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."
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 attitude 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 passion. 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 anticipate 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 callsmal 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 theboulevardierto 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 association 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 lashing 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 shore, 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 lashings 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 space 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 scrap 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 scraped away the accumulated beard. He had allowed it to grow upon Joe Lamont's assertion 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 impassively, 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. Sam say he go—don't know when come back. Leave me house, plenty blanket, plenty grub. Next spring he say he send more grub. That all. Sophie go too."
Thompson stared at her. Perhaps he was not alone in facing something that numbed him.
"Your man go away. Not come back. You sorry? You feel bad?" he asked.
Her lips parted in a wide smile.
"Sam he good man," she said evenly. "Leave good place for me. I plenty warm, plenty to eat. I no care he go. Sam, pretty soon he get old. I want ketchum man, I ketchum. No feel bad. No."
She shook her head, as if the idea amused her. And Mr. Thompson, perceiving that a potential desertion which moved him to sympathy did not trouble her at all, turned his attention to the letter in his hand. He opened the envelope. There were half a dozen closely written sheets within.
Dear freckle-faced man: there is such a lot I want to say that I don't know where to begin. Perhaps you'll think it queer I should write instead of telling you, but I have found it hard to talk to you, hard to say what I mean in any clear sort of way. Speech is a tricky thing when half of one's mind is dwelling on the person one is trying to talk to and only the other half alive to what one is trying to express. The last time we were together it was hard for me to talk. I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't like to tell you. I wanted to talk and when I tried I blundered. Too much feeling—a sort of inward choking. And the last few days, when I have become accustomed to the idea of going away and familiar with the details of the astonishing change which has taken place in my life, you have been gone. I dare not trust to a casual meeting between here and Pachugan. I do not even know for sure that you have gone to Pachugan, or that you will come back—of course I think you will or I should not write.But unless you come back to-night you will not see me at Lone Moose. So I'm going to write and leave it with Cloudy Moon to give you when you do come.Perhaps I'd better explain a little. Dad had an old bachelor brother who—it seems—knew me when I was an infant. Somehow he and dad have kept in some sort of touch. This uncle, whom I do not remember at all, grew moderately wealthy. When he died some six months ago his money was willed equally to dad and myself. It was not wholly unexpected. Dad has often reminded me of that ultimate loophole when I would grow discontented with being penned up in these dumb forests. I suppose it may sound callous to be pleased with a dead man's gift, but regardless of the ways and means provided it seems very wonderful to me that at last I am going out into the big world that I have spent so many hours dreaming of, going out to where there are pictures and music and beautiful things of all sorts—and men.You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a preacher—if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital—I—but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you—but it was under protest—under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of that same passion stirred me—I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands—yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering: "Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me. But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate protection—as he has often made plain—to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong—I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in that sort of atmosphere.Even if you were not a minister—if you were just plain man—and I wish you were—I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (videHavelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I know myself, within certain limits—but men I do not know at all, except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately—and that alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you—and mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other.And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity. I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go.I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself—looking at it from your own peculiar angle—you will say: "She is not worth thinking about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still—knowing all this—I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you—and that is often.I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love doesn't endure to death—unless it is nurtured by association, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different. But—a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by.Sophie.P.S. Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the books he left. He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all if you want them, or any of them, any time.
Dear freckle-faced man: there is such a lot I want to say that I don't know where to begin. Perhaps you'll think it queer I should write instead of telling you, but I have found it hard to talk to you, hard to say what I mean in any clear sort of way. Speech is a tricky thing when half of one's mind is dwelling on the person one is trying to talk to and only the other half alive to what one is trying to express. The last time we were together it was hard for me to talk. I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't like to tell you. I wanted to talk and when I tried I blundered. Too much feeling—a sort of inward choking. And the last few days, when I have become accustomed to the idea of going away and familiar with the details of the astonishing change which has taken place in my life, you have been gone. I dare not trust to a casual meeting between here and Pachugan. I do not even know for sure that you have gone to Pachugan, or that you will come back—of course I think you will or I should not write.
