Mike Breyette took a last look over his shoulder as the current and the
thrust of two paddles carried the canoe around the first bend. Thompson
stood on the bank, watching them go.
"Bagosh, dat man hees gon' have dam toff time, Ah theenk," Breyette
voiced his conviction. "Feller lak heem got no beesness for be here
'tall."
"He didna have tae come here," MacDonald answered carelessly. "An' he
disna have tae stay."
"Oh, sure, Ah know dat, me," Mike agreed. "All same hees feel bad."
Which was a correct, if brief, estimate of Mr. Thompson's emotions as he
stood on the bank watching the gray canoe slip silently out of his ken.
That gave him a keener pang, a more complete sense of loss, than he had
ever suffered at parting with any one or anything. It was to him like
taking a last look before a leap in the dark. Thrown entirely upon his
own resources he felt wholly inadequate, found his breast filled with
incomprehensible misgivings. The work he had come there to do seemed to
have lost much of its force as a motive, as an inspiration. He felt
himself--so far as his mission to Lone Moose was concerned--in the
anomalous position of one compelled to make bricks without straw.
He was, in a word, suffering an acute attack of loneliness.
That was why the empty space of the clearing affected him with a
physical shrinking, why the neatly arranged interior of his cabin seemed
hollow, abandoned, terribly dispiriting. He longed for the sound of a
human voice, found himself listening for such a sound. The stillness was
not like the stillness of a park, nor an empty street, nor any of the
stillnesses he had ever experienced. It was not a kindly, restful
stillness,--not to him. It was the hollow hush of huge spaces emptied of
all life. Life was at his elbow almost but he could not make himself
aware of that. The forested wilderness affected him much as a small
child is affected by the dark. He was not afraid of this depressing
sense of emptiness, but it troubled him.
Before nine o'clock in the forenoon had rolled around he set off with
the express purpose of making himself acquainted with Sam Carr. Carr was
a white man, a scholar, MacLeod had said. Passing over the other things
MacLeod had mentioned for his benefit Thompson, in his dimly realized
need of some mental stimulus, could not think of a white man and a
scholar being aught but a special blessing in that primeval solitude.
Thompson had run across that phrase in books--primeval solitude. He was
just beginning to understand what it meant.
He set out upon his quest of Sam Carr with a good deal of unfounded
hope. In his own world, beginning with the churchly leanings of the
spinster aunts, through the successive steps of education and his
ultimate training for the ministry as a profession, the theological note
had been the note in which he reasoned and thought and felt. His
environment had grounded him in the belief that all the world vibrated
in unison with the theological harmonies. He had never had any doubts or
equivocations. Faith was everything, and he had abundance of faith. As a
matter of fact, until he encountered MacLeod, the factor of Fort
Pachugan, he had never crossed swords with a man open and sincere in
disbelief based on rational grounds. He had found those who evaded and
some who were indifferent, many who compromised, never before a sweeping
denial. He could not picture an atheist as other than a perverted
monster, a moral degenerate, the personification of all evil. This was
his conception of such as denied his God. Blasphemers. Foredoomed to
hell. Yet he had found MacLeod hospitable, ready with kindly advice,
occupying a position of trust in the service of a great company. Was it
after all possible that the essence of Christianity might not be the
exclusive possession of Christians?