Burned Bridges Part 2

CHAPTER III

THE DESERTED CABIN

In the factor's comfortable quarters Mr. Thompson sat down to the first meal he had thoroughly relished in two weeks. A corner of the verandah was screened off with wire netting. Outside that barrier mosquitoes and sandflies buzzed and swarmed in futile activity. Within stood an easy chair or two and a small table which was presently spread with a linen cloth, set with porcelain dishes, and garnished with silverware. All the way down the Athabasca Thompson had found every meal beset with exasperating difficulties, fruitful of things that offended both his stomach and his sense of fitness. He had not been able to accommodate himself to the necessity of juggling a tin plate beside a campfire, of eating with one hand and fending off flies with the other. Also he objected to grains of sand and particles of ash and charred wood being incorporated with bread and meat. Neither Breyette nor MacDonald seemed to mind. But Thompson had never learned to adapt himself to conditions that were unavoidable. Pitchforked into a comparatively primitive mode of existence and transportation his first reaction to it took the form of offended resentment. There were times when he forgot why he was there, enduring these things. After such a lapse he prayed for guidance and a patient heart.

These creature comforts now at hand were in a measure what he had been accustomed to, what he had, with no thought on the matter, taken as the accepted and usual order of things, save that his needs had been administered by two prim and elderly spinster aunts instead of a black-browed Scotchman and a half-breed servant girl.

Thompson sat back after his supper, fanning himself with an ancient newspaper, for the day's heat still lingered. Across the table on which he rested an elbow MacLeod, bearded, aggressive, capable, regarded his guest with half-contemptuous pity under cover of the gathering dusk.

MacLeod smoked a pipe. Thompson chewed the cud of reflection.

"And so," the factor began suddenly, "ye are a missionary to the Lone Moose Crees. It will be a thankless task; a tougher one nor I'd care to tackle. I ha' seen the job undertaken before by folk who--beggin' your pardon--ha' little conception of the country, the people in it, or the needs of either. Ye'll find the Cree has more concern for meat an'

clothes, for traps an' powder, than he has for his soul. Ye'll understand this better when ye ha' more experience in the North. Indeed, it's no impossible ye might come to the same way of thinkin' in time."

The dusk hid the shocked expression that gathered on Thompson's face.

"'What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world if he knoweth not G.o.d?'" he quoted gravely. "The priests of the Catholic church have long carried on missionary work among these tribes. We of the Protestant faith would be lacking if we did not try to extend our field, if we made no effort to bear light into the dark places. Man's spiritual need is always greater than any material need can ever be. I hardly expect to accomplish a great deal at first. But the work will grow."

"I see, I see," MacLeod chuckled dryly. "It's partly a matter of the Methodist Church tryin' to compete with the fathers, eh? Well, I am no what ye'd call devout. I ha' had much experience wi' these red folk, an'

them that's both red an' white. An' I dinna agree with ye aboot their speeritual needs. I think ye sky-pilots would do better to leave them to their ain G.o.ds, such as they are. Man, do ye know that it's better than a century since the fathers began their missionary labors? A hundred years of teachin' an' preachin'. The sum of it a' is next to nothin'--an' naebody knows that better than the same fathers. They're wise, keen-sighted men, too. What good they do they do in a material way. If men like ye came here wi' any cert.i.tude of lightenin' the struggle for existence--but ye canna do that; or at least ye dinna do that. Ye'll find that neither red men nor white ha' time or inclination to praise the Lord an' his grace an' bounty when their life's one long struggle wi' hards.h.i.+ps an' adversity. The G.o.d ye offer them disna mitigate these things. Forbye that, the Indian disna want to be Christianized. When ye come to a determination of abstract qualities, his pagan beliefs are as good for him as the G.o.d of the Bible. What right ha' we to cram oor speeritual dogmas doon his gullet?"

MacLeod applied himself to relighting his pipe. Thompson gathered himself together. He was momentarily stricken with speechless amazement.

