Burned Bridges Part 4

"My name is Thompson." His diffidence, verging upon forthright embarra.s.sment, precipitated him into abruptness. He was addressing the older man, a spare-built man with a trim gray beard and a disconcerting direct gaze. "I am a newcomer to this place. The factor of Fort Pachugan spoke of a Mr. Carr here. Have I--er--the--ah--pleasure of addressing that gentleman?"

Carr's gray eyes twinkled, the myriad of fine creases radiating from their outer corners deepened.

"MacLeod mentioned me, eh? Did he intimate that meeting me might prove a doubtful pleasure for a gentleman of your calling?"

That momentarily served to heighten Mr. Thompson's embarra.s.sment--like a flank attack while he was in the act of waving a flag of truce. But he perceived that there was no malice in the words, only a flash of ironic humor. Carr chuckled dryly.

"Meet Mr. Tommy Ashe, Mr. Thompson," he said. "Mr. Ashe is, like yourself, a newcomer to Lone Moose. You may be able to exchange mutual curses on the country. People usually do at first."

"I've been hereabouts six months," Ashe smiled as he rose to shake hands. (Carr's friendliness seemed a trifle negative, reserved; he had not offered his hand.)

"That means newly come, as time is reckoned here," Carr remarked. "It takes at least a generation to make one permanent. Have a seat, Mr.

Thompson. What do you think, so far, of the country you have selected for the scene of your operations?"

The slightly ironic inflection was not lost upon Thompson. It nettled him a little, but it was too intangible to be resented, and in any case he had no ready defence against that sort of thing. He took a third chair between the two of them and occupied himself a moment exterminating a few mosquitoes which had followed him from the gra.s.sy floor of the meadow and now slyly sought to find painful lodgment upon his face and neck.

"To tell the truth," he said at last, "everything is so different from my expectations that I find myself a bit uncertain. One finds--well--certain drawbacks."

"Material or spiritual?" Carr inquired gravely.

The Reverend Thompson considered.

"Both," he answered briefly.

This was the most candid admission he had ever permitted himself. Carr laughed quietly.

"Well," said he, "we are a primitive folk in a primitive region. But I daresay you hope to accomplish a vast change for the better in us, if not in the country?"

Again there was that suggestion of mockery, veiled, scarcely perceptible, a matter of inflection. Mr. Thompson found himself uttering an entirely unpremeditated reply.

"Which I daresay you doubt, Mr. Carr. You seem to be fully aware of my mission here, and rather dubious as to its merit."

Carr smiled.

"News travels fast in a country where even a pa.s.sing stranger is a notable event," he remarked. "Naturally one draws certain conclusions when one hears that a minister has arrived in one's vicinity. As to my doubts--first and last I've seen three different men sent here by your Board of Home Missions. They have made no more of an impression than a pebble chucked into the lake. Your Board of Missions must be a visionary lot. They should come here in a body. This country would destroy some of their cherished illusions."

"A desire to serve is not an illusion," Thompson said defensively.

"One would have to define service before one could dispute that," Carr returned casually. "What I mean is that the people who send you here have not the slightest conception of what they send you to. When you get here you find yourself rather at sea. Isn't it so?"

"In a sense, yes," Thompson reluctantly admitted.

"Oh, well," Carr said, with a gesture of dismissing the subject, "that is your private business in any case. We won't get on at all if we begin by discussing theology, and dissecting the theological motive and activities. Do you hunt or fish at all, Mr. Thompson?"

Mr. Thompson did not, and expressed no hankering for such pursuits.

There came a lapse in the talk. Carr got out his pipe and began stuffing the bowl of it with tobacco. Tommy Ashe sat gazing impa.s.sively over the meadow, slapping at an occasional mosquito.

"Tommy might give you a few pointers on game," Carr remarked at last.

"He has the sporting instinct. It hasn't become a commonplace routine with him yet, a matter of getting meat, as it has to the rest of us up here."

Ashe made his first vocal contribution.

"If you're going to be about here for awhile," said he pleasantly, "you'll find it interesting to dodge about after things in the woods with a gun. Keeps you fit, for one thing. Lots of company in a dog and a gun. Is it a permanent undertaking, this missionary work of yours, Mr.

Thompson?"

"We hope to make it so," Mr. Thompson responded.

"I should say you've taken on the deuce of a job," Tommy commented frankly.

Thompson had no inclination to dispute that. He had periods of thinking so himself.

