Burned Bridges Part 11

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

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

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

"Good," MacLeod grunted. "An' when ye go back tae the preachin' ye'll find the experience has done ye no harm. Now, we'll go over the seetuation in detail to-morrow, an' the next day ye'll start north, wi'

Joe Lamont. The freeze-up's due, an' it's quicker an' easier travelin'

by canoe than wi' dogs."

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

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

His eyes had lost the old, mild look. They were hard and alert, blue mirrors of an unquiet spirit. There was a different set to his lips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

A FORTUNE AND A FLITTING

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

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

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

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

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

In those long nights at the Porcupine he had done a good deal of pondering over his next move. He had not yet come to a fixed decision.

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

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

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

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

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

Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was lonely still--but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the woodsman to his woods, and the _boulevardier_ to his beloved avenues!

Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on a man's soul.

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

When he had tied the last las.h.i.+ng he shook hands with MacLeod and set out.

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

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

He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The cabin sat squat and brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green.

Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some one laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

Thompson put back the hood of his parka and laid off his mitts. The room was hot by comparison with outdoors. He looked about. Carr's woman motioned him to a chair. Opposite him the youngest Carr squatted like a brown Billiken on a wolfskin. Every detail of that room was familiar.

There was the heavy, homemade chair wherein Sam Carr was wont to sit and read. Close by it stood Sophie's favorite seat. A nickel-plated oil lamp gave forth a mellow light under a pale birch-bark shade. But he missed the old man with a pipe in his mouth and a book on his knee, the gray-eyed girl with the slow smile and the sunny hair.

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

The Indian woman shook her head.

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

She crossed the room to a shelf above the serried volumes of Sam Carr's library, lifted the cover of a tin tobacco box and took out a letter.

This she gave to Thompson. Then she sat down cross-legged on the wolfskin beside her youngster, looking up at her visitor impa.s.sively, her moon face void of expression, except perhaps the mildest trace of curiosity.

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

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

"Long time. Two moon," she replied matter-of-factly. "Dunno where go.