Burned Bridges Part 7

A SLIP OF THE AXE

Mr. Thompson gradually became aware of a change in the season. The calendar lost a good deal of its significance up there, partly because he had no calendar and partly because one day was so much a duplicate of another that the flitting of time escaped his notice. But he became conscious that the days grew shorter, the nights a shade more cool, and that the atmosphere was taking on that hazy, mellow stillness which makes Indian Summer a period of rare beauty in the North. He took serious stock of elapsed time then, and found to his surprise that it was September the fifteenth.

He had not accomplished much. The walls of his church stood about the level of his head. It grew increasingly difficult for him alone to hoist the logs into place. The door and window s.p.a.ces were out of square.

Without help he did not see how he was going to rectify these small errors and get the roof on. Even after it should be roofed, the cracks c.h.i.n.ked and daubed with mud, the doors and windows in place--what then?

He would still lack hearers for the message which he daily grew a little more doubtful of his ability to deliver. A native streak of stubbornness kept him studying the language along with his daily tussle with the axe and saw. But the rate of his progress was such that he pessimistically calculated that it would take him at least two years before he could preach with any degree of understanding in the Athabascan tongue.

So far he had never gone the length of candidly asking himself whether by then it would be a task he could put his heart into, if he were even fitted for such a work, or if it were a useful and worthy task if he were gifted with a fitness for it. He had been taught that preaching the gospel was a divinely appointed function. He had not questioned that.

But he had now a lively sense of difficulties. .h.i.therto unreckoned, and an ill-stifled doubt of the good that might accrue. His blank ignorance of the salient points of human contact, of why men work and play, why they love and fight and marry and bend all their energies along certain given lines until they grow old and gray and in the end cease to be, only served to bewilder him. His a.s.sociation with Tommy Ashe and with Carr and Carr's daughter--especially with Carr's daughter--further accentuated the questioning uncertainty of his mind.

But that was all--merely an uncertainty which he tried to dissipate by prayer and stern repression of smoldering doubts. At the same time while he decried and resented their outspoken valuation of material considerations he found himself constantly subject to those material factors of daily living.

The first of these was food. When Mr. Thompson outfitted himself for that spiritual invasion of Lone Moose he brought in four months'

supplies. He discovered now that his supply of certain articles was not so adequate as he had been told it would be. Also he had learned from Carr and Lachlan that if a man wintered at Lone Moose it was well to bring in a winter's grub before the freeze-up--the canoe being a far easier mode of transport than a dog-team and sled.

So Thompson stopped his building activities long enough to make a trip to Pachugan. He got Lachlan's oldest son to go with him. His quarterly salary was due, and he had a rather reluctant report of his work to make. With the money he would be able to replenish his stock of sugar and tea and dried fruit and flour. He decided too that he would have to buy a gun and learn to use it as the source of his meat supply.

His sublime confidence in the organization which had sent him there suffered a decided shock when he reached Fort Pachugan, and found no remittance awaiting him. There was a letter from the Board secretary breathing exhortations which sounded rather hollow in conjunction with the absence of funds. Mr. Thompson, for the first time in his career, found himself badly in need of money, irritated beyond measure by its lack, painfully cognizant of its value. But he was too diffident to suggest a credit on the strength of the cheque which, upon reflection, he decided was merely delayed in the more or less uncertain mails. He could make shift with what he had for another month. Nor did he mention this slight difficulty to MacLeod.

That gentleman had greeted him heartily enough.

"Man, but ye look as if the country agreed wi' you," he observed, after an appraising glance. "How goes the good work at Lone Moose?"

"There are difficulties," Thompson responded with an unintentional touch of ambiguity. "But I daresay I'll manage in time to overcome them."

He discovered in himself a disinclination to talk about his labors in that field.

