Burned Bridges Part 13

"No?" Thompson could not forbear an inquiring inflection on the monosyllable.

"No," Tommy continued a bit wistfully. "I was talking to Carr a few days after you and I had that--that little argument of ours." He smiled. "He told me then that after fifteen years up here he was inclined to try civilization again. Mostly to give Sophie a chance to see what the world was like, I imagine. I gathered from his talk that some sort of windfall was coming his way. But I daresay you know more about it than I do."

"No," Thompson replied. "I've been away--a hundred miles north of Pachugan--for two months. I didn't know anything about it till to-night."

Tommy looked at him keenly.

"Jolted you, eh, old man?" There was a quiet sympathy in his tone.

"A little," Thompson admitted grimly. "But I'm getting used to jolts. I had no claim on--on them."

"We both lost out," Tommy Ashe said thoughtfully. "Sophie Carr is one woman in ten thousand. I think she's the most remarkable girl I ever came across anywhere. She knows what she wants, and neither of us quite measured up. She liked me too--but she wouldn't marry me. Before you came she tried to convince me of that. And I wasn't slow to see that you interested her, that as a man she gave you a good deal of thought, although your--er--your profession's one she rather makes light of.

Women are queer. I didn't know but you might have taken her by storm.

And then again, I rather imagined she'd back off when you got serious."

"I was a fool," Thompson muttered.

"I wouldn't say that," Tommy responded gently. "A man couldn't resist her. I've known a lot of women one way and another. I never knew one could hold a candle to her. She has a mind like a steel trap, that girl.

She understood things in a flash, moods and all that. She'd make a real chum, as well as a wife. Most women aren't, y'know. They're generally just one or the other. No, I'd never call myself a fool for liking Sophie too well. In fact a man would be a fool if he didn't.

"She likes men too," Tommy went on musingly. "She knew it. I suppose she'll be friendly and curious and chummy, and hurt men without meaning to until she finds the particular sort of chap she wants. Oh, well."

"How's the trapping?"

Thompson changed the subject abruptly. He could not bear to talk about that, even to Tommy Ashe who understood out of his own experience, who had exhibited a rare and kindly understanding.

"I've been wondering if I could make a try at that. I've got to do something. I've quit the ministry."

Tommy looked at him for a second.

"Why did you get out?" he asked bluntly.

"I'm not fitted for it," Thompson returned. "I've been through h.e.l.l for four months, and I've lost something--some of that sublime faith that a man must have. I'm not certain about a lot of things I have always taken for granted. I'm not certain I have an immortal soul which is worth saving, let alone considering myself peculiarly fitted to save other people's souls. I'd be like a blind man leading people with good eyes.

It has come to seem to me that I've been trained for the ministry as a carpenter is trained for his trade. I can't go on feeling like that. I'm too much interested in my own personal salvation. I'm too keenly conscious of a tremendous ignorance about tremendously important things to continue setting myself up as a finger post for other men's spiritual guidance. If I stay with the church now it seems to me it will only be because I lack courage to get out and make my living along lines that won't be so easy. I'd despise myself if I did that. So I've resigned--quite a while ago, to be exact. I've been working for the H.B.

two months. That's why I asked about the trapping. I've been casting about for what I'd best try next."

Tommy sat silent. When he did speak he touched very briefly on Thompson's confession of faith--or rather the lack of it.

"When a man's heart isn't in a thing," said he, "it's better for him to drop it. About the trapping, now--I don't think you'd do much at that with the season so far along. This district is pretty well covered by the natives. You'd get into difficulties right off the bat over setting traps on their territory. They have a rude sort of understanding about where their several trap lines shall run. And for some reason or other furs are getting scarce. Up where young Lachlan and I were it was pretty fair for awhile. We took some good skins. Lately we did a lot of trap-tending for nothing much. I got fed up with it. Fact is, I'm about fed up with this region. I think I'll pull out."

"I've been thinking the same thing," Thompson observed. "There isn't much here for a man."

"Not now," Tommy amended. "I'd have been gone long ago only for Sophie Carr. That was the magnet that held me. It happens that I've come to something of your pa.s.s, right now. I can't afford to loaf any longer, living off the wilderness. I had a bit of an income to keep me in loose change when I wanted a taste of towns. But that's been chopped off--probably for good. I'm strictly on my own henceforth. Every penny I spend will first have to be earned. And so," he hesitated briefly, "I've considered a move to the Coast, the Pacific, y'know. Going over the continental divide while the snow makes a dog team useful. Then I'd go down the western streams by boat--dugout canoe or bateaux, or whatever simple craft a man could make himself in the woods. Probably be the last big trip I'll get a chance at. I'll have roughed it clear across North America then, and I rather fancy winding up that way. But it's a big undertaking single-handed. I'm not so partial to an Indian for company; besides the fact that I'd have to pay him wages and dollars count with me now. A fellow likes some one he can talk to. If you've cut the cloth and are at loose ends, why not come along?"

Thompson looked at him a second.

"Do you mean it?" he asked. "I'm not what you'd call a good hand on the trail. You might find me a handicap."

Tommy grinned.

"I've got the impression you're a chap that can hold his end up," he drawled. "I've an idea we'd make a go of it, all right."

