Burned Bridges

But he could not reach them unless he could speak their tongue, he could

not gather them about him in the open meadow as the Man of Galilee

gathered his disciples about him. The climate was against that simple

procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a

beginning--to learn the tribal language and to build a church.

He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than

he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled

him to assimilate the messes he cooked without suffering acute

indigestion. Likewise only a naïve turn of mind enabled him to ward off

mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the

defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had

considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was

not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the

Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of

eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he

struggled with pronunciations and meanings like a child learning the

alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons.

And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was

to be a meeting-house.

He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the

edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved.

He had to fell trees, to lop off the branches, and cut the trunks to

proper length, then roll them with infinite effort to their proper place

in the structure. He could only gather how a log building could be

erected by asking Lachlan, and by taking the Lone Moose cabins for his

model. And he was a fearful and wonderful axeman. His log ends looked as

if chewed by a beaver, except that they lacked the beaver's neatness of

finish. His feet suffered manifold hairbreadth escapes from the sharp

blade. He could never guess which way a tree would fall. For a week's

work he had got two courses of logs laid in position.

He did not allow his mind to dwell on the ultimate outcome of this task,

because he was uneasily aware that Lone Moose was smiling slyly behind

its brown hand at him and his works. In his mind there was nothing for

it but a church. He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan's house,

with Lachlan senior to interpret his words. The Indians had come.

Indeed, they had come en masse. They packed the room he spoke in, big

and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the

overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond. The day was very hot, the roof

low, the windows closed. There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that

was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and sturdy smell that

came near to sickening Mr. Thompson. He was extraordinarily glad when he

got outside. That closeness--to speak mildly--coupled with the heavy,

copper-red faces, impassive as masks, impersonally listening with

scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another

attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and

speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man's thoughts would

not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.