Burned Bridges. Bertrand W. Sinclair
Sophie put her arm around his neck, and her fingers played a tattoo on his shoulder.
"No," she said at last. "I can't honestly say that I've ever been overwhelmed with a feeling like that."
"Well, there you are," Carr observed dryly. "Between the propositions I think you've answered your own question."
The girl's breast heaved a little and her breath went out in a fluttering sigh.
"Yes," she said gravely. "I suppose that is so."
They sat silent for an interval. Then something wet and warm dropped on Carr's hand. He looked up quickly.
"Does it hurt?" he said softly. "I'm sorry."
"So am I," she whispered. "But chiefly, I think, I am sorry for Tommy. He'd be perfectly happy with me."
"Yes, I suppose so," Carr replied. "But you wouldn't be happy with him, only for a brief time, Sophie. Tommy's a good boy, but it will take a good deal of a man to fill your life. You'd outgrow Tommy. And you'd hurt him worse in the end."
She ran her soft hand over Carr's grizzled hair with a caressing touch. Then she got up and walked away into the house. Carr turned his gaze again to the meadow and the green woods beyond. For ten minutes he sat, his posture one of peculiar tensity, his eyes on the distance unseeingly—or as if he saw something vague and far-off that troubled him. Then he gave his shoulders a quick impatient twitch, and taking up his book began once more to read.
CHAPTER II
THE MAN AND HIS MISSION
At almost the same hour in which Sam Carr and his daughter held that intimate conversation on the porch of their home a twenty-foot Peterborough freight canoe was sliding down the left-hand bank of the Athabasca like some gray river-beast seeking the shade of the birch and willow growth that overhung the shore. The current beneath and the thrust of the blades sent it swiftly along the last mile of the river and shot the gray canoe suddenly beyond the sharp nose of a jutting point fairly into the bosom of a great, still body of water that spread away northeastward in a widening stretch, its farthest boundary a watery junction with the horizon.
There were three men in the canoe. One squatted forward, another rested his body on his heels in the after end. These two were swarthy, stockily built men, scantily clad, moccasins on their feet, and worn felt hats crowning lank, black hair long innocent of a barber's touch.
The third man sat amidships in a little space left among goods that were piled to the top of the deep-sided craft. He was no more like his companions than the North that surrounded them with its silent waterways and hushed forests is like the tropical jungle. He was a fairly big man, taller, wider-bodied than the other two. His hair was a reddish-brown, his eyes as blue as the arched dome from which the hot sun shed its glare.
He had on a straight-brimmed straw hat which in the various shifts of the long water route and many camps had suffered disaster, so that a part of the brim drooped forlornly over his left ear. This headgear had preserved upon his brow the pallid fairness of his skin. From the eyebrows down his face was in the last stages of sunburn, reddened, minute shreds of skin flaking away much as a snake's skin sheds in August. Otherwise he was dressed, like a countless multitude of other men who walk the streets of every city in North America, in a conventional sack suit, and shoes that still bore traces of blacking. The paddlers were stripped to thin cotton shirts and worn overalls. The only concession their passenger had made to the heat was the removal of his laundered collar. Apparently his dignity did not permit him to lay aside his coat and vest. As they cleared the point a faint breeze wavered off the open water. He lifted his hat and let it play about his moist hair.
"This is Lake Athabasca?" he asked.
"Oui, M'sieu Thompson," Mike Breyette answered from the bow, without turning his head. "Dees de lak."
"How much longer will it take us to reach Port Pachugan?" Thompson made further inquiry.
"Bout two-three hour, maybeso," Breyette responded.
He said something further, a few quick sentences in the French patois of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur in the stern laughed. Their gayety stirred no response from the midship passenger. If anything, he frowned. He was a serious-minded young man, and he did not understand French. He had a faint suspicion that his convoy did not take him as seriously as he wished. Whether their talk was badinage or profanity or purely casual, he could not say. In the first stages of their journey together, on the upper reaches of the river, Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald had, after the normal habit of their kind, greeted the several contingencies and minor mishaps such a journey involved with plaintive oaths in broken English. Mr. Wesley Thompson, projected into an unfamiliar environment and among a—to him—strange manner of men, took up his evangelistic cudgel and administered shocked reproof. It was, in a way, practice for the tasks the Methodist Board of Home Missions had appointed him to perform. But if he failed to convict these two of sin, he convinced them of discourtesy. Even a rude voyageur has his code of manners. Thereafter they invariably swore in French.
They bore on in a northerly direction, keeping not too far from the lake shore, lest the combination of a sudden squall and a heavy-loaded canoe should bring disaster. When Mike Breyette's "two-tree" hour was run Mr. Thompson stepped from the canoe to the sloping, sun-blistered beach before Fort Pachugan, and if he did not openly offer thanks to his Maker that he stood once more upon solid ground he at least experienced profound relief.
For many days he had occupied that midship position with ill-concealed misgivings. The largest bodies of water he had been on intimate terms with heretofore had been contained within the dimensions of a bathtub. He could not swim. No matter that his faith in an all-wise Providence was strong he could not forbear inward tremors at the certain knowledge that only a scant quarter-inch of frail wood and canvas stood between him and a watery grave. He regarded a canoe with distrust. Nor could he understand the careless confidence with which his guides embarked in so captious a craft upon the swirling bosom of that wide, swift stream they had followed from Athabasca Landing down to the lake of the same name. To Thompson—if he had been capable of analyzing his sensations and transmuting them into words—the river seemed inexplicably sinister, a turbid monster writhing over polished boulders, fuming here and there over rapids, snarling a constant menace under the canoe's prow.
It did not comfort him to know that he was in the hands of two capable rivermen, tried and proven in bad water, proud of their skill with the paddle. Could he have done so the reverend young man would gladly have walked after the first day in their company. But since that was out of the question, he took his seat in the canoe each morning and faced each stretch of troubled water with an inward prayer.
The last stretch and this last day had tried his soul to its utmost. Pachugan lay near the end of the water route. What few miles he had to travel beyond the post would lie along the lake shore, and the lake reassured him with its smiling calm. Having never seen it harried by fierce winds, pounding the beaches with curling waves, he could not visualize it as other than it was now, glassy smooth, languid, inviting. Over the last twenty miles of the river his guides had strained a point now and then, just to see their passenger gasp. They would never have another chance and it was rare sport, just as it is rare sport for spirited youths to snowball a passer-by who does not take kindly to their pastime.
In addition to these nerve-disturbing factors Thompson suffered from the heat. A perverted dignity, nurtured in a hard-shell, middle-class environment, prevented him from stripping to his undershirt. The sun's rays, diffusing abnormal heat through the atmosphere, reflected piercingly upward from the water, had played havoc with him. His first act upon landing was to seat himself upon a flat-topped boulder and dab tenderly