But unless you come back to-night you will not see me at Lone Moose. So I'm going to write and leave it with Cloudy Moon to give you when you do come.
Perhaps I'd better explain a little. Dad had an old bachelor brother who—it seems—knew me when I was an infant. Somehow he and dad have kept in some sort of touch. This uncle, whom I do not remember at all, grew moderately wealthy. When he died some six months ago his money was willed equally to dad and myself. It was not wholly unexpected. Dad has often reminded me of that ultimate loophole when I would grow discontented with being penned up in these dumb forests. I suppose it may sound callous to be pleased with a dead man's gift, but regardless of the ways and means provided it seems very wonderful to me that at last I am going out into the big world that I have spent so many hours dreaming of, going out to where there are pictures and music and beautiful things of all sorts—and men.
You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a preacher—if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital—I—but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.
It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you—but it was under protest—under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of that same passion stirred me—I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands—yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering: "Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."
There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me. But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate protection—as he has often made plain—to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong—I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in that sort of atmosphere.
Even if you were not a minister—if you were just plain man—and I wish you were—I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (videHavelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I know myself, within certain limits—but men I do not know at all, except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately—and that alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you—and mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other.
And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.
Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity. I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go.
I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself—looking at it from your own peculiar angle—you will say: "She is not worth thinking about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still—knowing all this—I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you—and that is often.
I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love doesn't endure to death—unless it is nurtured by association, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.
Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different. But—a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by.
Sophie.
P.S. Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the books he left. He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all if you want them, or any of them, any time.
Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He rose to go. He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it hurt him terribly to recall. His eye fell upon the rows of Carr's books, orderly upon their shelves. The postscript, fresh in his sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books, roused him to a swelling fury of anger.
The heresies of Huxley and Darwin! The blasphemies of Tom Paine! The economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial intellects in every civilized corner of the earth. The bulky, bitter tomes of Marx and Engels! The Lorias and Leacocks, the tribe of Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual realm—and which generally leave gods and religions out of account except to analyze them as manifestations of social phenomena. Those damnable documents which he had never read, but which he had been taught to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!
He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt "good evening" to Cloudy Moon, and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat within.
The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon. The teeth of the frost nipped at him. A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow. And his anger died. That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion. She had loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil—tempted by a fortune untimely directed to her hands.
He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.
A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure. He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically—set his teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much the same.
He turned for a look at the yellow windows of Sam Carr's house. It was a hollow, empty place now, one that he never wanted to see again, like a room in which a beloved person has died and from which the body has been carried away. His eyes lingered on the dim bulk of the house, dusky black and white like a sketch in charcoal.
"Another bridge burned," he said wistfully to himself.
He faced about, crossed the dividing fringe of timber, passing near the walls of his unfinished church. A wry smile twisted his lips. That would remain, the uncompleted monument of his good intentions, the substance of an unrealizable, impractical dream.
Beyond that, as he came out into his own clearing, he saw a light in his cabin, where he had left no light. When he came to the door another toboggan lay beside his own. Strange dogs shifted furtively about at his approach. Warned by these signs he opened the door full of a curiosity as to who, in the accustomed fashion of the North, had stopped and made himself at home.
When the man sitting before the stove with his feet on the rusty front turned his head at Thompson's entrance, he saw, with a mild turn of surprise, that his visitor was Tommy Ashe.
"Hello, old man," Tommy greeted cheerfully. "How goes it?"
If it occurred to either of them that the last time they faced each other it had been in hot anger and in earnest endeavor to inflict bodily damage, they were not embarrassed by that recollection, nor did either man hold rancor. Their hands gripped sturdily. It seemed to Thompson, indeed, that a face had never been so welcome. He did not want to sit alone and think. Even apart from that he was uncommonly glad to see Tommy Ashe.
"It doesn't go much at all," he said. "As a matter of fact, I just got back to Lone Moose to-night after being away for weeks."
