Burned Bridges

Thompson had achieved a hair-cut at Pachugan. Now he got out his razor

and painstakingly scraped away the accumulated beard. He had allowed it

to grow upon Joe Lamont's assertion that "de wheesker, she's help keep

hout de fros', Bagosh." Thompson doubted the efficiency of whiskers as a

protection, and he wanted to appear like himself. He made that

concession consciously to his vanity.

He did not waste much time. While he shaved and washed, his supper

cooked. He ate, drew the parka over his head, hooked his toes into the

loops of his snowshoes and strode off toward Carr's house. The timidity

that made him avoid the place after his fight with Tommy Ashe and

subsequent encounter with Sophie had vanished. The very eagerness of his

heart bred a profound self-confidence. He crossed the meadow as

hurriedly as an accepted lover.

For a few seconds there was no answer to his knock. Then a faint

foot-shuffle sounded, and Carr's Indian woman opened the door. She

blinked a moment in the dazzle of lamp glare on the snow until,

recognizing him, her brown face lit up with a smile.

"You come back Lone Moose, eh?" she said. "Come in."

Thompson put back the hood of his parka and laid off his mitts. The room

was hot by comparison with outdoors. He looked about. Carr's woman

motioned him to a chair. Opposite him the youngest Carr squatted like a

brown Billiken on a wolfskin. Every detail of that room was familiar.

There was the heavy, homemade chair wherein Sam Carr was wont to sit and

read. Close by it stood Sophie's favorite seat. A nickel-plated oil lamp

gave forth a mellow light under a pale birch-bark shade. But he missed

the old man with a pipe in his mouth and a book on his knee, the

gray-eyed girl with the slow smile and the sunny hair.

"Mr. Carr and Sophie--are they home?" he asked at length.

The Indian woman shook her head.

"Sam and Sophie go 'way," she said placidly. "No come back Lone Moose

long time--maybe no more. Sophie leave sumpin' you. I get."

She crossed the room to a shelf above the serried volumes of Sam Carr's

library, lifted the cover of a tin tobacco box and took out a letter.

This she gave to Thompson. Then she sat down cross-legged on the

wolfskin beside her youngster, looking up at her visitor impassively,

her moon face void of expression, except perhaps the mildest trace of

curiosity.

Thompson fingered the envelope for a second, scarcely crediting his

ears. The letter in his hands conveyed nothing. He did not recognize the

writing. He was acutely conscious of a dreadful heartsinking. There was

a finality about the Indian woman's statement that chilled him.

"They have gone away?" he said. "Where? When did they go?"