Burned Bridges

They lingered awhile watching the crew work, chatted with them in spare

moments. Then Carr led Thompson away through the woods again, and

presently took him across another stretch of stumps where men were

drilling and blasting out the roots of the ravished trees, on to fields

where grain and grass and root crops were ripening in the September sun,

and at last by another cluster of houses to the bank of the river again.

Here Carr sat down on a log, and began to fill a pipe.

"Well," he said, "what do you think of it?"

"For eighteen months' work you have made an astonishing amount of

headway," Thompson observed. "This is hard land to clear."

"Yes," Carr admitted. "But it's rich land--all alluvial, this whole

valley. Anything that can be grown in this latitude will grow like a

village scandal here."

He lighted his pipe.

"I tried high living and it didn't agree with me," Carr said abruptly.

"I have tried a variety of things since I left the North, and none of

them has seemed worth while. I'm not a philanthropist. I hate

charitable projects. They're so damned unscientific--don't you think

so?"

Thompson nodded.

"You know that about the time you left, discharged soldiers were

beginning to drift back," Carr continued. "Drift is about the word. The

cripples of war will be taken care of. Their case is obvious, too

obvious to be overlooked or evaded. But there are returned men who are

not cripples, and still are unfit for military duty. They came back to

civilian existence, and a lot of them didn't fit in. The jobs they could

get were not the jobs they could do. As more and more of them came home

the problem grew more and more acute. It is still acute, and I rather

think it will grow more acute until the crisis comes with the end of the

war and God knows how many thousands of men will be chucked into civil

life, which cannot possibly absorb them again as things are going at

present. It's a problem. Public-spirited men have taken it up. The

government took the problem of the returned soldier into consideration.

So far as I know they are still considering it. The Provincial

Legislature talked--and has done nothing. The Dominion Government has

talked a lot, but nothing more than temporary measures has come out of

it. Nothing practical. You can't feed men with promises of after-the-war

reconstruction.

"All this was apparent to me. So I talked it over with Sophie and one or

two other men who wanted to do something, and we talked to returned

soldiers. We couldn't do what it's the business of the country to

do--and may perhaps do when the red tape is finally untangled. But we

could do something, with a little brains and money and initiative. So we

went at it.