Thompson received his preliminary training in a camp not greatly distant from his birthplace and the suburban Toronto home where the spinster aunts still lived. He did not go to see them at first, for two reasons. Primarily, because he had written them a full and frank account of himself when he got out of the ruck and achieved success in San Francisco. Their reply had breathed an open disappointment, almost hostility, at his departure from the chosen path. They made it clear that in their eyes he was a prodigal son for whom there would never be any fatted calf. Secondly, he did not go because there was seldom anything but short leave for a promising aviator.
Thompson speedily proved himself to belong in that category. There resided in him those peculiar, indefinable qualities imperative for mastery of the air. Under able instruction he got on fast, just as he had got on fast in the Henderson shops. And by the time the first fall snows whitened the ground, he was ready for England and the finishing stages of aërial work antecedent to piloting a fighting plane. He had practically won his official wings.
With his orders to report overseas he received ten days' final leave. And a sense of duty spurred him to look up the maiden aunts, to brave their displeasure for the sake of knowing how they fared. There was little other use to make of his time. The Pacific Coast was too far away. The only person he cared to see there had no wish to see him, he was bitterly aware. And nearer at hand circumstances had shot him clear out of the orbit of all those he had known as he grew to manhood. Recalling them, he had no more in common with them now than any forthright man of action has in common with narrow visionaries. It was not their fault, he knew. They were creatures of their environment, just as he had been. But he had outgrown all faith in creeds and forms before a quickening sympathy with man, a clearer understanding of human complexities. And as he recalled them his associates had been slaves to creed and form, worshippers of the letter of Christianity while unconsciously they violated the spirit of Christ. Thompson had no wish to renew those old friendships, not even any curiosity about them. So he passed them by and went to see his aunts, who had fed and clothed him, to whom he felt a vague sort of allegiance if no particular affection.
It seemed to Thompson like reliving a very vivid sort of dream to get off a street car at a certain corner, to walk four blocks south and turn into the yard before a small brick cottage with a leafless birch rising out of the tiny grass plot and the bleached vines of sweet peas draping the fence palings.
The woman who opened the door at his knock stood before him a living link with that dreamlike past, unchanged except in minor details, a little more spare perhaps and grayer for the years he had been gone, but dressed in the same dull black, with the same spotless apron, the same bit of a white lace cap over her thin hair, the same pince-nez astride a high bony nose.
Aunt Lavina did not know him in his uniform. He made himself known. The old lady gazed at him searchingly. Her lips worked. She threw her arms about his neck, laughing and sobbing in the same breath.
"Surely, it's myself," Thompson patted her shoulder. "I'm off to the front in a few days and I thought I'd better look you up. How's Aunt Hattie?"
Aunt Lavina disengaged herself from his arms, her glasses askew, her faded old eyes wet, yet smiling as Thompson could not recall ever seeing her smile.
"What a spectacle for the neighbors," she said breathlessly. "Me, at my time of life, hugging and kissing a soldier on the front step. Do come in, Wesley. Harriet will be so pleased. My dear boy, you don't know how we have worried about you. How well you look."
She drew him into the parlor. A minute later Aunt Harriet, with less fervor than her sister perhaps, made it clear that she was unequivocally glad to see him, that any past rancor for his departure from grace was dead and buried.
They were beyond the sweeping current of everyday life, living their days in a back eddy, so to speak. But they were aware of events, of the common enemy, of the straining effort of war, and they were proud of their nephew in the King's uniform. They twittered over him like fond birds. He must stay his leave out with them.
At this pronunciamento of Aunt Lavina's a swift glance passed between the two old women. Thompson caught it, measured the doubt and uneasiness of the mutual look, and was puzzled thereby.
But he did not fathom its source for a day or two, and only then by a process of deduction. They treated him handsomely, they demonstrated an affection which moved him deeply because he had never suspected its existence. (They had always been so precise, almost harsh with him as a youngster.) But their living was intolerably meager. Disguise it with every artifice, a paucity of resource—or plain niggardliness—betrayed itself at every meal. Thompson discarded the theory of niggardliness. And proceeding thence on the first conclusion stood his two aunts in a corner—figuratively, of course—and wrung from them a statement of their financial status.
