He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the port of Halifax. There was a lump in his throat because of those two old women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them. There was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed. And he would have sold his soul to feel her arms around his neck and her lips on his before he went.
"Oh, well," he muttered to himself as he watched the few harbor lights falling astern, yellow pin-points on the velvety black of the shore," this is likely to be the finish of that. I think I've burned my last bridge. And I have learned to stand on my own feet, whether she believes so or not."
CHAPTER XXVII
THOMPSON'S RETURN
"Anon we return, being gathered again
Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."
On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.
Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the train below.