"Same here," Tommy responded. "I've been trapping. Heard you'd gone to Pachugan, but thought it was only for supplies. I got in to my own diggings to-night, and the shack was so infernally cold and dismal I mushed on down here on the off chance that you'd have a fire and wouldn't mind chinning awhile. Lord, but a fellow surely gets fed up with his own company, back here. At least I do."
Thompson awoke to hospitable formalities.
"Have you had supper?" he asked.
"Stopped and made tea about sundown," Tommy replied. "Thanks just the same. Gad, but it was cold this afternoon. The air fairly crackled."
"Yes," Thompson agreed. "It was very cold."
He drew a stool up to the stove and sat down. Tommy got out his pipe and began whittling shavings of tobacco off a plug.
"Did you know that Carr and his daughter have gone away?" Thompson asked abruptly.
Tommy nodded.
"Donald Lachlan—I've been trapping partners with him, y'know—Donald was home a month or so since. Told me when he came back that the Carrs were gone. I wasn't surprised."
"No?" Thompson could not forbear an inquiring inflection on the monosyllable.
"No," Tommy continued a bit wistfully. "I was talking to Carr a few days after you and I had that—that little argument of ours." He smiled. "He told me then that after fifteen years up here he was inclined to try civilization again. Mostly to give Sophie a chance to see what the world was like, I imagine. I gathered from his talk that some sort of windfall was coming his way. But I daresay you know more about it than I do."
"No," Thompson replied. "I've been away—a hundred miles north of Pachugan—for two months. I didn't know anything about it till to-night."
Tommy looked at him keenly.
"Jolted you, eh, old man?" There was a quiet sympathy in his tone.
"A little," Thompson admitted grimly. "But I'm getting used to jolts. I had no claim on—on them."
"We both lost out," Tommy Ashe said thoughtfully. "Sophie Carr is one woman in ten thousand. I think she's the most remarkable girl I ever came across anywhere. She knows what she wants, and neither of us quite measured up. She liked me too—but she wouldn't marry me. Before you came she tried to convince me of that. And I wasn't slow to see that you interested her, that as a man she gave you a good deal of thought, although your—er—your profession's one she rather makes light of. Women are queer. I didn't know but you might have taken her by storm. And then again, I rather imagined she'd back off when you got serious."
"I was a fool," Thompson muttered.
"I wouldn't say that," Tommy responded gently. "A man couldn't resist her. I've known a lot of women one way and another. I never knew one could hold a candle to her. She has a mind like a steel trap, that girl. She understood things in a flash, moods and all that. She'd make a real chum, as well as a wife. Most women aren't, y'know. They're generally just one or the other. No, I'd never call myself a fool for liking Sophie too well. In fact a man would be a fool if he didn't.
"She likes men too," Tommy went on musingly. "She knew it. I suppose she'll be friendly and curious and chummy, and hurt men without meaning to until she finds the particular sort of chap she wants. Oh, well."
"How's the trapping?"
Thompson changed the subject abruptly. He could not bear to talk about that, even to Tommy Ashe who understood out of his own experience, who had exhibited a rare and kindly understanding.
"I've been wondering if I could make a try at that. I've got to do something. I've quit the ministry."
Tommy looked at him for a second.
"Why did you get out?" he asked bluntly.
"I'm not fitted for it," Thompson returned. "I've been through hell for four months, and I've lost something—some of that sublime faith that a man must have. I'm not certain about a lot of things I have always taken for granted. I'm not certain I have an immortal soul which is worth saving, let alone considering myself peculiarly fitted to save other people's souls. I'd be like a blind man leading people with good eyes. It has come to seem to me that I've been trained for the ministry as a carpenter is trained for his trade. I can't go on feeling like that. I'm too much interested in my own personal salvation. I'm too keenly conscious of a tremendous ignorance about tremendously important things to continue setting myself up as a finger post for other men's spiritual guidance. If I stay with the church now it seems to me it will only be because I lack courage to get out and make my living along lines that won't be so easy. I'd despise myself if I did that. So I've resigned—quite a while ago, to be exact. I've been working for the H.B. two months. That's why I asked about the trapping. I've been casting about for what I'd best try next."