They were proud and reluctant. But Thompson had not moved among and dealt with men of the world to be baffled by two old women, so presently he was in possession of certain facts.
They had not been able to support themselves, to rear and educate him, on their income alone, and gradually their small capital had been consumed. They were about to negotiate the sale of their home, the proceeds of which would keep them from want—if they did not live too long. They tried to make light of it, but Thompson grasped the tragedy. They had been born in that brick cottage with the silver birch before the door.
"Well," he said at length, "I don't want to preëmpt the Lord's prerogative of providing. But I can't permit this state of affairs. I wish you had taken me into your confidence, aunties, when I was a youngster. However, that doesn't matter now. Can you live comfortably on eleven hundred dollars a year?"
Aunt Harriet held up her hands.
"My dear boy," she said, "such a sum would give us luxuries, us two old women. But that is out of the question. If we get five thousand for the place we shall have to live on a great deal less than that."
"Forget that nonsense about selling this place," Thompson said roughly. That grated on him. He felt a sense of guilt, of responsibility too long neglected. "Where I'm going I shall be supplied by the government with all I need. I've made some money. I own war-bonds sufficient to give you eleven hundred a year in interest. I'll turn them over to you. If I come back with a whole skin when the war's over, I'll be able to use the capital in a way to provide for all of us. If I don't come back, you'll be secure against want as long as you live."
He made good his word before his leave was up. He had very nearly lost faith in the value of money, of any material thing. He had struggled for money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to any man's struggle. He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons that were still a little obscure to him. Failure had made him a little bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure. Even if he had failed to achieve his heart's desire he had acquired power to make two lives content. Save that it ministered to his self-respect to know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old and helpless.
He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the port of Halifax. There was a lump in his throat because of those two old women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them. There was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed. And he would have sold his soul to feelherarms around his neck and her lips on his before he went.
"Oh, well," he muttered to himself as he watched the few harbor lights falling astern, yellow pin-points on the velvety black of the shore," this is likely to be the finish ofthat. I think I've burned my last bridge. And I have learned to stand on my own feet, whether she believes so or not."
"Anon we return, being gathered again
Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."
On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.
Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the train below.
It was not a troop train, merely the regular express from the East. But it bore a hundred returned men, and news of their coming had been widely heralded. So the wives and sweethearts, the committees, and the curious, facile-minded crowd, were there to greet these veterans who were mostly the unfortunates of war, armless, legless men, halt and lame, gassed and shrapnel-scarred—and some who bore no visible sign only the white face and burning eyes of men who had met horror and walked with it and suffered yet from the sight. All the wounds of the war are not solely of the flesh, as many a man can testify.
From one coach there alighted a youngish man in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps. He carried a black bag. He walked a little stiffly. Beyond that he bore no outward trace of disablement. His step and manner suggested no weakness. One had to look close to discern pallor and a peculiar roving habit of the eyes, a queer tensity of the body. A neurologist, versed in the by-products of war, could have made a fair guess at this man's medical-history sheet. But the folk on the platform that night were not specialists in subtle diagnosis of the nervous system. Nor were the committees. They were male and female of those who had done their bit at home, were doing it now, welcoming their broken heroes. The sight of a man with a scarred face, a mutilated limb, elicited their superficial sympathy, while the hidden sickness of racked nerves in an unmaimed body they simply could not grasp.
So this man with the black bag and the wings on his left arm walked the length of the platform, gained the steel stairway which led to the main floor of the depot, and when he had climbed half-way stopped to rest and to look down over the rail.
Below, the mass of humanity was gravitating into little groups here and there about a khaki center. There was laughter, and shrill voices, with an occasional hysterical note. There were men surrounded by women and children, and there were others by twos and threes and singly who looked enviously at these little groups of the reunited, men who moved haltingly on their way to the city above, perfunctorily greeted, perfunctorily handshaken, and perfunctorily smiled upon by the official welcomers.