He knew there were such things as critical unbelievers, but he had never encountered one in the flesh. His life had been too excellently supervised and directed in youth by the spinster aunts. Nor does materialistic philosophy flourish in a theological seminary. Young men in training for the ministry are taught to strangle doubt whenever it rears its horrid head, to see only with the single eye of faith.

Neither the bitterness of experience nor a natural gentleness of spirit had ever permitted Thompson to know the beauty and wisdom of tolerance.

Whosoever disputed his creed and his consecrated purpose must be in error. The evangelical spirit glowed within him when he faced the factor across the little table. Figuratively speaking he cleared for action.

His host, being a hard-headed son of a disputatious race, met him more than half-way. As a result midnight found them still wordily engaged, one maintaining with emotional fervor that man's spiritual welfare was the end and aim of human existence; the other as outspoken--if more calmly and critically so--in his a.s.sertion that a tooth-and-toenail struggle for existence left no room in any rational man's life for the manner of religion set forth in general by churches and churchmen. The edge of acrimony crept into the argument.

"The Lord said, 'Leave all thou hast and follow me,'" Thompson declared.

"My dear sir, you cannot dispute--"

"Ay, but yon word was said eighteen hundred years past," MacLeod interrupted. "Since which day there's been a fair rate o' progress in man's knowledge of himself an' his needs. The Biblical meeracles in the way o' provender dinna happen nowadays--although some ither modern commonplaces would partake o' the meeraculous if we didna have a rational knowledge of their process. Men are no fed wi' loaves and fishes until they themselves ha' first gotten the loaves an' the fish.

At least, it disna so happen i' the Pachugan deestreect. It's much the same the world over, but up here especially ye'll find that the problem o' subsistence is first an' foremost, an' excludes a' else till it's solved."

With this MacLeod, weary of an unprofitable controversy, arose, took up a candle and showed his scandalized guest the way to bed.

Thompson was full of a willingness to revive the argument when he was roused for breakfast at sunrise. But MacLeod had said his say. He abhorred vain repet.i.tion. Since it takes two to keep an argument going, Thompson's beginning was but the beginning of a monologue which presently died weakly of inattention. When he gave over trying to inject a theological motif into the conversation, he found MacLeod responsive enough. The factor touched upon native customs, upon the fur trade, upon the vast and unexploited resources of the North, all of which was more or less hazy to Thompson.

His men had intimated an early start. Their journey down the Athabasca had impressed Thompson with the wisdom of that. Only so could they escape the brazen heat of the sun, and still accomplish a fair day's travel. So he rose immediately from the breakfast table, when he saw Breyette and MacDonald standing by the canoe waiting for him. MacLeod halted him on the verandah steps to give a brusque last word of counsel.

"Look ye, Mr. Thompson," he said. "An honest bit of advice will do ye no harm. Ye're startin' out wi' a brave vision o' doin' a great good; of lettin' a flood o' light into dark places. Speakin' out my ain first-hand experience ye'll be fairly disappointed, because ye'll accomplish nought that's in yer mind. Ye'll have no trouble wi' the Crees. If ye remain among them long enough to mak' them understand yer talk an' objects they'll listen or not as they feel inclined. They're a simple, law-abidin' folk. But there's a white man at Lone Moose that ye'll do well to cultivate wi' discretion. He's a man o' positive character, and scholarly beyond what ye'd imagine. When ye meet him, dinna be sanctimonious. His philosophy'll no gibe wi' your religion, an'

if ye attempt to impose a meenesterial att.i.tude on him, it's no beyond possibility he'd flare up an' do ye bodily damage. I know him. If ye meet him man to man, ye'll find he'll meet ye half-way in everything but theology. He'll be the sort of friend ye'll need at Lone Moose. But dinna wave the Cloth in his face. For some reason that's to him like the proverbial red rag tae a bull. The last missionary tae Long Moose cam'

awa wi' a lovely pair o' black eyes Sam Carr bestowed on him. I'm forewarnin' ye for yer ain good. Ye can decry material benefits a' ye like, but it'll be a decided benefit if ye ha' Sam Carr for a friendly neighbor at Lone Moose."

