Burned Bridges. Bertrand W. Sinclair
face while his men hauled up the canoe. That in itself was a measure of his inefficiency, as inefficiency is measured in the North. The Chief Factor of a district large enough to embrace a European kingdom, traveling in state from post to post, would not have been above lending a hand to haul the canoe clear. Thompson had come to this terra incognita to preach and pray, to save men's souls. So far it had not occurred to him that aught else might be required of a man before he could command a respectful hearing.
Back from the beach, in a clearing hacked out of the woods, stood a score or more of low cabins flanking a building more ambitious in scope and structure. More than a century had passed since the first foundation logs were laid in the name of the Hudson's Bay Company, to the Company's glory and profit. It had been a fort then, in all that the name implies throughout the fur country. It had boasted a stockade, a brass cannon which commanded the great gates that swung open to friendly strangers and were closed sharply to potential foes. But the last remnant of Pachugan's glory had gone glimmering down the corridors of time. The Company was still as strong, stronger even in power more sure and subtle than ever lay in armed retainers and absolute monopoly. But Fort Pachugan had become a mere collecting station for the lesser furs, a distributing center for trade goods to native trappers. There were no more hostile tribes. The Company no longer dealt out the high justice, the middle, and the low. The stockade and the brass cannon were traditions. Pachugan sprawled on the bank of the lake, open to all comers, a dimming landmark of the old days.
What folk were out of doors bent their eyes upon the canoe. The factor himself rose from his seat on the porch and came down to have speech with them. Thompson, recognizing authority, made known his name and his mission. The burly Scot shook hands with him. They walked away together, up to the factor's house. On the threshold the Reverend Wesley paused for a backward look, drew the crumpled linen of his handkerchief across his moist brow, and then disappeared within. Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald looked at each other expressively. Their swarthy faces slowly expanded in a broad grin.
In the North, what with the crisp autumn, the long winter, and that bleak, uncertain period which is neither winter nor spring, summer—as we know it in softer lands—has but a brief span to endure. But Nature there as elsewhere works out a balance, adheres to a certain law of proportion. What Northern summers lack in length is compensated by intensity. When the spring floods have passed and the warm rains follow through lengthening days of sun, grass and flowers arise with magic swiftness from a wonderfully fertile soil. Trees bud and leaf; berries form hard on the blossoming. Overnight, as it were, the woods and meadows, the river flats and the higher rolling country, become transformed. And when August passes in a welter of flies and heat and thunderstorms, the North is ready once more for the frosty segment of its seasonal round. July and August are hot months in the high latitudes. For six weeks or thereabouts the bottom-lands of the Peace and the Athabasca can hold their own with the steaming tropics. After that—well, this has to do in part with "after that." For it was in late July when Wesley Thompson touched at Fort Pachugan, a Bible in his pocket, a few hundred pounds of supplies in Mike Breyette's canoe, certain aspirations of spiritual labor in his head, and little other equipment to guide and succor him in that huge, scantily peopled territory which his superiors had chosen as the field for his labors.
When Breyette and MacDonald had so bestowed the canoe that the diligently foraging dogs of the post could not take toll of their supplies they also hied them up to the cluster of log cabins ranging about the Company store and factor's quarters. They were on tolerably familiar ground. First they made for the cabin of Dougal MacPhee, an ancient servitor of the Company and a distant relative of Breyette's, for whom they had a gift of tobacco. Old Dougal welcomed them laconically, without stirring from his seat in the shade. He sucked at an old clay pipe. His half-breed woman, as wrinkled and time worn as himself, squatted on the earth sewing moccasins. Old Dougal turned his thumb toward a bench and bade them be seated.
"It's a bit war-rm," MacDonald opined, by way of opening the conversation.
"What else wad it be this time o' year?" Dougal rumbled. "Tell us somethin' we dinna ken. Wha's yon cam' wi' ye?"
"Man, but the heat makes ye crabbed," MacDonald returned with naïve candor. "Yon's a meenister."
"Bagosh, yes," Breyette chuckled. "Dat ees de man of God w'at you see. He's com' for save soul hon' de Eenjun hon' Lone Moose. Bagosh, we're have som' fon weet heem dees treep."
"He's a loon," MacDonald paused with a forefinger in the bowl of his pipe. "He doesna know a moccasin from a snowshoe, scarce. I'd like tae be aboot when 'tis forty below—an' gettin' colder. I'm thinkin' he'd relish a taste o' hell-fire then, for a change—eh, Mike?"
The two of them went off into a fit of silent laughter, for the abysmal ignorance of Wesley Thompson concerning practical things, his awkward length of body, his student's pallor that the Athabasca sun had played such havoc with, his blue eyes that looked so often with trepidation or amazement on the commonplaces of their world, his general incapacity and blind belief that an all-wise Providence would personally intervene to make things go right when they went wrong, had not struck these two hardy children of the solitudes as other than a side-splitting joke.
"He rises i' the mornin'," MacDonald continued, "win' a word frae the Book aboot the Lord providin', an' he'd starve if nabody was by t' cook his meal. He canna build a fire wi'oot scorchin' his fingers. He lays hold o' a paddle like a three months' babby. He bids ye pit yer trust i' the Lord, an' himself rises up wi' a start every time a wolf raises the long howl at nicht. I didna believe there was ever sae helpless a creature. An' for a' that he's the laddie that's here tae show the heathen—thae puir, sinfu' heathen, mind ye—how tae find grace. No that he's any doot aboot bein' equal tae the job. For a' that he's nigh helpless i' the woods he was forever ying-yangin' at me an' Mike for what he ca's sinfu' pride in oor ain' persons. I've a notion that if yon had a bit o' that same sinfu' pride he'd be the better able tae make his way."
Old MacPhee took the blackened clay pipe from his mouth and puffed a blue spiral into the dead, sultry air. A sour expression gathered about his withered lips.
"Dinna gibe at yon puir mortal," he rebuked. "Ye canna keep fools frae wanderin'. I've seen manny's the man like him. It's likely that once he's had a fair taste o' the North he'll be less a saint an' more a man."
The afternoon was far spent when they landed. Breyette and MacDonald made themselves comfortable with their backs against the wall. Supper came and was eaten. Evening closed in. The bold, scorching stare of the sun faded. Little cooling breezes fluttered along the lake shore, banishing the last trace of that brassy heat. Men who had lounged indoors, or against shaded walls roamed about, and half-breed women chattered in voluble gutturals back and forth between the cabins.
CHAPTER III
THE DESERTED CABIN
In the factor's comfortable quarters Mr. Thompson sat down to the first meal he had thoroughly relished in two weeks. A corner of the verandah was screened off with wire netting. Outside that barrier mosquitoes and sandflies buzzed and swarmed in futile activity. Within stood an easy chair or two and a small table which was presently spread with a linen cloth, set with porcelain dishes, and garnished with silverware. All the way down the Athabasca Thompson had found every meal beset with exasperating difficulties, fruitful of things that offended both his stomach and his sense of fitness. He had not been able to accommodate himself to the necessity of juggling a tin plate beside a campfire, of eating with one hand and fending off flies with the other. Also he objected to grains of sand and particles of ash and charred wood being incorporated with bread and meat. Neither Breyette nor MacDonald seemed to mind. But Thompson had never learned to adapt himself to conditions that were unavoidable. Pitchforked into a comparatively primitive mode of existence and transportation his first reaction to it took the form of offended resentment. There were times when