He looked at this awhile, with a speculative, pitying air, and continued his climb, passing at last through great doors into a waiting-room, a place of high, vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, beautiful tiled floors. He evaded welcoming matrons on the watch for unattached officers, to hale them into an anteroom reserved for such, to feed them sandwiches and doubtful coffee, and to elicit tales of their part in the grim business overseas. This man avoided the cordial clutches of the socially elect by the simple expedient of saying that his people expected him. He uttered this polite fiction in self-defense. He did not want to talk or be fed. He was sick of noise, weary of voices, irritated by raucous sounds. All he desired was a quiet place away from the confusion of which he had been a part for many days, to get speedily beyond range of the medley of voices and people that reminded him of nothing so much as a great flock of seagulls swooping and crying over a school of herring.
He passed on to the outer door which gave on the street where taxi drivers and hotel runners bawled their wares, and here in the entrance met the first face he knew. A man about his own age, somewhat shorter, a great deal thicker through the waist, impeccably dressed, shouldered his way through a group at the exit.
Their eyes met. Into the faces of both leaped instant recognition. The soldier pressed forward eagerly. The other stood his ground. There was a look which approached unbelief on his round, rather florid features. But he grasped the extended hand readily enough.
"By jove, itisyou, Wes," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. So you're back alive, eh? You were reported killed, you know. Shot down behind the German lines. You made quite a record, didn't you? How's everything over there?"
There was a peculiar quality in Tommy Ashe's tone, a something that was neither aloofness nor friendliness, nor anything that Wes Thompson could immediately classify. But it was there, a something Tommy tried to suppress and still failed to suppress. His words were hearty, but his manner was not. And this he confirmed by his actions. Thompson said that things over there were going well, and let it go at that. He was more vitally concerned just then with over here. But before he could fairly ask a question Tommy seized his hand and wrung it in farewell.
"Pardon my rush, old man," he said. "I've got an appointment I can't afford to pass up, and I'm late already. Look me up to-morrow, will you?"
Two years is long for some things, over-brief for others. In Thompson those twenty-four months had softened certain perspectives. He had quickened at sight of Tommy's familiar face, albeit that face was a trifle grosser, more smugly complacent than he had ever expected to behold it. He could mark the change more surely for the gap in time. But Tommy had not been glad to see him. Thompson felt that under the outward cordiality.
He took up his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada Hotel. His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed. Thompson was high above the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, and the great hills across the Inlet looming duskily massive against the paler sky.
He stood by the window looking over roofs and traffic and the glow-worm light of shipping in the stream. He could smell the sea, the brown kelp bared on rocky beaches by a falling tide. And he fancied that even at that distance he could get a whiff of the fir and cedar that clothed the mountain flank.
"By God," he whispered. "It's good to be back."
He said it much as a man might breathe a prayer. All this that he saw now had lingered in his memory, had risen up to confront him as something beautiful and desirable, many times when he never expected to see it again. For it was not logical, he held, that he should survive where so many others had perished. It was just a whimsey of Fate. And he was duly and honestly grateful that it had been permitted him to outlive many gallant comrades in the perilous service of the air.
Three days and nights on a train close upon long months in hospital had left him very tired. Rest both his body and uneasy nerves craved insistently. Although it lacked some minutes of eight, he threw off his clothes and went to bed.
In the morning he rose refreshed, eager to be about, to look up men he knew, to talk of things beyond the scope of war.
But when he went out into Vancouver's highways and met people, his uniform gave them a conversational cue. And he found that here, six thousand miles from the guns, even less than among his fellows in the hangars behind the fighting line could he escape that topic. He did not want to talk about fighting and killing. He had lived those things and that was enough. So he came back to the Granada and read the papers and had his lunch and decided to look up Tommy Ashe.