"I don't deliberately seek religious controversy with any one," Thompson replied rather stiffly. "I have been sent by the Church to do what good I am able. That should not offend Mr. Carr, or any man."

"Nor will it," MacLeod returned. Then he added dryly, "It a' depends, as ye may discover, on the interpretation others put on your method o'

doin' good. However, I wish ye luck. Stop in whenever ye happen along this way."

"I thank you, sir," Thompson smiled, "both for your hospitality, and your advice."

They shook hands. Thompson strode to the beach. Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald stood bare-footed in the shallow water. When Thompson had stepped awkwardly aboard and seated himself amids.h.i.+ps, they lifted on the canoe and slid it gently off the s.h.i.+ngle, leaped to their places fore and aft and gave way. A hundred yards off sh.o.r.e they lifted the dripping paddles in mute adieu to old Donald McPhee, smoking his pipe at the gable end of his cabin. MacLeod watched the gray canoe slip past the first point. When it vanished beyond that he turned back into his quarters with a shrug of his burly shoulders, and a few unintelligible phrases muttered under his breath.

Lone Moose Creek emptied into Lake Athabasca some forty miles east of Fort Pachugan. The village of Lone Moose lay another twenty-five miles or so up the stream. Thompson's canoemen carried with them a rag of a sail. This they hoisted to a fair wind that held through the morning hours. Between that and steady paddling they made the creek mouth by sundown. There they lay overnight on a jutting sandbar where the mosquitoes plagued them less than on the brushy sh.o.r.e.

At dawn they pushed into the sinuous channel of Lone Moose, breasting its slow current with steady strokes, startling flocks of waterfowl at every bend, gliding hour after hour along this shadowy waterway that split the hushed reaches of the woods. It was very still and very somber and a little uncanny. The creek was but a thread in that illimitable forest which pressed so close on either hand. The sun at high noon could not dissipate the shadows that lurked among the close-ranked trees; it touched the earth and the creek with patches and streaks of yellow at rare intervals and left untouched the obscurity where the rabbits and the fur-bearing animals and all the wild life of the forest went furtively about its business. Once they startled a cow moose and her calf knee-deep in a shallow. The crash of their hurried retreat rose like a blare of bra.s.s horns cutting discordantly into the piping of a flute. But it died as quickly as it had risen. Even the beasts bowed before the invisible altars of silence.

About four in the afternoon Mike Breyette turned the nose of the canoe sharply into the bank.

The level of the forest floor lifted ten feet above Thompson's head so that he could see nothing beyond the earthy rim save the tops of trees.

He kept his seat while Mike tied the bow to a birch trunk with a bit of rope. He knew that they expected to land him at his destination before evening fell. This did not impress him as a destination. He did not know what Lone Moose would be like. The immensity of the North had left him rather incredulous. Nothing in the North, animate or inanimate, corresponded ever so little to his preconceived notions of what it would be like. His ideas of the natives had been tinctured with the flavor of Hiawatha and certain Leatherstocking tales which he had read with a sense of guilt when a youngster. He had really started out with the impression that Lone Moose was a collection of huts and tents about a log church and a missionary house. The people would be simple and high-minded, tillers of the soil in summer, trappers of fur in winter, humble seekers after the Light he was bringing. But he was not a fool, and he had been compelled to forego that illusion. Then he had surmised that Lone Moose might be a replica of Fort Pachugan. MacLeod had partly disabused his mind of that.

But he still could not keep out of his mind's eye a somewhat hazy picture of Lone Moose as a group of houses on the bank of a stream, with Indians and breeds--no matter how dirty and unkempt--going impa.s.sively about their business, an organized community, however rude. Here he saw nothing save the enfolding forest he had been pa.s.sing through since dawn. He scarcely troubled to ask himself why they had stopped. Breyette and MacDonald were given to casual haltings. He sat in irritable discomfort brus.h.i.+ng aside the hordes of mosquitoes that rose up from the weedy brink and the sh.o.r.e thickets to a.s.sail his tender skin. He did not notice that MacDonald was waiting for him to move. Mike Breyette looked down on him from the top of the bank.