Tommy sat silent. When he did speak he touched very briefly on Thompson's confession of faith—or rather the lack of it.
"When a man's heart isn't in a thing," said he, "it's better for him to drop it. About the trapping, now—I don't think you'd do much at that with the season so far along. This district is pretty well covered by the natives. You'd get into difficulties right off the bat over setting traps on their territory. They have a rude sort of understanding about where their several trap lines shall run. And for some reason or other furs are getting scarce. Up where young Lachlan and I were it was pretty fair for awhile. We took some good skins. Lately we did a lot of trap-tending for nothing much. I got fed up with it. Fact is, I'm about fed up with this region. I think I'll pull out."
"I've been thinking the same thing," Thompson observed. "There isn't much here for a man."
"Not now," Tommy amended. "I'd have been gone long ago only for Sophie Carr. That was the magnet that held me. It happens that I've come to something of your pass, right now. I can't afford to loaf any longer, living off the wilderness. I had a bit of an income to keep me in loose change when I wanted a taste of towns. But that's been chopped off—probably for good. I'm strictly on my own henceforth. Every penny I spend will first have to be earned. And so," he hesitated briefly, "I've considered a move to the Coast, the Pacific, y'know. Going over the continental divide while the snow makes a dog team useful. Then I'd go down the western streams by boat—dugout canoe or bateaux, or whatever simple craft a man could make himself in the woods. Probably be the last big trip I'll get a chance at. I'll have roughed it clear across North America then, and I rather fancy winding up that way. But it's a big undertaking single-handed. I'm not so partial to an Indian for company; besides the fact that I'd have to pay him wages and dollars count with me now. A fellow likes some one he can talk to. If you've cut the cloth and are at loose ends, why not come along?"
Thompson looked at him a second.
"Do you mean it?" he asked. "I'm not what you'd call a good hand on the trail. You might find me a handicap."
Tommy grinned.
"I've got the impression you're a chap that can hold his end up," he drawled. "I've an idea we'd make a go of it, all right."
"I believe we would," Thompson asserted impulsively. "Hanged if I haven't a mind to take you at your word."
"Do," Tommy urged earnestly. "The Pacific coast has this part of the interior frazzled when it comes to opportunities. That's what we're both after, isn't it? An opportunity to get on—in plain English, to make some money? It's really simple to get up the Peace and through the mountains and on down to southeastern Alaska or somewhere in northern B.C. It merely means some hard mushing. And neither of us is very soft. You've begun to cut your eyeteeth on the wilderness. I can see that."
"Yes, I believe I have," Thompson assented, "I'm learning to take as a matter of course a good many things that I used to rather dread. I find I have a hankering to be on the move. Maybe I'll end up as a tramp. If you want a partner for that journey I'm your man."
"Shake," Tommy thrust out his hand with a boyish sort of enthusiasm. "We'll have no end of a time."
They sat up till a most unseemly hour talking over the details of that long trek. Tommy Ashe was warmed with the prospect, and some of his enthusiasm fired Thompson, proved strangely infectious. The wanderlust, which Wesley Thompson was only beginning to feel in vague stirrings, had long since become the chief motif in Tommy's life. He did not unburden himself at length. It was simply through stray references, offhand bits of talk, as they checked up resources and distances, that Thompson pieced out the four years of Ashe's wanderings across Canada—four years of careless, happy-go-lucky drifting along streams and through virgin forest, sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner; four years of hunting, fishing, and camping all the way from Labrador to Lone Moose. Tommy had worked hard at this fascinating game. He confessed that with revenue enough to keep him going, to vary the wilderness with an occasional month in some city, he could go on doing that sort of thing with an infinite amount of pleasure.
But something had gone wrong with the source of the funds that came quarterly. Tommy did not appear to regret that. But he realized its significance. He would have to work. Having to work he meant to work as he had played, with all his heart and to some purpose. He had an ambitious idea of pressing Fortune to her lair. He was young and very sanguine. His cheerful optimism was the best possible antidote for the state of mind in which he found Thompson.