He had learned casually that morning that Tommy's company had more than made good Tommy's prophecy of swift work. Tommy Ashe and Joe Hedley were rising young men.
"Oh, yes, they've got a mint," a broker he knew said to Thompson, with an unconcealed note of envy. "By gad, it's a marvel how a pair of young cubs like that can start on a shoestring and make half a million apiece in two years."
"How did they both manage to escape the draft?" Thompson asked. "I'm sure Ashe is a Class A man."
"Huh!" the broker snorted. "Necessary government undertakings. Necessary hell! All they had to do with the shipbuilding was to bank their rake-off. I tell you, Thompson, this country has supported the war in great style—but there's been a lot of raw stuff in places where you wouldn't suspect it. I'm not knocking, y' understand. This is no time to knock. But when the war's over, we've got to do some house-cleaning."
Thompson called the shipyard first. In the glow of a sunny September morning he felt that he must have imagined Tommy's attitude. He was a fair-minded man, and he gave Tommy the benefit of the doubt.
But he failed to get in touch with Tommy. A voice informed him politely that Mr. Ashe had left town that morning and would be gone several days.
Thompson hung up the receiver. For at least five minutes he sat debating with himself. Then he took it down again.
"Give me Seymour 365L," he said to Central.
"Hello."
"Is Mr. Carr at home?"
"You have the wrong number," he was answered, and he heard the connection break.
He tried again, and once more the same voice, this time impatiently, said, "Wrong number."
"Wait," Thompson said quickly. "Is this Seymour 365L, corner of Larch and First?"
"Yes."
"I beg pardon for bothering you. I'm just back from overseas and I'm rather anxious to locate Mr. Carr—Samuel A. Carr. This was his home two years ago."
"Just a minute," the feminine voice had recovered its original sweetness. "Perhaps I can help you. Hold the line."
Thompson waited. Presently he was being addressed again.
"My husband believes Mr. Carr still owns this place. We lease through an agent, however, Lyng and Salmon, Credit Foncier Building. Probably they will be able to give you the required information."
"Thanks," Thompson said.
He found Lyng and Salmon's number in the telephone book. But the lady was mistaken. Carr had sold the place. Nor did Lyng and Salmon know his whereabouts.
Tommy would know. But Tommy was out of town. Still there were other sources of information. A man like Carr could not make his home in a place no larger than Vancouver and drop out of sight without a ripple. Thompson stuck doggedly to the telephone, sought out numbers and called them up. In the course of an hour he was in possession of several facts. Sam Carr was up the coast, operating a timber and land undertaking for returned soldiers. The precise location he could not discover, beyond the general one of Toba Inlet.
They still maintained a residence in town, an apartment suite. From the caretaker of that he learned that Sophie spent most of her time with her father, and that their coming and going was uncertain and unheralded.
The latter facts were purely incidental, save one. Tommy Ashe had that morning cleared theAlertfor a coastwise voyage.
Sam Carr and Sophie were up the coast. Tommy was up the coast. Thompson sat for a time in deep study. Very well, then. He, too, would journey up the coast. He had not come six thousand miles to loaf in a hotel lobby and wear out shoe leather on concrete walks.
Within a gunshot of the heart of Vancouver lies a snug tidal basin where yachts swing to their moorings, where a mosquito fleet of motor craft lies along narrow slips, with the green woods of Stanley Park for a background. Thompson knew Coal Harbor well. He knew the slips and the boats and many of the men who owned them. He had gone on many a week-end cruise out of that basin with young fellows who looked their last on the sea when they crossed the English Channel. So he had picked up a working fund of nautical practice, a first-hand knowledge of the sea and the manner of handling small sail.
From the Granada he went straight to Coal Harbor. While the afternoon was yet young he had chartered a yawl, a true one-man craft, carrying plenty of canvas for her inches, but not too much. She had a small, snug cabin, was well-found as to gear, and was equipped with a sturdy single-cylinder gas engine to kick her along through calm and tideway.
