A SLIP OF THE AXE
Mr. Thompson gradually became aware of a change in the season. The
calendar lost a good deal of its significance up there, partly because
he had no calendar and partly because one day was so much a duplicate of
another that the flitting of time escaped his notice. But he became
conscious that the days grew shorter, the nights a shade more cool, and
that the atmosphere was taking on that hazy, mellow stillness which
makes Indian Summer a period of rare beauty in the North. He took
serious stock of elapsed time then, and found to his surprise that it
was September the fifteenth.
He had not accomplished much. The walls of his church stood about the
level of his head. It grew increasingly difficult for him alone to hoist
the logs into place. The door and window spaces were out of square.
Without help he did not see how he was going to rectify these small
errors and get the roof on. Even after it should be roofed, the cracks
chinked and daubed with mud, the doors and windows in place--what then?
He would still lack hearers for the message which he daily grew a little
more doubtful of his ability to deliver. A native streak of stubbornness
kept him studying the language along with his daily tussle with the axe
and saw. But the rate of his progress was such that he pessimistically
calculated that it would take him at least two years before he could
preach with any degree of understanding in the Athabascan tongue.
So far he had never gone the length of candidly asking himself whether
by then it would be a task he could put his heart into, if he were even
fitted for such a work, or if it were a useful and worthy task if he
were gifted with a fitness for it. He had been taught that preaching the
gospel was a divinely appointed function. He had not questioned that.
But he had now a lively sense of difficulties hitherto unreckoned, and
an ill-stifled doubt of the good that might accrue. His blank ignorance
of the salient points of human contact, of why men work and play, why
they love and fight and marry and bend all their energies along certain
given lines until they grow old and gray and in the end cease to be,
only served to bewilder him. His association with Tommy Ashe and with
Carr and Carr's daughter--especially with Carr's daughter--further
accentuated the questioning uncertainty of his mind.
But that was all--merely an uncertainty which he tried to dissipate by
prayer and stern repression of smoldering doubts. At the same time while
he decried and resented their outspoken valuation of material
considerations he found himself constantly subject to those material
factors of daily living.
The first of these was food. When Mr. Thompson outfitted himself for
that spiritual invasion of Lone Moose he brought in four months'
supplies. He discovered now that his supply of certain articles was not
so adequate as he had been told it would be. Also he had learned from
Carr and Lachlan that if a man wintered at Lone Moose it was well to
bring in a winter's grub before the freeze-up--the canoe being a far
easier mode of transport than a dog-team and sled.
So Thompson stopped his building activities long enough to make a trip
to Pachugan. He got Lachlan's oldest son to go with him. His quarterly
salary was due, and he had a rather reluctant report of his work to
make. With the money he would be able to replenish his stock of sugar
and tea and dried fruit and flour. He decided too that he would have to
buy a gun and learn to use it as the source of his meat supply.
His sublime confidence in the organization which had sent him there
suffered a decided shock when he reached Fort Pachugan, and found no
remittance awaiting him. There was a letter from the Board secretary
breathing exhortations which sounded rather hollow in conjunction with
the absence of funds. Mr. Thompson, for the first time in his career,
found himself badly in need of money, irritated beyond measure by its
lack, painfully cognizant of its value. But he was too diffident to
suggest a credit on the strength of the cheque which, upon reflection,
he decided was merely delayed in the more or less uncertain mails. He
could make shift with what he had for another month. Nor did he mention
this slight difficulty to MacLeod.
That gentleman had greeted him heartily enough.
"Man, but ye look as if the country agreed wi' you," he observed, after
an appraising glance. "How goes the good work at Lone Moose?"
"There are difficulties," Thompson responded with an unintentional
touch of ambiguity. "But I daresay I'll manage in time to overcome
them."
He discovered in himself a disinclination to talk about his labors in
that field.
MacLeod smiled and forbore to press the subject. There were sundry
parcels for Sam Carr, a letter or two, and a varied assortment of
magazines. Thompson took these, after tarrying overnight at the post,
and started home, refusing MacLeod's cordial invitation to stay over a
day or two. He would be back again when the next mail was due, a matter
of four or five weeks. And late that same evening, by dint of a
favorable breeze that kept the canoe flying, and some hard pulling up
Lone Moose Creek, Thompson and the breed boy reached home.
Young Lachlan went off to his cabin. Mr. Thompson conscientiously lugged
the assortment of parcels and magazines over to Sam Carr's house, duly
delivered the three letters to Carr himself, and--for reasons that he
could not define as anything but an unwarrantable access of
shyness--declining the first invitation he had ever received to break
bread at Carr's table, hurried back to his own primitive quarters.
Perhaps the fact that Sophie Carr, curled up in a big chair, smiled at
him in a way that made his pulses quicken had something to do with his
hasty retreat. He was wary of the impulses and emotions she never failed
to stir in him when he was near her. There were times when he suspected
that she was aware of this power--which in his naïve conception of women
he believed almost uncanny in her--and that she amused herself by
exercising it upon him. And he resented that.
So he did not stay long enough to observe Carr lay two of his letters on
the table after a brief glance, and sit looking fixedly at the third,
which by the length of envelope and thickness of enclosure might
conceivably have contained some document of a legal or official nature.
Carr looked at this letter a long time before he tore it open. He took a
still longer time to peruse its contents. He sat for several minutes
thereafter turning the sheets over and over in his lean fingers, until
in fact he became aware that his daughter's eyes were fixed on him with
a lively curiosity in their gray depths.
"What is it, Dad?" she asked, as he tucked envelope and foolscap pages
into the inside pocket of his coat.
"Oh, nothing much," he said shortly.
But he leaned back in his chair and immediately became absorbed in
thought that accentuated the multitude of fine lines about his eyes and
drew his lips together in a narrow line. Sophie sat regarding him with a
look of wonder.
This trifling incident, naturally, did not come under the notice of Mr.
Thompson. Conceivably he would not have noticed had he been present, nor
have been in any degree interested.
He was, as a matter of fact, fully occupied at that precise moment with
the painful and disagreeable consequences of attempting to split
kindling by lantern light. To be specific the axe had glanced and cut a
deep gash in one side of his foot.
At about the particular moment in which Sam Carr leaned back in his
chair and fell into that brown study of a matter that was to have a
far-reaching effect, Mr. Thompson was seated on his haunches on his
cabin floor, his hands stained with blood and a considerable trail of
red marking his progress from woodpile to cabin. His face was white, and
his hands rather shaky by the time he finished binding up the wound. The
cut stung and burned. When he essayed to move he found himself quite
effectually crippled.
For the first time in his twenty-five years of carefully directed
existence Mr. Thompson swore a loud, round, Anglo-Saxon oath. Whether
this relieved his pent-up feelings or not he appeared to suffer no
remorse for the burst of profanity. Instead, he rose and limped
painfully about the building of a fire and the preparation of his
supper.