"I believe we would," Thompson a.s.serted impulsively. "Hanged if I haven't a mind to take you at your word."

"Do," Tommy urged earnestly. "The Pacific coast has this part of the interior frazzled when it comes to opportunities. That's what we're both after, isn't it? An opportunity to get on--in plain English, to make some money? It's really simple to get up the Peace and through the mountains and on down to southeastern Alaska or somewhere in northern B.C. It merely means some hard mus.h.i.+ng. And neither of us is very soft.

You've begun to cut your eyeteeth on the wilderness. I can see that."

"Yes, I believe I have," Thompson a.s.sented, "I'm learning to take as a matter of course a good many things that I used to rather dread. I find I have a hankering to be on the move. Maybe I'll end up as a tramp. If you want a partner for that journey I'm your man."

"Shake," Tommy thrust out his hand with a boyish sort of enthusiasm.

"We'll have no end of a time."

They sat up till a most unseemly hour talking over the details of that long trek. Tommy Ashe was warmed with the prospect, and some of his enthusiasm fired Thompson, proved strangely infectious. The wanderl.u.s.t, which Wesley Thompson was only beginning to feel in vague stirrings, had long since become the chief motif in Tommy's life. He did not unburden himself at length. It was simply through stray references, offhand bits of talk, as they checked up resources and distances, that Thompson pieced out the four years of Ashe's wanderings across Canada--four years of careless, happy-go-lucky drifting along streams and through virgin forest, sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner; four years of hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and camping all the way from Labrador to Lone Moose.

Tommy had worked hard at this fascinating game. He confessed that with revenue enough to keep him going, to vary the wilderness with an occasional month in some city, he could go on doing that sort of thing with an infinite amount of pleasure.

But something had gone wrong with the source of the funds that came quarterly. Tommy did not appear to regret that. But he realized its significance. He would have to work. Having to work he meant to work as he had played, with all his heart and to some purpose. He had an ambitious idea of pressing Fortune to her lair. He was young and very sanguine. His cheerful optimism was the best possible antidote for the state of mind in which he found Thompson.

They went to bed at last. With breakfast behind them they went up to Ashe's cabin and brought down to Thompson's a miscellaneous collection of articles that Tommy had left behind when he went trapping. Tommy had four good dogs in addition to the brown retriever. By adding Thompson's pair and putting all their goods on one capacious toboggan they achieved a first-cla.s.s outfit.

In the North when a man sets out on a winter journey, or any sort of journey, in fact, his preparations are speedily made. He loads his sled, hitches his dogs, takes his rifle in hand, hooks his toes in his snowshoes and goes his way.

This is precisely the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed. Having decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in the deep of winter across a primitive land.

To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a capacity load of grub. West of the lake head they bore across a low, wooded delta and debouched upon Peace River's frozen surface.

After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern Lights, that strange glow that flashes and s.h.i.+mmers above the Pole, now a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen. Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that those cold white s.p.a.ces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with flowers.

But there were compensations. Two men cannot eat out of the same pot--figuratively speaking--sleep huddled close together for the warmth that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months--no two men born of woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without acquiring a positive att.i.tude toward each other. They achieve a contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friends.h.i.+p.

It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game fair and square.

So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges--not in the depths--of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard enough in order to succeed. They had conquered an ominous stretch of wilderness. They would conquer with equal facility whatever barriers they found between them and fortune.

The sweep of Spring's progress across the land found them west of the Coast Range by May, in a wild and forbidding region where three major streams--the Skeena, the Stikine, and the Naas--take their rise. For many days their advance was through grim canyons, over precipitous slopes, across glaciers, bearing always westward, until the maps with which Tommy Ashe was equipped showed them they were descending the Stikine. Here they rested in a country full of game animals and birds and fish, until the height of the spring torrents had pa.s.sed. During this time they fas.h.i.+oned a canoe out of a cedar tree, big enough to carry them and the dogs which had served so faithfully as pack animals over that last mountainous stretch. The Stikine was swift and forbidding, but navigable. Thus at last, in the first days of the salmon run, they came out upon tidewater, down to Wrangel by the sea.

There was in Thompson's mind no more thought of burned bridges, no heartache and empty longing, only an eagerness of antic.i.p.ation. He had come a long way, in a double sense. He had learned something of the essential satisfaction of striving. A tough trail had served to toughen the mental and moral as well as the physical fiber of him. He did not know what lay ahead, but whatever did so lie would never dismay him again as things had done in the past, in that too-recent vivid past.

He was quite sure of this. His mood was tinctured with recklessness when he summed it up in words. A man must stand on his own feet!

He would never forget that sentence. It was burned into his memory. He was beginning to understand what Sophie Carr meant by it. Looking backward he could see that he never had stood on his own feet like a man. Always he had required props. And they had been forthcoming from the time the prim spinster aunts took his training in hand until he came to Lone Moose self-consciously, rather flauntingly, waving the banner of righteousness. Thompson could smile wryly at himself now. He could see the unreckonable element of chance functioning largely in a man's life.

And in the meantime he went about Wrangel looking for a job!

CHAPTER XIV

THE RESTLESS FOOT