Burned Bridges Part 31

"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 n.o.ble 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sionately. "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 navely: 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 G.o.d 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

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.

PEAc.o.c.k 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 c.o.c.kADE