody here pays his own way. All these men needed was backing and direction."

Carr looked away across the clearing. His glance swept the houses, and fields, and the distant woods where the logging crews labored.

"And there are valleys and valleys," he said thoughtfully; "when they are cleared and cultivated there is endless room in them for people who want elbow-room, who want to live without riding on the other fellow's back.

"Better get in with us, Wes," he said abruptly. "I'm getting old. It won't be long before I have to quit. This thing will need a pilot for a long time yet. Men will always have to have a leader. You can do good here. Big oaks, you know, from little acorns. I mean, if this project continues to achieve success, it might blaze the way for a national undertaking. We said that a country that was worth living in was worth fighting for. We are liars and cheats if we do not make it so for those who did our fighting."

"I wouldn't mind taking a hand in this game," Thompson said. "But the war is still on. If that were over—well, yes, Toba Valley looks good to me."

"You aren't out of it for good, then?"

Thompson shook his head.

Carr put his hand on Thompson's shoulder. "Ah, well," he said. "It won't be long now. You'll be back. You can put on an aerial mail service for us, as your first undertaking."

He chuckled, and they left their log and strolled back toward the house.

* * * * *

"Come and I'll show you what the valley looks like, Wes," Sophie said to him, when they had finished dinner, and Carr had his nose buried in mail just that evening arrived.

She led him a hundred yards upstream to where a footbridge slung upon steel cables spanned the Toba, crossed that and a little flat on the north side, and climbed up the flank of a slide-scarred hill until she came out on a little plateau.

"Look," she waved her hand, panting a little from the steepness of the climb.

Five hundred feet below, the valley of the Toba spread its timbered greenness, through which looped in sweeping curves the steel-gray of the river. In a great bend immediately beneath them lay the houses of the settlement, facing upon the stream. Farther along were isolated homesteads which he had not seen. Back of these spread little gardens, and the green square of cultivated fields, and beyond in greater expanse the stump-dotted land that was still in the making.

The smoke of the donkey-engines was vanished, fires grown cold with the end of the day's work. But upriver and down the spoil of axe and saw lay in red booms along the bunk. He could mark the place where he had stood that afternoon and watched a puffing yarder bunt a string of forty-foot logs into the booming-ground. He could see figures about in the gardens, and the shrill voices and laughter of children echoed up to them on the hill.

"It is a great view, and there is more in it than meets the eye," Thompson said. "Eh, little woman? The greatest war of all, the biggest struggle. One that never ends. Man struggling to subdue his environment to his needs."

Sophie smiled understandingly. She looked over the valley with a wistful air.

"Did you ever read 'The Sons of Martha'?" she asked. Do you remember these lines:

"'Not as a ladder to reach high Heaven, Not as an altar to any creed, But simple service simply given To his own kind in their common need.'"

"It is a noble mark to shoot at," Thompson said.

He fell silent. Sophie went on after a minute.

"Dad said he was going back to first principles when he began this. There are men here who have found economic salvation and self-respect, who think he is greater than any general. I'm proud of dad. He wanted to do something. What he has accomplished makes all my puttering about at what, after all, was pure charity, a puerile sort of service. I gave that up after you went away." She snuggled one hand into his. "It didn't seem worth while—nothing seemed worth while until dad evolved this."

She waved her hand again over the valley. Thompson's eyes gleamed. It was good to look at, good to think of. It was good to be there. He remembered, with uncanny, disturbing clearness of vision, things he had looked down upon from a greater height over bloody stretches in France. And he shuddered a little.

Sophie felt the small tremor run through him.

"What is it?" she whispered anxiously.

"It is beautiful, and I can appreciate its beauty all the more from seeing it with you. I'd like to take a hand in this," he said quietly. "I was just comparing it with other things—and wondering."

"Wondering what?"

"If I'll get back to this—and you," he said, with his arms around her. "Oh, well, I've got three months' leave. That's a lot."

Sophie looked at him out of troubled eyes. Her voice shook.

"You will be ordered to the front again?"

He nodded. "Very likely."

"I don't want you to go," she broke out passionately. "You mustn't. Oh, Wes, Wes!"

"Do you think I like the prospect any better?" he said tenderly. "But I am an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, and the war is not over yet. Buck up, sweetheart. I had six months' training, a year in fighting planes, six months in hospital, and barring an occasional spell of uncertain nerves, I am still as good as ever. Don't worry. I was silly to say what I thought, I suppose."

"Nevertheless, it is true," she said. "You may go again and never come back. But I suppose one must face that. Thousands of women have had to face it. Why should I be exempt?"

She wiped her eyes and smiled uncertainly.

"We shall simply have to keep that in the background. I want to forget everything but that you are here and that I'm happy," she whispered, with her arms about his neck. "I want to forget everything else—until it's time for you to go."

"Amen," Thompson replied, and kissed her, and then they went silently, hand in hand down to the swinging bridge with the sun gone to rest below the western sky-line, and dusk creeping softly up over the valley floor.

* * * * *

There will be those who, having followed so far, will desire further light. They will ask naively: Did Wes Thompson go back to the front and get killed? Did they marry and find lasting happiness?

