Burned Bridges. Bertrand W. Sinclair
to rack and ruin. They knew also how to restore such an abandoned place to a measure of its original homeliness. And neither the spectacle of the one nor the labor of the other gave them any qualms. They were practical-minded men to whom musty, forsaken cabins, isolation, the hollow emptiness of the North, the sultry heat of the brief summer, the flies, the deep snows and iron frosts of the long winter, were a part of their life, the only life they knew.
But they were not wholly devoid of sentiment and perception. They recognized in Thompson a lively susceptibility to certain disagreeable things which they accepted as a matter of course. They saw that he was rather less capable of coping with such a situation than a ten-year-old native boy, that a dirty cabin in a lonely clearing made him stand aghast. And so—although their bargain with him was closed when they deposited him and his goods on the bank of Lone Moose—they set to work with energy to renovate his forlorn-looking abode.
They made short work of the rats' and the swallows' nests. Breyette quickly fashioned a broom of fine willow twigs, brought up a shovel from the canoe, and swept and shovelled the place out. MacDonald meanwhile cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up the unseemly refuse. The stove fulfilled its functions perfectly despite the red rust of disuse. With buckets of boiling water they flooded and drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as if new erected.
The place was habitable by sundown. While the long northern twilight held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe, and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.
That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the hard floor.
In the morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so that there would be some semblance of order instead of an indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at the bottom. Incidentally he strove to impart to Thompson certain rudimentary principles in the cooking of simple food. He illustrated the method of mixing a batch of baking-powder bread, and how to parboil salt pork before cooking, explained to him the otherwise mysterious expansion of rice and beans and dried apples in boiling water, all of which Breyette was shrewd enough to realize that Thompson knew nothing about. He had a ready ear for instructions but a poor understanding of these matters. So Mike reiterated out of his experience of camp cooking, and Thompson tried to remember.
Meanwhile, MacDonald, who had vanished into the woods with a rifle in his hand at daybreak, came back about noon with a deer's carcass slung on his sturdy back. This, after it was skinned, the two breeds cut into pieces the thickness of a man's wrist and as long as they could make them, rubbed well with salt and hung on a stretched line in the sun. The purpose and preparation of "jerky" was duly elucidated to Thompson; rather profitless explanation, for he had no rifle, nor any knowledge whatever in the use of firearms.
"Bagosh, dat man Ah'm wonder w'ere hees raise," Mike said to his partner once when Thompson was out of earshot. "Hees ask more damfool question een ten minute dan a man hees answer een t'ree day. W'at hees gon' do all by heemself here Ah don' know 'tall, Mac. Bagosh, no!"
By midafternoon all that was possible in the way of settling their man had been accomplished, even to a pile of firewood sufficient to last him two weeks. MacDonald contributed that after one brief exhibition of Thompson's axemanship. Short of remaining on the spot like a pair of swarthy guardian angels there was no further help they could give him, and their solicitude did not run to that beneficent extreme. And so about three o'clock Mike Breyette surveyed the orderly cabin, the pile of chopped wood, and the venison drying in the sun, and said briskly:
"Well, M'sieu Thompson, Ah theenk we go show you hon Lone Moose village now. Dere's one w'ite man Ah don' know 'tall. But der's breed familee call Lachlan, eef she's not move 'way somew'ere. Dat familee she's talk Henglish, and ver' fond of preacher. S'pose we go mak leetle veesit hon dem Lachlan, eh? Ah theenk us two feller we're gon' beet dat water weeth de paddle een de morneeng."
A man does not easily forego habits that have become second nature. Breyette and MacDonald put on their dilapidated hats, filled their pipes, and were ready for anything from a social call to a bear hunt. Thompson had to shave, wash up, brush his hair, put on a tie and collar, which article of dress he donned without a thought that the North was utterly devoid of laundries, that he would soon be reduced to flannel shirts which he must wash himself. His preparations gave the breeds another trick of his to grin slyly over. But Thompson was preparing himself to face the units of his future congregation, and he went about it precisely as he would have gone about getting ready for a Conference, or a cup of tea with a meeting of the Ladies' Aid. Eventually, however, the three set out across the trunk-littered clearing.
The thin place in the belt of timber to the northward proved barely a hundred yards deep. On the farther side the brushy edge of the woods gave on the open meadow around which the Lone Moose villagers had built their cabins. Thompson swept the crescent with a glance, taking in the dozen or so dwellings huddling as it were under the protecting wings of the forest, and his gaze came to rest on the more impressive habitation of Sam Carr.
"Dat's white man married hon Enjun woman," Breyette responded to Thompson's inquiry. "Ah don' never see heem maself. Lachlan she's leev over there."
Left to himself Thompson would probably have gravitated first to a man of his own blood, even though he had been warned to approach Carr with diplomacy. But there was no sign of life about the Carr place, and his men were headed straight for their objective, walking hurriedly to get away from the hungry swarms of mosquitoes that rose out of the grass. Thompson followed them. Two weeks in their company, with a steadily growing consciousness of his dependence upon them, had inclined him to follow their lead.
They found Lachlan at home, a middle-aged Scotch half-breed with a house full of sons and daughters ranging from the age of four to twenty. How could they all be housed in three small rooms was almost the first dubious query which presented itself to Thompson. His mind, to his great perplexity, seemed to turn more upon incongruities than upon his real mission there. That is, to Thompson they seemed incongruities. The little things that go to make up a whole were each impinging upon him with a force he could not understand. He could not, for instance, tell why he thought only with difficulty, with extreme haziness, of the great good he desired to accomplish at Lone Moose, and found his attention focussing sharply upon the people, their manner of speech, their surroundings, even upon so minor a detail as a smudge of flour upon the hand that Mrs. Lachlan extended to him. She was a fat, dusky-skinned woman, apparently regarding Thompson with a feeling akin to awe. The entire family, which numbered at least nine souls, spoke in the broad dialect of their paternal ancestors from the heather country overseas.
Thompson spent an hour there, an hour which was far from conducive to a cheerful survey of the field wherein his spiritual labors would lie. Aside from Sam Carr, who appeared to be looked upon as the Nestor of the village, the Lachlans were the only persons who either spoke or understood a word of English. And Thompson found himself more or less tongue-tied with them, unable to find any common ground of intercourse. They were wholly illiterate. As a natural consequence the world beyond the Athabasca region was as much of an unknown quantity to them as the North had been to Thompson before he set foot in it—as much of its needs and customs were yet, for that matter. The Lachlan virtues of simplicity and kindliness were overcast by obvious dirt and a general slackness. In so far as religion went if they were—as Breyette had stated—fond of preachers, it was manifestly because they looked upon a preacher as a very superior sort of person, and not because of his gospel message.
For when Mrs. Lachlan hospitably brewed a cup of tea and Thompson took the opportunity of making his customary prayer before food an appeal for divine essence to be showered upon these poor sinful creatures of earth, the Lachlan family rose from its several knees with an air of some embarrassing matter well past. And they hastened to converse volubly upon the weather and the mosquitoes and Sam Carr's garden and a new canoe that Lachlan's boys were building, and such homely interests.