Thompson walked on. The white house with green shingles loomed up near at hand, with a clump of flaming maples beside it. Past that stood other houses in an orderly row facing the river, and back of them were sheds and barns, and beyond the group of buildings spread a wide area of cleared land with charred stumps still dotting many an acre.
He had to enter the place he took to be Sam Carr's by the back yard, so to speak. That is, he came up from the rear, passed alongside the house—and halted abruptly, with his foot on the first of three steps rising to a roomy verandah.
He had not meant to eavesdrop, to listen to words not meant for his hearing. But he had worn the common footgear of yachtsmen, a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes, and so had come to the verandah end unseen and noiselessly. He was arrested there by the sight of two people and the mention of his own name by one of them.
Sophie was sitting on the rail, looking soberly down on the glacial gray of Toba River. There was a queer expression on her face, a mixture of protest and resignation. Tommy Ashe stood beside her. He had imprisoned one of her hands between his own and he was speaking rapidly, eagerly, passionately.
Thompson had heard without meaning to hear. And what he heard, just a detached sentence or two, shot him through with a sudden blaze of anger. He stepped up on the floor, took quickly the three strides that separated him from Tommy.
"You are nothing but a common liar," he challenged bluntly. "You know you are, when you speak of me as being dead. Is that why you scuttled out of Vancouver and hurried on here, as soon as you saw me back?"
Ashe shrank back a step. His naturally florid face grew purple. Thompson matched him glance for glance, wondering as the moments ticked off why Tommy glared and did not strike.
"Your heart has grown as flabby as your principles," he said at last contemptuously.
For the instant, in anger at a lie, in that fighting mood which puts other considerations into abeyance when it grips a man, Thompson gave no heed to Sophie—until he felt her hand on his arm and looked down into her upturned face, white and troubled, into gray eyes that glowed with some peculiar fire.
"It is really, truly you?" she said in a choked voice.