Burned Bridges Part 30

"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 x.x.x

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 gra.s.s.

"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 a.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 gra.s.s and root crops were ripening in the September sun, and at last by another cl.u.s.ter 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 lat.i.tude 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 d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d 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.