They went to bed at last. With breakfast behind them they went up to Ashe's cabin and brought down to Thompson's a miscellaneous collection of articles that Tommy had left behind when he went trapping. Tommy had four good dogs in addition to the brown retriever. By adding Thompson's pair and putting all their goods on one capacious toboggan they achieved a first-class outfit.
In the North when a man sets out on a winter journey, or any sort of journey, in fact, his preparations are speedily made. He loads his sled, hitches his dogs, takes his rifle in hand, hooks his toes in his snowshoes and goes his way.
This is precisely the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed. Having decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in the deep of winter across a primitive land.
To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a capacity load of grub. West of the lake head they bore across a low, wooded delta and debouched upon Peace River's frozen surface.
After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern Lights, that strange glow that flashes and shimmers above the Pole, now a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen. Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that those cold white spaces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with flowers.
But there were compensations. Two men cannot eat out of the same pot—figuratively speaking—sleep huddled close together for the warmth that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months—no two men born of woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without acquiring a positive attitude toward each other. They achieve a contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friendship. It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game fair and square.
So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges—not in the depths—of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard enough in order to succeed. They had conquered an ominous stretch of wilderness. They would conquer with equal facility whatever barriers they found between them and fortune.
The sweep of Spring's progress across the land found them west of the Coast Range by May, in a wild and forbidding region where three major streams—the Skeena, the Stikine, and the Naas—take their rise. For many days their advance was through grim canyons, over precipitous slopes, across glaciers, bearing always westward, until the maps with which Tommy Ashe was equipped showed them they were descending the Stikine. Here they rested in a country full of game animals and birds and fish, until the height of the spring torrents had passed. During this time they fashioned a canoe out of a cedar tree, big enough to carry them and the dogs which had served so faithfully as pack animals over that last mountainous stretch. The Stikine was swift and forbidding, but navigable. Thus at last, in the first days of the salmon run, they came out upon tidewater, down to Wrangel by the sea.
There was in Thompson's mind no more thought of burned bridges, no heartache and empty longing, only an eagerness of anticipation. He had come a long way, in a double sense. He had learned something of the essential satisfaction of striving. A tough trail had served to toughen the mental and moral as well as the physical fiber of him. He did not know what lay ahead, but whatever did so lie would never dismay him again as things had done in the past, in that too-recent vivid past.
He was quite sure of this. His mood was tinctured with recklessness when he summed it up in words. A man must stand on his own feet!
He would never forget that sentence. It was burned into his memory. He was beginning to understand what Sophie Carr meant by it. Looking backward he could see that he never had stood on his own feet like a man. Always he had required props. And they had been forthcoming from the time the prim spinster aunts took his training in hand until he came to Lone Moose self-consciously, rather flauntingly, waving the banner of righteousness. Thompson could smile wryly at himself now. He could see the unreckonable element of chance functioning largely in a man's life.
And in the meantime he went about Wrangel looking for a job!
Being in a town that was at once a frontier camp and a minor seaport, and being there at a season when the major industry of salmon-packing was at its height, the search of Tommy Ashe and Thompson for a job was soon ended. They were taken on as cannery hands—a "hand" being the term for unskilled laborers as distinguished from fishermen, can machine experts, engineers and the like. As such they were put to all sorts of tasks, work that usually found them at the day's end weary, dirty with fish scales and gurry, and more than a little disgusted. But they were getting three dollars and a half a day, and it was practically clear, which furnished a strong incentive to stick it out as long as the season lasted—a matter of two more months.
"By that time," said Tommy Ashe, "we'll have enough coin to venture into fresh fields. My word, but we do earn this money. It's the nastiness I object to, not the work. I shan't forget this first hundred dollars I've earned by the sweat of my manly brow."
In the fullness of time the salmon run came to an end. The pack being finished the hands were paid off. In company with half a hundred others, Ashe and Thompson were shipped from the Suchoi Bay Canneries back to Wrangel again.
In Wrangel, before they had been there four hours, Thompson got the offer of work in a pile camp. He took his prospective job under advisement and hunted up Tommy Ashe. Tommy dangled his legs over the edge of the bed in their room, and considered the matter.