Before six he had her ready for sea, his dunnage bag aboard, grub in the lockers, gas in the tanks, clearance from the customhouse. He slept aboard in a bunk softer than many a sleeping place that had fallen to his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half north, to clear Roger Curtis Point.
He blew through Welcome Pass at noon on the forefront of a rising gale, with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank. As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in the trough again.
But she made merry weather of it. And Thompson rode the tiller, an eye to his sheets, glorying in his mastery of the sea. It was good to be there with a clean wind whistling through taut stays, no sound but the ripple of water streaming under his lee, and the swoosh of breaking seas that had no power to harm him. Peace rode with him. His body rested, and the tension left his nerves which for months had been strung like the gut on a violin.
Between Welcome Pass and Cape Coburn the southeaster loosed its full fury on him. The seas rose steeper at the turn of the tide, broke with a wicked curl. He put the Cape on his lee after a wild fifteen minutes among dangerous tiderips, and then prudence drove him to shelter.
He put into a bottle-necked cove gained by a passage scarce twenty feet wide which opened to a quiet lagoon where no wind could come and where the swell was broken into a foamy jumble at the narrow entrance.
He cooked his supper, ate, watched the sun drop behind the encircling rim of firs. Then he lay on a cushion in the cockpit until dark came and the green shore of the little bay grew dim and then black and the dusky water under the yawl's counter was split with the phosphorescent flashes of darting fish.
Across a peninsula, on the weather side of the Cape, he could hear the seas thud and the surf growl like the distant booming of heavy batteries. Over his head the wind whistled and whined in the firs with a whistle and a whine like machine-gun bullets that have missed their mark. But neither of these sounds held the menace of the sounds of which they reminded him. He listened to those diapasons and thin trebles and was strangely soothed. And at last he grew sleepy and turned in to his bunk.
Some time in the night he had a weird sort of dream. He was falling, falling swiftly from a great height in the air. On the tail of his plane rode a German, with a face like those newspaper caricatures of the Kaiser, who shot at him with a trench mortar—boom—boom—boom—boom!
Thompson found himself sitting up in his bunk. The queer dream had given place to reality, in which the staccato explosions continued. As he put his face to an open porthole a narrow, searching ray of uncommon brilliance flashed over his yawl and picked up the shore beyond. Back of the searchlight lifted the red, green, and white triangle of running lights laid dead for him. It sheered a little. The brilliant ray blinked out. He saw a dim bulk, a pale glimmer through cabin windows, heard the murmur of voices and the rattle of anchor chain running through hawse pipe. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
He rose with the sun. Beside him lay a sturdily built motor tug. A man leaned on the towing bitts aft, smoking a pipe, gazing at the yawl. Twenty feet would have spanned the distance between them.
Thompson emerged into the cockpit. The air was cool and he was fully dressed. At sight of the uniform with the insignia on sleeve and collar the man straightened up, came to attention, lifted his hand smartly in the military salute—the formality tempered by a friendly grin. Thompson saw then that the man had a steel hook where his left hand should have been. Also a livid scar across his cheek where a bullet or shrapnel had plowed.
"It's a fine morning after a wild night," Thompson broke the conversational ice.
"It was a wild night outside and no mistake," the man replied. "We took cover about midnight—got tired of plowing into it, and wasn't too keen for wallowing through them rips off the Cape. Say, are you back long from over there?"
"Not long," Thompson replied. "I left England two weeks ago."
"How's it going?"
"We're over the hump," Thompson told him. "They're outgunned now. The Americans are there in force. And we have them beaten in the air at last. You know what that means if you've been across."
"Don't I know it," the man responded feelingly. "By the Lord, it's me that does know it. I was there when the shoe was on the other foot. I was a gunner in the Sixty-eighth Battery, and you can believe me there was times when it made us sick to see German planes overhead. Well, I hope they give Fritz hell. He gave it to us."
"They will," Thompson answered simply, and on that word their talk of the war ended. They spoke of Vancouver, and of the coast generally.
