But he still could not keep out of his mind's eye a somewhat hazy picture of Lone Moose as a group of houses on the bank of a stream, with Indians and breeds—no matter how dirty and unkempt—going impassively about their business, an organized community, however rude. Here he saw nothing save the enfolding forest he had been passing through since dawn. He scarcely troubled to ask himself why they had stopped. Breyette and MacDonald were given to casual haltings. He sat in irritable discomfort brushing aside the hordes of mosquitoes that rose up from the weedy brink and the shore thickets to assail his tender skin. He did not notice that MacDonald was waiting for him to move. Mike Breyette looked down on him from the top of the bank.
"Well, we here, M'sieu Thompson," he said.
"What?" Thompson roused himself. "Here? Where is the village?"
Breyette waved a hand upstream.
"She's 'roun' de nex' bend," said he. "Two-three hundred yard. Dees w'ere de meeshonaire have hees cabanne."
Thompson could not doubt Breyette's statement. He recalled now that Mike had once told him the mission quarters were built a little apart from the village. But he peered up through the screen of birch and willow with a swift wave of misgiving. The forest enclosed him like the blank walls of a cell. He shrank from it as a sensitive nature shrinks from the melancholy suggestiveness of an open grave, and he could not have told why he felt that strange form of depression. He was wholly unfamiliar with any form of introspective inquiry, any analysis of a mental state. He had never held sad intellectual inquest over a dead hope, nor groped blindly for a ray of light in the inky blackness of a soul's despair.
Nevertheless, he was conscious that he felt very much as he might have felt if, for instance, his guides had stopped anywhere in those somber woods and without rhyme or reason set him and his goods ashore and abandoned him forthwith. And when he crawled over the bow of the canoe and ascended the short, steep bank to a place beside Mike Breyette, this peculiar sense of being forsaken grew, if anything, more acute, more appalling.
They stood on the edge of the bank, taking a reconnaissance, so to speak. The forest flowed about them like a sea. On Thompson's left hand it seemed to thin a trifle, giving a faint suggestion of open areas beyond. Beginning where they stood, some time in past years a square place had been slashed out of the timber, trees felled and partly burned, the stumps still standing and the charred trunks lying all askew as they fell. The unlovely confusion of the uncompleted task was somewhat concealed by a rank growth of weeds and grass. This half-hearted attack upon the forest had let the sunlight in. It blazed full upon a cabin in the center of the clearing, a square, squat structure of logs with a roof of poles and dirt. A door and a window faced the creek, a window of tiny panes, a door that stood partly open, sagging forlornly upon its hinges.
"Is that the house?" Thompson asked. It seemed to him scarcely credible. He suspected his guides, as he had before suspected them, of some rude jest at his expense.
"Dat's heem," Breyette answered. "Let's tak' leetle more close look on heem."