The conversation languished again.

Without ever having been aware of it Thompson's circle of friends and acquaintances had been people of wordy inclination. Their thoughts dripped unceasingly from their tongue's end like water from a leaky faucet. He had never come in contact with a type of men who keep silent unless they have something to say, who think more than they speak. The spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of no mental reservations whatever. The young men of his group had not been much different. The reflective att.i.tude as opposed to the discursive was new to him. New and embarra.s.sing. He felt impelled to talk, and while he groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more acutely self-conscious. He felt that these men were calmly taking his measure. Especially Sam Carr.

He wanted to go on talking. He protested against their intercourse congealing in that fas.h.i.+on. But he could find no opening. His conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a ba.n.a.lity about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and frost. Then they were silent again.

Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he sought Carr. He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which his training had made nearly second nature. This for the sake of intelligent companions.h.i.+p. He was like a man sentenced to solitary confinement. Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such, a break in the ghastly solitude. But he was fast succ.u.mbing to a despair of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr standing within arm's length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness, a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of puzzlement.

A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson. His heart leaped.

Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his blood in the presence of a woman. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does happen. It was so in Thompson's case. Staring into the clear pools of Sophie Carr's gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman first dawned on him. Something that made him feel a pa.s.sionate sense of incompleteness.

He did not think this. The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon within him. It had nothing to do with his mental processes. It was purely an instinctive revelation. A blind man whose sight has been restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more bewildered than he. It was as if indeed he had been blind.

All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him. There was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its appeal, from the perfect oval of her face down to the small feet in bead-ornamented moccasins. A woman's eyes, her hair, her hands, her bearing--these things had never obtruded upon his notice before. Yet he saw now that a shaft of sunlight on her hair made it s.h.i.+mmer like ripe wheat straw, that her breast was full and rounded, her lips red and sweetly curved. But it was not alone that swift revelation of seductive beauty, or warm human desirableness, that stirred him so deeply, that afflicted him with those queer uncomfortable sensations. He found himself struggling with a sense of guilt, of shame. The world, the flesh, and the devil seemed leagued against his peace of mind.

He was filled with an incredulous wonder as to what manner of thing this was which had blown through the inner recesses of his being like a gusty wind through an open door. He had grown to manhood with nothing but a cold, pa.s.sionless tolerance in his att.i.tude toward women. Technically he was aware of s.e.x, advised as to its pitfalls and temptations; actually he could grasp nothing of the sort. A very small child is incapable of a.s.sociating pain with a hot iron until the hot iron has burned him. Even then he can scarcely correlate cause and effect. Neither could Thompson.

No woman had ever before stirred his pulse to an added beat.

But this--this subtle, mysterious emanation from a smiling girl at his elbow singed him like a flame. If he had been asleep he was now in a moment breathlessly, confusedly awake.

The commotion was all inward, mental. Outwardly he kept his composure, and the only sign of that turmoil was a tinge of color that rose in his face. And as if there was some mysterious mode of communication established between them a faint blush deepened the delicate tint of Sophie Carr's cheeks. Thompson rose. So did Tommy Ashe with some haste when he perceived her there.

"No, no," she protested. "Keep your chairs, please."

"Mr. Thompson," Carr's keen old eyes flickered between the two men and the girl. "My daughter. Mr. Thompson is the latest leader of the forlorn hope at Lone Moose, Sophie."

Mr. Thompson murmured some conventional phrase. He was mightily disturbed without knowing why he was so disturbed, and rather fearful of showing this incomprehensible state. The girl's manner put him a little at his ease. She gave him her hand, soft warm fingers that he had a mad impulse to press. He wondered why he felt like that. He wondered why even the tones of her voice gave him a thrill of pleasure.

"So you are the newest missionary to Lone Moose?" she said. "I wish you luck."

Although her voice was full, throaty like a meadow lark's, her tone carried the same sardonic inflection he had noticed in her father's comment on his mission. It pained Thompson. He had no available weapon against that sort of attack. But the girl did not pursue the matter. She said to her father:

"Crooked Tree's oldest son is in the kitchen and wants to speak to you, Dad."

Carr rose. So did Thompson. He wanted to get away, to think, to fortify himself somehow against this siren call in his blood. He was sadly perplexed. Measured by his own standards, even to harbor such thoughts as welled up in his mind was a sinful weakness of the flesh. He was in as much anxiety to get away from Carr's as he had been to find a welcome there.