Burned Bridges

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.