"By the way, do you happen to know whereabouts in Toba Inlet a man named Carr is located?" Thompson bethought him of his quest. "Sam Carr. He is operating some sort of settlement for returned men, I've been told."
"Sam Carr? Sure. TheSquallahere belongs to him—or to the Company—and Carr is just about the Company himself."
A voice from the interior abaft the wheelhouse bellowed "Grub-pi-l-e."
"That's breakfast," the man said. "I see you ain't lighted your fire yet. Come and have a bite with us. Here, make this line fast and lay alongside."
The wind had died with the dawn, and the sea was abating. TheSquallawent her way within the hour, and so did Thompson. There was still a small air out of the southeast, sufficient to give him steerageway in the swell that ran for hours after the storm. Between sail and power he made the Redonda Islands and passed between them far up the narrow gut of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that deep pass when night came on. And by late afternoon the following day he had traversed the mountain-walled length of Toba Inlet and moored his yawl beside a great boom of new-cut logs at the mouth of Toba River.
Thanks to meeting theSquallahe knew his ground. Also he knew something of Sam Carr's undertaking. The main camp was four miles up the stream. The deep fin-keel of the yawl barred him from crossing the shoals at the river mouth except on a twelve-foot tide. So he lay at the boom, planning to go up the river next morning in the canoe he towed astern in lieu of a dinghy.
He sat on his cushions in the cockpit that evening looking up at a calm, star-speckled sky. On either side of him mountain ranges lifted like quiescent saurians, heads resting on the summit of the Coast Range, tails sweeping away in a fifty-mile curve to a lesser elevation and the open waters of the Gulf. The watery floor of Toba Inlet lay hushed between, silvered by a moon-path, shimmering under the same pale rays that struck bluish-white reflections from a glacier high on the northern side. It was ghostly still at the mouth of the valley whence the Toba River stole down to salt water, with somber forests lining the beach and clinging darkly on the steep slopes. A lone light peeped from the window of a cabin on shore. The silence was thick, uncanny. But it was a comforting silence to Thompson. He felt no loneliness, he whom the lonely places had once appalled. But that was a long time ago. Sitting there thinking of that, he smiled.
No man lives by, for, or because of love alone. Nor does a woman, although the poets and romancers have very nearly led us to believe a woman does. Yet it is a vital factor upon some occasions, in many natures. There had been times in Thompson's life when the passion Sophie Carr kindled in him seemed a conflagration that must either transfigure or destroy him. It was like a volcano that slept, and woke betimes.
The last two years had rather blotted out those periods of eruption. He had given her up, and in giving up all hope of her, Sophie and everything that linked her with him from Lone Moose to the last time he saw her had grown dim, like a book read long ago and put by on the shelf. In the fierce usages of aërial warfare distracted thought, any relaxing from an eagle-like alertness upon the business in hand, meant death swift and certain. And no man, even a man whose heart is sore, wishes to die. The will-to-live is too strong in him. Pride spurs him. To come off victorious over a concrete enemy, to uphold the traditions of his race, to be of service—these things will carry any man over desperate places without faltering, if he feels them.
And Wes Thompson had experienced that sort of vision rather keenly. It had driven him, a man of peaceful tendency, to blood-drenched fields. For two years he had been in another world, in a service that demanded of a man all that was in him. He was just beginning to be conscious that for so long he had been detached from life that flowed in natural, normal channels.
He was conscious too, of a queer, impersonal manner of thinking about things and people, now that he was back. He wondered about himself. What particular motive, for instance, had driven him up here? To be sure there was the very plausible one of obeying a physician's order about living in the open, of keeping decent hours, of avoiding crowds and excitement until he was quite himself again. But he could have done that without coming to Toba Inlet.
