Burned Bridges

Mike Breyette took a last look over his shoulder as the current and the

thrust of two paddles carried the canoe around the first bend. Thompson

stood on the bank, watching them go.

"Bagosh, dat man hees gon' have dam toff time, Ah theenk," Breyette

voiced his conviction. "Feller lak heem got no beesness for be here

'tall."

"He didna have tae come here," MacDonald answered carelessly. "An' he

disna have tae stay."

"Oh, sure, Ah know dat, me," Mike agreed. "All same hees feel bad."

Which was a correct, if brief, estimate of Mr. Thompson's emotions as he

stood on the bank watching the gray canoe slip silently out of his ken.

That gave him a keener pang, a more complete sense of loss, than he had

ever suffered at parting with any one or anything. It was to him like

taking a last look before a leap in the dark. Thrown entirely upon his

own resources he felt wholly inadequate, found his breast filled with

incomprehensible misgivings. The work he had come there to do seemed to

have lost much of its force as a motive, as an inspiration. He felt

himself--so far as his mission to Lone Moose was concerned--in the

anomalous position of one compelled to make bricks without straw.

He was, in a word, suffering an acute attack of loneliness.

That was why the empty space of the clearing affected him with a

physical shrinking, why the neatly arranged interior of his cabin seemed

hollow, abandoned, terribly dispiriting. He longed for the sound of a

human voice, found himself listening for such a sound. The stillness was

not like the stillness of a park, nor an empty street, nor any of the

stillnesses he had ever experienced. It was not a kindly, restful

stillness,--not to him. It was the hollow hush of huge spaces emptied of

all life. Life was at his elbow almost but he could not make himself

aware of that. The forested wilderness affected him much as a small

child is affected by the dark. He was not afraid of this depressing

sense of emptiness, but it troubled him.

Before nine o'clock in the forenoon had rolled around he set off with

the express purpose of making himself acquainted with Sam Carr. Carr was

a white man, a scholar, MacLeod had said. Passing over the other things

MacLeod had mentioned for his benefit Thompson, in his dimly realized

need of some mental stimulus, could not think of a white man and a

scholar being aught but a special blessing in that primeval solitude.

Thompson had run across that phrase in books--primeval solitude. He was

just beginning to understand what it meant.

He set out upon his quest of Sam Carr with a good deal of unfounded

hope. In his own world, beginning with the churchly leanings of the

spinster aunts, through the successive steps of education and his

ultimate training for the ministry as a profession, the theological note

had been the note in which he reasoned and thought and felt. His

environment had grounded him in the belief that all the world vibrated

in unison with the theological harmonies. He had never had any doubts or

equivocations. Faith was everything, and he had abundance of faith. As a

matter of fact, until he encountered MacLeod, the factor of Fort

Pachugan, he had never crossed swords with a man open and sincere in

disbelief based on rational grounds. He had found those who evaded and

some who were indifferent, many who compromised, never before a sweeping

denial. He could not picture an atheist as other than a perverted

monster, a moral degenerate, the personification of all evil. This was

his conception of such as denied his God. Blasphemers. Foredoomed to

hell. Yet he had found MacLeod hospitable, ready with kindly advice,

occupying a position of trust in the service of a great company. Was it

after all possible that the essence of Christianity might not be the

exclusive possession of Christians?