Not until he was torn by the roots out of the old, ordered environment

and flung headlong into an environment where cause and effect are linked

close did he consider these things. Materially he was getting a

first-hand lesson in economics--and domestic science of a sort!

Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not

personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began

to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and

clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands,

skilful exercise of the thought-function.

If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a

minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt--unless he denied the justice

of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had

returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give?

Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but

the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity to be

bartered.

He did not think these things in these terms. He found himself becoming

involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly

for words to define the unrest that was in him.

While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched,

unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea

that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a

considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice

taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pass along one

edge of his clearing, a cluster of bright-winged ducks slung over

Tommy's shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came

down a long corridor. They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the

timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he

realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr

with a disturbing insistence.

The plague of mosquitoes had somewhat abated. In the early morning and

for a time in the evening, and also when rain dampened the atmosphere,

these pests still kept a man's hands busy warding them off. But through

the dry heat of the day he could go abroad in reasonable comfort.

So now Mr. Thompson washed up his dishes in a fashion to make the lips

of a careful housekeeper pucker in disdain, clapped on his broken-rimmed

straw hat and sallied forth.

He was full of an earnest desire to do good, as he defined doing good.

He had come here for that purpose, backed by an organization for just

such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the

crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials

of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an

illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was

resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these

primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation,

of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his

business to show them with certainty the paths that led to each.




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