"No," he said finally. "I don't believe I'll take it on. I think I'll go down to Vancouver. I'm about two hundred dollars strong, and I don't really see anything but a poor sort of living in this laboring-man stuff. I'm going to try some business proposition. I've got a pretty fair acquaintance with motor cars. I might be able to get in on the selling end of the game, and there is good money in that in the way of commissions. I know some people there who should be able to show me the ropes. In a big live seaport like that there must be chances. Yes, I think I'll try Vancouver. You'd better come too, Wes."
Thompson shook his head. He knew nothing of business. He had no trade. For a time—until he came face to face with an opportunity he could recognize as such—he shrank from tackling a city. He had not quite Tommy's confidence in himself.
"No," he said. "I'd like to—but I don't believe I'd make good. And I don't want to get in a position where I'd have to be looking for somebody to throw me a life line. I don't seem to mind common hard work so much. I don't imagine I could jump right into a town and be any better off than I would be here. When I get a little more money ahead I'll be tempted to take a chance on a city. But not yet."
From this position Tommy's persuasion failed to move him. Tommy was earnest enough, and perfectly sincere in promising to see him through. But that was not what Thompson wanted. He was determined that in so far as he was able he would make his own way unaided. He wanted to be through with props forever. That had become a matter of pride with him. He went back and told the pile-camp boss that he would report in two days.
A southbound steamer sailed forty-eight hours later. She backed away from the Wrangel wharf with Tommy waving his hand to his partner on the pierhead. Thompson went back to their room feeling a trifle blue, as one does at parting from a friend. But it was not the moodiness of uncertainty. He knew what he was going to do. He had simply got used to Tommy being at his elbow, to chatting with him, to knowing that some one was near with whom he could try to unravel a knotty problem or hold his peace as he chose. He missed Tommy. But he knew that although they had been partners over a hard country, had bucked a hard trail like men and grown nearer to each other in the stress of it, they could not be Siamese twins. His road and Tommy's road was bound to fork. A man had to follow his individual inclination, to live his own life according to his lights. And Tommy's was for town and the business world, while his—as yet—was not.
So for the next four months Thompson lived and worked on a wooded promontory a few miles north of Wrangel, very near the mouth of the river down which he and Tommy Ashe had come to the sea. He was housed with thirty other men in a bunkhouse of hand-split cedar; he labored every day felling and trimming tall slender poles for piling that would ultimately hold up bridges and wharves. The crew was a cosmopolitan lot so far as nationality went. In addition they were a tougher lot than Thompson had ever encountered. He never quite fitted in. They knew him for something of a tenderfoot, and they had not the least respect for his size—until he took on and soundly whipped two of them in turn before the bunkhouse door, with the rest of the thirty, the boss and the cook for spectators. Thompson did not come off scathless, but he did come off victor, although he was a bloody sight at the finish. But he fought in sheer desperation, because otherwise he could not live in the camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different attitude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights would be respected.
Along with this incidental light upon the ways of his fellow working-men he learned properly how to swing an axe; he grew accustomed to dragging all day on the end of a seven-foot crosscut saw, to lift and strain with a cant hook. The hardening process, begun at Lone Moose, continued unceasingly. If mere physical hardihood had been his end, he could easily have passed for a finished product. He could hold his own with those broad-shouldered Swedes and Michigan loggers at any turn of the road. And that was a long way for a man like Thompson to come in the course of twelve months. If he could have been as sure of a sound, working philosophy of life as he was of the fitness of his muscles he would have been well satisfied. Sometimes it was a puzzle to him why men existed, why the will to live was such a profound force, when living was a struggle, a vexation, an aimless eating and sleeping and working like a carthorse. Where was there any plan, any universal purpose at all?
Having never learned dissipation as a form of amusement, nor having yet been driven to it by the sheer deadliness of incessant, monotonous labor, Thompson was able to save his money. When he went to Wrangel once a month he got a bath, a hair-cut, and some magazines to read, perhaps an article or two of necessary clothing. That was all his financial outlay. He came back as clear-eyed as when he left, with the bulk of his wages in his pocket, where some of his fellows returned with empty pockets and aching heads.
