Burned Bridges

* * * * * "Come and I'll show you what the valley looks like, Wes," Sophie said to

him, when they had finished dinner, and Carr had his nose buried in mail

just that evening arrived.

She led him a hundred yards upstream to where a footbridge slung upon

steel cables spanned the Toba, crossed that and a little flat on the

north side, and climbed up the flank of a slide-scarred hill until she

came out on a little plateau.

"Look," she waved her hand, panting a little from the steepness of the

climb.

Five hundred feet below, the valley of the Toba spread its timbered

greenness, through which looped in sweeping curves the steel-gray of the

river. In a great bend immediately beneath them lay the houses of the

settlement, facing upon the stream. Farther along were isolated

homesteads which he had not seen. Back of these spread little gardens,

and the green square of cultivated fields, and beyond in greater expanse

the stump-dotted land that was still in the making.

The smoke of the donkey-engines was vanished, fires grown cold with the

end of the day's work. But upriver and down the spoil of axe and saw lay

in red booms along the bunk. He could mark the place where he had stood

that afternoon and watched a puffing yarder bunt a string of forty-foot

logs into the booming-ground. He could see figures about in the gardens,

and the shrill voices and laughter of children echoed up to them on the

hill.

"It is a great view, and there is more in it than meets the eye,"

Thompson said. "Eh, little woman? The greatest war of all, the biggest

struggle. One that never ends. Man struggling to subdue his environment

to his needs."

Sophie smiled understandingly. She looked over the valley with a wistful

air.

"Did you ever read 'The Sons of Martha'?" she asked. Do you remember

these lines: "'Not as a ladder to reach high Heaven,

Not as an altar to any creed,

But simple service simply given

To his own kind in their common need.'"

"It is a noble mark to shoot at," Thompson said.

He fell silent. Sophie went on after a minute.

"Dad said he was going back to first principles when he began this.

There are men here who have found economic salvation and self-respect,

who think he is greater than any general. I'm proud of dad. He wanted to

do something. What he has accomplished makes all my puttering about at

what, after all, was pure charity, a puerile sort of service. I gave

that up after you went away." She snuggled one hand into his. "It didn't

seem worth while--nothing seemed worth while until dad evolved this."

She waved her hand again over the valley. Thompson's eyes gleamed. It

was good to look at, good to think of. It was good to be there. He

remembered, with uncanny, disturbing clearness of vision, things he had

looked down upon from a greater height over bloody stretches in France.

And he shuddered a little.