Burned Bridges

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

He did not think these things in these terms. He found himself becoming involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly for words to define the unrest that was in him.

While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched, unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pass along one edge of his clearing, a cluster of bright-winged ducks slung over Tommy's shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came down a long corridor. They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr with a disturbing insistence.

The plague of mosquitoes had somewhat abated. In the early morning and for a time in the evening, and also when rain dampened the atmosphere, these pests still kept a man's hands busy warding them off. But through the dry heat of the day he could go abroad in reasonable comfort.

So now Mr. Thompson washed up his dishes in a fashion to make the lips of a careful housekeeper pucker in disdain, clapped on his broken-rimmed straw hat and sallied forth.

He was full of an earnest desire to do good, as he defined doing good. He had come here for that purpose, backed by an organization for just such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation, of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his business to show them with certainty the paths that led to each.

But he could not reach them unless he could speak their tongue, he could not gather them about him in the open meadow as the Man of Galilee gathered his disciples about him. The climate was against that simple procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a beginning—to learn the tribal language and to build a church.

He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled him to assimilate the messes he cooked without suffering acute indigestion. Likewise only a naïve turn of mind enabled him to ward off mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he struggled with pronunciations and meanings like a child learning the alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons. And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was to be a meeting-house.

He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved. He had to fell trees, to lop off the branches, and cut the trunks to proper length, then roll them with infinite effort to their proper place in the structure. He could only gather how a log building could be erected by asking Lachlan, and by taking the Lone Moose cabins for his model. And he was a fearful and wonderful axeman. His log ends looked as if chewed by a beaver, except that they lacked the beaver's neatness of finish. His feet suffered manifold hairbreadth escapes from the sharp blade. He could never guess which way a tree would fall. For a week's work he had got two courses of logs laid in position.

He did not allow his mind to dwell on the ultimate outcome of this task, because he was uneasily aware that Lone Moose was smiling slyly behind its brown hand at him and his works. In his mind there was nothing for it but a church. He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan's house, with Lachlan senior to interpret his words. The Indians had come. Indeed, they had come en masse. They packed the room he spoke in, big and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond. The day was very hot, the roof low, the windows closed. There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and sturdy smell that came near to sickening Mr. Thompson. He was extraordinarily glad when he got outside. That closeness—to speak mildly—coupled with the heavy, copper-red faces, impassive as masks, impersonally listening with scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man's thoughts would not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.

Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.