MacLeod smiled and forbore to press the subject. There were sundry parcels for Sam Carr, a letter or two, and a varied a.s.sortment of magazines. Thompson took these, after tarrying overnight at the post, and started home, refusing MacLeod's cordial invitation to stay over a day or two. He would be back again when the next mail was due, a matter of four or five weeks. And late that same evening, by dint of a favorable breeze that kept the canoe flying, and some hard pulling up Lone Moose Creek, Thompson and the breed boy reached home.

Young Lachlan went off to his cabin. Mr. Thompson conscientiously lugged the a.s.sortment of parcels and magazines over to Sam Carr's house, duly delivered the three letters to Carr himself, and--for reasons that he could not define as anything but an unwarrantable access of shyness--declining the first invitation he had ever received to break bread at Carr's table, hurried back to his own primitive quarters.

Perhaps the fact that Sophie Carr, curled up in a big chair, smiled at him in a way that made his pulses quicken had something to do with his hasty retreat. He was wary of the impulses and emotions she never failed to stir in him when he was near her. There were times when he suspected that she was aware of this power--which in his nave conception of women he believed almost uncanny in her--and that she amused herself by exercising it upon him. And he resented that.

So he did not stay long enough to observe Carr lay two of his letters on the table after a brief glance, and sit looking fixedly at the third, which by the length of envelope and thickness of enclosure might conceivably have contained some doc.u.ment of a legal or official nature.

Carr looked at this letter a long time before he tore it open. He took a still longer time to peruse its contents. He sat for several minutes thereafter turning the sheets over and over in his lean fingers, until in fact he became aware that his daughter's eyes were fixed on him with a lively curiosity in their gray depths.

"What is it, Dad?" she asked, as he tucked envelope and foolscap pages into the inside pocket of his coat.

"Oh, nothing much," he said shortly.

But he leaned back in his chair and immediately became absorbed in thought that accentuated the mult.i.tude of fine lines about his eyes and drew his lips together in a narrow line. Sophie sat regarding him with a look of wonder.

This trifling incident, naturally, did not come under the notice of Mr.

Thompson. Conceivably he would not have noticed had he been present, nor have been in any degree interested.

He was, as a matter of fact, fully occupied at that precise moment with the painful and disagreeable consequences of attempting to split kindling by lantern light. To be specific the axe had glanced and cut a deep gash in one side of his foot.

At about the particular moment in which Sam Carr leaned back in his chair and fell into that brown study of a matter that was to have a far-reaching effect, Mr. Thompson was seated on his haunches on his cabin floor, his hands stained with blood and a considerable trail of red marking his progress from woodpile to cabin. His face was white, and his hands rather shaky by the time he finished binding up the wound. The cut stung and burned. When he essayed to move he found himself quite effectually crippled.

For the first time in his twenty-five years of carefully directed existence Mr. Thompson swore a loud, round, Anglo-Saxon oath. Whether this relieved his pent-up feelings or not he appeared to suffer no remorse for the burst of profanity. Instead, he rose and limped painfully about the building of a fire and the preparation of his supper.

CHAPTER VIII

--AND THE FRUITS THEREOF

Mr. Thompson slept fitfully that night. A hard day's paddling had left him tired and sleepy, but the swarm of pain-devils in his slashed foot destroyed his rest. When he got up at daylight and examined the wound again he found himself afflicted with a badly swollen foot and ankle, and a steady dull ache that extended upward past the knee. He was next to helpless since every movement produced the most acute sort of pain--sufficiently so that when he had made shift to get some breakfast he could scarcely eat. In the course of his experiments in self-aid he discovered that to lie flat on his back with the slashed foot raised higher than his body gave a measure of ease. So he adopted this position and stoically set out to endure the hurt. He lay in that position the better part of the day--until, in fact, four in the afternoon brought Sam Carr, shotgun in hand, to his door.

Carr had seldom been in the cabin. This evening, for some reason, he put his head in the door, and whistled softly at sight of Thompson's bandaged foot c.o.c.ked up on a folded overcoat.

"Well, well," he said, standing his gun against the door casing and coming in. "What have you done to yourself now?"