Of course he wanted to see Sam Carr again. Also he wanted to see Sophie.Whyhe wished to see her was not so readily answered. He wanted to see her again, that was all—just as he had wanted to see Canada and his aunts, and the green slopes of the Pacific again. Because all these things and people were links with a past that was good and kindly by comparison with the too-vivid recent days. Yes, surely, he would be glad to see Sam Carr—and Sophie. When he recalled the last time he spoke with her he could smile a little wryly. It had been almost a tragedy then. It did not seem much now. The man who had piloted a battle-plane over swaying armies in France could smile reminiscently at being called a rabbit by an angry girl.
It was queer Sophie had never married. His thought took that turn presently. She was—he checked the years on his fingers—oh, well, she was only twenty-four. Still, she was no frail, bloodless creature, but a woman destined by nature for mating, a beautiful woman well fit to mother beautiful daughters and strong sons, to fill a lover with joy and a husband with pride.
A queer warmth flushed Thompson's cheek when he thought of Sophie this wise. A jealous feeling stabbed at him. The virus was still in his blood, he became suddenly aware. And then he laughed out loud, at his own camouflaging. He had known it all the time. And this trip it would be kill or cure, he said to himself whimsically.
Still itwasodd, now he came to think of it, that Sophie had never in those years found a man quite to her liking. She had had choice enough, Thompson knew. But it was no more strange, after all, than for himself never to have looked with tender eyes on any one of the women he had known. He had liked them, but he hadn't ever got past the stage of comparing them with Sophie Carr. She had always been the standard he set to judge the others. Thompson realized that he was quite a hopeless case in this respect.
"I must be a sort of a freak," he muttered to himself when he was stowed away in his blankets. "I wonder if Icouldlike another woman, as well, if I tried? Well, we'll see, we'll see."
Thompson drove his canoe around a jutting point and came upon a white cruiser swinging at anchor in an eddy. Her lines were familiar though he had not seen her in two years. In any case the nameAlertin gold leaf on her bows would have enlightened him. He was not particularly surprised to find Tommy's motor boat there. He had half-expected to find Tommy Ashe hereabouts.
A man's head rose above the after companion-hatch as the canoe glided abreast.
"Is Mr. Ashe aboard?" Thompson asked.
The man shook his head.
"Went up to Carr's camp a while ago."
"When did you get in?" Thompson inquired further.
"Last night. Lost a day laying up at Blind Bay for a southeaster. Gee, she did blow."
Thompson smiled and passed on. Blind Bay was only two miles from Cape Coburn. Just a narrow neck of land had separated them that blustery night. It was almost like a race. Tommy would not be pleased to see him treading so close on his heels. Thompson felt that intuitively. All was fair in love and war. Still, even in aërial warfare, ruthless and desperate as it was, there were certain courtesies, a certain element of punctilio. Thompson had an intuition that Ashe would not subscribe to even that simple code. In fact he began to have a premonition of impending conflict as he thrust stoutly on his paddle blade. Tommy had changed. He was no longer the simple, straightforward soul with whom Thompson had fought man-fashion on the bank of Lone Moose, and with whom he had afterward achieved friendship on a long and bitter trail.
Three hundred yards past theAlerthe came to a landing stage which fitted the description given by the skipper of theSqualla. Thompson hauled his canoe out on the float, gained the shore, and found a path bordering the bank. He followed this. Not greatly distant he could hear the blows of chopping, the shrill blasts of a donkey-engine whistle and the whirr of the engine itself as it shuddered and strained on its anchored skids, reeling up half a mile, more or less, of inch and a quarter steel cable, snaking a forty-foot log out of the woods as a child would haul a toothpick on the end of a string.
Before long the brush-floored forest opened on a small area of parked wood. In this pleasant place stood a square block of a house. From a tall staff fluttered the Union Jack. As Thompson came near this the door opened and a group of youngsters tumbled out pell-mell and began to frolic. Thompson looked at his watch. He had stumbled on a school in the hour of morning recess.
"Where does Mr. Carr live?" he asked one of these urchins when he got near enough to have speech with him.
The youngster pointed upstream.
"First house you come to," he said. "White house with shingles painted green. Say, mister, have you just come from the war? My dad was over there. Do you know my dad, mister?"