To these curious folk who seek explicit detail, I can only point out that Wes Thompson had three months' leave which ran into November, and that to Sophie that ninety days loomed like a stay of execution. I would ask them further to recall the eleventh of November, 1918—and so the first question is duly answered.

As for the second—I am no soothsayer. I cannot foretell the future. Most certainly they married. At once—with a haste prudery and lovers of formalism might term indecent.

Whether they live happily who can say? Somewhere between the day he first looked on Sophie Carr at Lone Moose and the day he fell five thousand feet to earth in a flaming battle-plane, keeping his life by one of war's miracles, Wes Thompson lived and loved and suffered perhaps a little more than falls to the common lot. He sloughed off prejudices and cant and ignorance and narrowness in those six years as a tree sheds its foliage in autumn.

A man may come to doubt the omnipotence of God without denying his Maker. He may scorn churchly creeds and cleave to the Golden Rule. He may hate greed and oppression, and injustice and intolerance, and ruthless exploitation of man by man—and still hold firm faith in humanity, still yearn to love his neighbor as himself.

To do good, to fight hard and play fair, to love faithfully and to desire love, to go out of the world when his time should come with the knowledge of having at least tried to make it a little better for those who were in it, and for those who should come after. That was Wes Thompson's working philosophy of life—if he might be said to have a philosophy—although he certainly never formulated it in words.

He married a woman whom he loved dearly, who loved him, was proud of him, who saw life as he did—through tolerant, comprehending eyes. So if you ask whether they found real and lasting happiness I can only cite you bald facts. I cannot prophesy. But I wish my chances were as good.

THE END

* * * * * *



THE NOVELS OF TEMPLE BAILEY

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.

THE BLUE WINDOW

The heroine, Hildegarde, finds herself transplanted from the middle western farm to the gay social whirl of the East. She is almost swept off her feet, but in the end she proves true blue.

PEACOCK FEATHERS

The eternal conflict between wealth and love. Jerry, the idealist who is poor, loves Mimi, a beautiful, spoiled society girl.

THE DIM LANTERN

The romance of little Jane Barnes who is loved by two men.

THE GAY COCKADE

Unusual short stories where Miss Bailey shows her keen knowledge of character and environment, and how romance comes to different people.

THE TRUMPETER SWAN

Randy Paine comes back from France to the monotony of everyday affairs. But the girl he loves shows him the beauty in the common place.

THE TIN SOLDIER

A man who wishes to serve his country, but is bound by a tie he cannot in honor break—that's Derry. A girl who loves him, shares his humiliation and helps him to win—that's Jean. Their love is the story.

MISTRESS ANNE

A girl in Maryland teaches school, and believes that work is worthy service. Two men come to the little community; one is weak, the other strong, and both need Anne.

CONTRARY MARY

An old-fashioned love story that is nevertheless modern.

GLORY OF YOUTH

A novel that deals with a question, old and yet ever new—how far should an engagement of marriage bind two persons who discover they no longer love.

GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, NEW YORK

MARGARET PEDLER'S NOVELS

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.

TO-MORROW'S TANGLE

The game of love is fraught with danger. To win in the finest sense, it must be played fairly.

RED ASHES

A gripping story of a doctor who failed in a crucial operation—and had only himself to blame. Could the woman he loved forgive him?

THE BARBARIAN LOVER

A love story based on the creed that the only important things between birth and death are the courage to face life and the love to sweeten it.

THE MOON OUT OF REACH

Nan Davenant's problem is one that many a girl has faced—her own happiness or her father's bond.

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

How a man and a woman fulfilled a Gypsy's strange prophecy.

THE HERMIT OF FAR END

How love made its way into a walled-in house and a walled-in heart.

THE LAMP OF FATE

The story of a woman who tried to take all and give nothing.

THE SPLENDID FOLLY

Do you believe that husbands and wives should have no secrets from each other?

THE VISION OF DESIRE

An absorbing romance written with all that sense of feminine tenderness that has given the novels of Margaret Pedler their universal appeal.

WAVES OF DESTINY

Each of these stories has the sharp impact of an emotional crisis—the compressed quality of one of Margaret Pedler's widely popular novels.

GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, NEW YORK.

THE NOVELS OF

GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.

A NEW NAME

ARIEL CUSTER

BEST MAN, THE

CITY OF FIRE, THE

CLOUDY JEWEL

DAWN OF THE MORNING

ENCHANTED BARN, THE

EXIT BETTY

FINDING OF JASPER HOLT, THE

GIRL FROM MONTANA, THE

LO, MICHAEL!

MAN OF THE DESERT, THE

MARCIA SCHUYLER

MIRANDA

MYSTERY OF MARY, THE

NOT UNDER THE LAW

PHOEBE DEANE

RE-CREATIONS

RED SIGNAL, THE

SEARCH, THE

STORY OF A WHIM, THE

TOMORROW ABOUT THIS TIME

TRYST, THE

VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS, A

WITNESS, THE

GROSSET & DUNLAP, Publishers, NEW YORK

THE END