"Oh, I cut my foot with the axe last night, worse luck," Thompson responded petulantly.

"Bad?" Carr inquired.

"Bad enough."

"Let me see it," Carr suggested. "It's a long way to a sawbones, and Providence never seems quite able to cope with germs of infection. Have you any sort of antiseptic dressing on it?"

Thompson shook his head. He would not confess that the pain and swelling had caused him certain misgivings, brought to his mind uneasily a good deal that he had read and heard of blood-poisoning from cuts and scratches. He was secretly glad to let Carr undo the rude bandage and examine the wound. A man who had spent fifteen years in the wilderness must have had to cope with similar cases.

"You did give yourself a nasty nick and no mistake," Carr observed. "You won't walk on that foot comfortably for two or three weeks. Just grazed a bone. No carbolic, no peroxide, or anything like that, I suppose?"

Thompson shook his head. He had not reckoned on cuts and bruises. Carr put back the wrapping and sat whittling shavings of tobacco off a brown plug, while Thompson got up, hopped on one foot across to the stove and began to lay a fire. He had eaten nothing since morning, and was correspondingly hungry. In addition, a certain unministerial pride stirred him to action. He was ashamed to lie supinely enduring, to seem helpless before another man's eyes. But the effort showed in his face.

Carr lit his pipe and watched silently. His gaze took in every detail of the cabin's interior, of Thompson's painful movements, of the poorly cooked remains of breakfast that he was warming up.

"You'll put that foot in a bad way if you try to use it much," he said at last. "The best thing you can do is to come home with me and lie around till you can walk again. I've got stuff to dress it properly.

Think you can hobble across the clearing if I make you a temporary crutch?"

Thompson at first declined to be such a source of trouble. He was grateful enough, but reluctant. Carr, however, went about it in a way that permitted nothing short of a boorish refusal, and presently Mr.

Thompson found himself, with a crutch made of a forked willow, crossing the meadow to Sam Carr's house.

His instincts had more or less subconsciously warned him that it would not be well for his peace of mind or the good of his soul to be in intimate daily contact with Sophie Carr. But his general inability to cope with emergencies--which was patent enough to a practical man if not wholly so to himself--culminating in this misadventure with a sharp axe, had brought about that very circ.u.mstance.

He had not looked for such a kindly office on the part of Sam Carr. That individual's caustic utterances and critical att.i.tude toward theology had not forewarned Thompson that sympathy and kindliness were fundamental attributes with Sam Carr. If he had an acid tongue his heart was tender enough. But Carr was no sentimentalist. When he had bestowed Thompson in a comfortable room and painstakingly dressed the injured foot he left his patient much to his own devices--and to the ministrations of his daughter.

As a consequence, while the wound in his foot healed rapidly, Mr.

Thompson suffered a more grievous injury to his heart. Sophie Carr affected him much as strong drink affects men with weak heads. The more he saw of her the more he desired to see, to feast his eyes on her loveliness--and invariably, when alone, to berate himself for such a weakness. He had never dreamed that a man could feel that way about a woman. He did not see why he, of all men, should succ.u.mb to the fascination of a girl like Sophie Carr.

But the emotion was undeniable. Perhaps Sophie would have been surprised if she could have known the amount of repression Mr. Thompson gradually became compelled to practice when she was with him.

That was frequently enough. They were all good to him. From Carr's Indian woman--who could, he now learned, speak pa.s.sable English--down to the sloe-eyed youngest Carr of mixed blood, they accepted him as one of themselves. However, it happened to be Sophie who waited on him most, who impishly took the greatest liberties with him, who was never averse to an argument on any subject Thompson cared to touch. He had never supposed there was a normal being with views on religion and economics, upon any manifestation of human problems, with views so contrary to his own. The maddening part of it was her ability to cite facts and authorities whose existence he was not aware of, to confute him with logic and compel him to admit that he did not know, that much of what he a.s.serted so emphatically was based on mere belief rather than demonstrable fact or rational processes of arriving at a conclusion.