The boy stood gazing at him, apparently hopeful of paternal acquaintance, until he discovered that Thompson did not know his "dad." Then he darted back to join his fellows at their game.
Thompson walked on. The white house with green shingles loomed up near at hand, with a clump of flaming maples beside it. Past that stood other houses in an orderly row facing the river, and back of them were sheds and barns, and beyond the group of buildings spread a wide area of cleared land with charred stumps still dotting many an acre.
He had to enter the place he took to be Sam Carr's by the back yard, so to speak. That is, he came up from the rear, passed alongside the house—and halted abruptly, with his foot on the first of three steps rising to a roomy verandah.
He had not meant to eavesdrop, to listen to words not meant for his hearing. But he had worn the common footgear of yachtsmen, a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes, and so had come to the verandah end unseen and noiselessly. He was arrested there by the sight of two people and the mention of his own name by one of them.
Sophie was sitting on the rail, looking soberly down on the glacial gray of Toba River. There was a queer expression on her face, a mixture of protest and resignation. Tommy Ashe stood beside her. He had imprisoned one of her hands between his own and he was speaking rapidly, eagerly, passionately.
Thompson had heard without meaning to hear. And what he heard, just a detached sentence or two, shot him through with a sudden blaze of anger. He stepped up on the floor, took quickly the three strides that separated him from Tommy.
"You are nothing but a common liar," he challenged bluntly. "You know you are, when you speak of me as being dead. Is that why you scuttled out of Vancouver and hurried on here, as soon as you saw me back?"
Ashe shrank back a step. His naturally florid face grew purple. Thompson matched him glance for glance, wondering as the moments ticked off why Tommy glared and did not strike.
"Your heart has grown as flabby as your principles," he said at last contemptuously.
For the instant, in anger at a lie, in that fighting mood which puts other considerations into abeyance when it grips a man, Thompson gave no heed to Sophie—until he felt her hand on his arm and looked down into her upturned face, white and troubled, into gray eyes that glowed with some peculiar fire.
"It is really, truly you?" she said in a choked voice.
"Of course," he answered—and he could not help a little fling. "You see I am no longer a rabbit. I don't like your friend here. He has tried to sneak a march on me, and I suspect it is not the first. I feel like hurting him."
She paid not the least heed to that.
"You were officially reported dead," she went on. "Reported shot down behind the German lines a year ago."
"I know I was reported dead, and so have many other men who still live," he said gently. "I was shot down, but I escaped and flew again, and was shot down a second time and still am here not so much the worse."
Sophie slipped her hand into his and turned on Tommy Ashe.
"And you knew this?" she said slowly. "Yet you came here to me this morning—and—and—"
She stopped with a break in her voice.
"I didn't believe you were capable of a thing like that, Tommy," she continued sadly. "I'm ashamed of you. You'd better go away at once."
Ashe looked at her and then at Thompson, and his face fell. Thompson, watching him as a man watches his antagonist, saw Tommy's lips tremble, a suspicious blur creep into his eyes. Even in his anger he felt sorry for Tommy.
The next instant the two of them stood alone, Sophie's hand caught fast in his. She tried to withdraw it. The red leaped into her cheeks. But there was still that queer glow in her eyes.
Thompson looked down at the imprisoned hand.
"You'll never get that away from me again," he said whimsically. "You see, I am not a rabbit, but a man, no matter what you thought once. And when a man really wants a thing, he takes it if he can. And I want you—so—you see?"
For answer Sophie hid her hot face against his breast.
"Ah, I'm ashamed of myself too," he heard a muffled whisper. "I sent you away into that hell over there with a sneer instead of a blessing. And I was too ashamed, and a little afraid, to write and tell you what a fool I was, that I'd made a mistake and was sorry. I couldn't do anything only wait, and hope you'd come back. Didn't you hate me for my miserable holier-than-thou preachment that day, Wes?"
"Why, no," he said honestly. "It hurt like the devil, of course. You see it was partly true. Iwasgoing 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 Ioughtto 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."