Wherefore, when the winter snows at last closed down the pile camp Thompson had accumulated four hundred dollars. Also he had made an impression on the contractor by his steadiness, to such an extent that the man offered him a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to come back and take charge of a similar camp in the spring. But Thompson, like Tommy Ashe, had grown troubled with the wandering foot. The money in hand gave him security against want in strange places. He would not promise to be on hand in the spring. Like Tommy, he had a notion to try town, to see for himself what opportunity town afforded. And he pitched on Vancouver, not alone because Tommy Ashe was there, but because it was the biggest port on Canada's western coast. He had heard once from Tommy. He was a motor-car salesman now, and he was doing well. But Tommy's letter was neither long nor graphic in its descriptions. It left a good deal of Vancouver to Thompson's imagination. However, like the bear that went over the mountain, Thompson thought he would go and see what he could see.
Wrangel lies well within the Inside Passage, that great waterway which is formed between the mainland and a chain of islands that sweeps from Cape Flattery in the south to the landward end of the Aleutians. All the steamers that ply between Puget Sound and Skagway take that route. Seldom do the vessels plying between southern ports and the far beaches of Nome come inside. They are deep-sea craft, built for offshore work. So that one taking a steamer at Wrangel can travel in two directions only, north to Skagway, south to Puget Sound.
The booking facilities at Wrangel are primitive, to say the least. When Thompson inquired about southbound passage, he was told to go down and board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at eleven that night. So he took all his meager belongings, which he could easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor's ditty-bag, and went down half an hour before sailing time. There seemed no one to bar his passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled, clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.
There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in mackinaws and heavy laced boots. Thompson, habitually diffident, asked no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner of the North. He laid down his bag and roll, sat awhile listening to the shift of feet and the clatter of cargo winches on deck and pierhead. Then, growing drowsy, he stretched himself on a cushioned seat with his bag for a pillow and fell asleep.
He woke with an odd sensation of his bed dropping out from under him. Coming out of a sound slumber he was at first a trifle bewildered, but instinctively he grasped a stanchion to keep himself from sliding across the floor as the vessel took another deep roll. The smoking room was deserted. He gained his feet and peered out of a window. All about him ran the uneasy heave of the sea. Try as he would his eyes could pick up no dim shore line. And it was not particularly dark, only a dusky gloom spotted with white patches where a comber reared up and broke in foam. He wondered at the ship's position. It did not conform to what he had been told of the Inside Passage.
And while he was wondering a ship's officer in uniform walked through the saloon. He cast a quick glance at Thompson and smiled slightly.
"This outside roll bother you?" he inquired pleasantly.
"Outside?" Thompson grasped at the word's significance. "Are we going down outside?"
"Sure," the man responded. "We always do."
"I wonder," Thompson began to sense what he had done, "I say—isn't this theRoanokefor Seattle?"
The mate's smile deepened. "Uh-uh," he grinned. "This is theSimoon, last boat of the season from outside northern points. We had to put into Wrangel, which we rarely do. TheRoanokeberthed right across the wharf from us. Got aboard us by mistake, did you?"
Thompson nodded.
"Well," the officer continued, "sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home. We don't touch this side the Golden Gate. So you may as well see the purser when he gets up and have him assign you a berth. It's pretty near daylight now."
He nodded and went on. Thompson, holding fast, getting his first uncomfortable experience of the roll and recovery of a ship in a beam sea, made his way out on the after deck. Holding on the rail he peered over the troubled water that was running in the open mouth of Dixon Entrance, beyond which lay the vast breadth of the Pacific, an unbroken stretch to the coast of Japan.
Again Chance was playing the deuce with his calculations. For a few minutes he felt uncommonly irritated. He had not started for San Francisco. He did not want to go to San Francisco. Still—what was the odds? San Francisco was as good as any other town. He shrugged his shoulders, and feeling his way to a coiled hawser sat down in the bight of it to contend with the first, faint touch of seasickness.