"Well, we here, M'sieu Thompson," he said.

"What?" Thompson roused himself. "Here? Where is the village?"

Breyette waved a hand upstream.

"She's 'roun' de nex' bend," said he. "Two-three hundred yard. Dees w'ere de meeshonaire have hees cabanne."

Thompson could not doubt Breyette's statement. He recalled now that Mike had once told him the mission quarters were built a little apart from the village. But he peered up through the screen of birch and willow with a swift wave of misgiving. The forest enclosed him like the blank walls of a cell. He shrank from it as a sensitive nature shrinks from the melancholy suggestiveness of an open grave, and he could not have told why he felt that strange form of depression. He was wholly unfamiliar with any form of introspective inquiry, any a.n.a.lysis of a mental state. He had never held sad intellectual inquest over a dead hope, nor groped blindly for a ray of light in the inky blackness of a soul's despair.

Nevertheless, he was conscious that he felt very much as he might have felt if, for instance, his guides had stopped anywhere in those somber woods and without rhyme or reason set him and his goods ash.o.r.e and abandoned him forthwith. And when he crawled over the bow of the canoe and ascended the short, steep bank to a place beside Mike Breyette, this peculiar sense of being forsaken grew, if anything, more acute, more appalling.

They stood on the edge of the bank, taking a reconnaissance, so to speak. The forest flowed about them like a sea. On Thompson's left hand it seemed to thin a trifle, giving a faint suggestion of open areas beyond. Beginning where they stood, some time in past years a square place had been slashed out of the timber, trees felled and partly burned, the stumps still standing and the charred trunks lying all askew as they fell. The unlovely confusion of the uncompleted task was somewhat concealed by a rank growth of weeds and gra.s.s. This half-hearted attack upon the forest had let the sunlight in. It blazed full upon a cabin in the center of the clearing, a square, squat structure of logs with a roof of poles and dirt. A door and a window faced the creek, a window of tiny panes, a door that stood partly open, sagging forlornly upon its hinges.

"Is _that_ the house?" Thompson asked. It seemed to him scarcely credible. He suspected his guides, as he had before suspected them, of some rude jest at his expense.

"Dat's heem," Breyette answered. "Let's tak' leetle more close look on heem."

Thompson did not miss the faint note of commiseration in the half-breed's voice. It stung him a little, nearly made him disregard the spirit of abnegation he had been taught was a Christian's duty in his Master's service. He closed his lips on an impulsive protest against that barren unlovely spot, and stiffened his shoulders.

"I understand it has not been occupied for some time," he said as they moved toward the cabin.

But even forewarned as he was his heart sank a few degrees nearer to his square-toed shoes when he stepped over the threshold and looked about.

Little, forgotten things recurred to him, matters touched upon lightly, airily, by the deacons and elders of the Board of Missions when his appointment was made. He recalled hearing of a letter in which his predecessor had renounced that particular field and the ministry together, with what to Thompson had seemed the blasphemous statement that the North was no place for either G.o.d or man.

The place was foul with dirt and cobwebs, full of a musty odor. The swallows had nested along the ridge-pole. They fluttered out of the door, chattering protest against the invasion. Rat nests littered the corners and the brown rodents scuttled out with alarmed squeaks. The floor was of logs roughly hewn to flatness. Upon four blocks stood a rusty cookstove. A few battered, smoke-blackened pots and pans stood on a shelf and hung upon nails driven in the walls. A rough bedstead of peeled spruce poles stood in a corner. The remains of a bedtick moldered on the slats, its gra.s.s stuffing given over to the nests of the birds and rodents.

It was so utterly and dishearteningly foreign to the orderly arrangement, the meticulous neatness of the home wherein Thompson had grown to young manhood under the tutelage of the prim spinsters that he could scarcely accept as a reality that this, henceforth, was to be his abode.

He could only stand, with a feeling in his throat that was new in his experience of emotions, staring in dismay at this forlorn habitation abandoned to wind and weather, to the rats and the birds.