Burned Bridges

Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an

eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the

more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men

felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from

foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be

done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect

to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be

consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete

accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to

see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.

Axe in hand, he set to work. He had learned the first lesson of manual

labor--that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body

is swaddled in clothes. His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all

slung across a fallen tree. Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt

joined the discarded garments.

Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform

to the clerical figure. He was the antithesis of asceticism, of

gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose. He was simply a big man

lustily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat

standing out on brow and cheek, his sturdy neck all a-glisten with

moisture. Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled

and played. The flat muscle-bands across his broad chest slackened and

tightened as his arms swung. For Mr. Thompson had been fashioned by

Nature in a generous mood. He was not a heroic figure, but he was big

and built as a man should be, deep in the chest, flat-backed, very

straight when he stood erect. He had escaped the scholarly stoop. If his

muscles were soft they were in a fair way to become hardened.

He was more or less unconscious of all this. He had never thought of his

body as being strong or well-shaped, because he had never used it, never

pitted his strength against the strength of other men, never worked,

never striven. It had never been necessary for him to do so. He had been

taught that pride of that sort was sinful, and he had accepted the

teaching rather too literally.

Already a curious sort of change was manifesting in him. His blue eyes

had a different expression than one would have observed in them

during--well, during the period of his theological studies, shall we

say, when the state of his soul and the state of other people's souls

was the only consideration. One would have been troubled to make out any

pronounced personality then. He was simply a studious young man with a

sanctimonious air. But now that the wind and the sun had somewhat turned

his fair skin and brought out a goodly crop of freckles, now that the

vigor of his movements and the healthy perspiration had rumpled up his

reddish-brown hair and put a wave in it, he could--standing up on his

log--easily have passed for a husky woodsman; until some experienced eye

observed him make such sorry work of a woodsman's task. He had acquired

no skill with the axe. That takes time. But he made vigorous endeavor,

and he was beginning to feel strength flow through him, to realize it as

a potential blessing. Now that the soreness was working out of his

sinews it gave him a peculiar elation to lay hold of a log-end, to heave

until his arms and back grew rigid, and to feel the heavy weight move.

That exultant sense of physical power was quite new and rather puzzling

to him. He could not understand why he enjoyed chopping logs and moving

them about, and yet was prone to grow moody, to be full of disquieting

perplexities when he sat down to think.