Then they drew a little apart and squatted on the bank of the creek to
lave their battered faces in the cold water.
For a period of possibly five minutes they sat dabbling water-soaked
handkerchiefs upon their faces. The blood ceased to ooze from Thompson's
nostrils. Tommy Ashe looked over at his late antagonist and remarked
casually.
"We're a pair of capital idiots, eh, Thompson?"
Mr. Thompson tried to smile. But his countenance was swelling rapidly
and was in no condition for smiling. He mustered up a grimace, nodding
assent.
"I hope Sophie didn't see us making such asses of ourselves," Tommy
continued ruefully.
"I hardly think she would," Thompson returned. "It couldn't have been
the sort of spectacle a woman would care to watch."
"You never can tell about a woman," Ashe observed thoughtfully. "Nor,"
he added, "a man. I could never have imagined myself going off
half-cocked like that. I suppose the primitive brute in us is never
really far from the surface. Especially in this country. There's
something," he looked up at the surrounding depths of forest, down along
the dusky channel of Lone Moose, curving away among the spruce, "there's
something about this infernal solitude that brings out the savage. I've
noticed it in little things. We're loosed, in a way, from all restraint,
except what we put upon ourselves. Funny world, eh? You couldn't
imagine two chaps like us mauling each other like a pair of bruisers in
Mrs. Grundy's drawing-room, could you? Over a girl--oh, well, it'll be
all the same a hundred years from now."
There was nothing apologetic in either Tommy's tone or words. Thompson
understood. Tommy Ashe was thinking out loud, that was all. And
presently, after another silent interval, he stood up.
"I think I'll be getting back to my own diggings," he said. "So long,
old man."
He nodded, pushed off his canoe and stepped aboard. In a minute he was
gone around the bend, driving the red canoe with slow, deliberate
strokes.
Mr. Thompson gave over musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy's words and
attitude, and began to take stock of himself. It seemed to him that
Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his
earlier life and the code he had assimilated during that formative
period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of
shame. And he felt no shame. On the contrary he experienced nothing more
than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration. Why, he could not
determine. It was un-Christian, undignified, brutal, to give and take
blows, to feel that vicious determination to smash another man with his
bare fists, to know the unholy joy of getting a blow home with all the
weight of his body behind it. Mr. Thompson was a trifle dazed, a trifle
uncertain. His face was puffed out of its natural contours, and very
tender in spots to touch. He knew that he must be a sight. There was a
grievous stiffness creeping over his arms and shoulders, an ache in his
ribs, as his heated body began to cool. But he was not sorry for
anything. He experienced no regrets. Only a heady feeling that for once
in his life he had met an emergency and had been equal to the demand.