He had not accomplished much. The walls of his church stood about the level of his head. It grew increasingly difficult for him alone to hoist the logs into place. The door and window spaces were out of square. Without help he did not see how he was going to rectify these small errors and get the roof on. Even after it should be roofed, the cracks chinked and daubed with mud, the doors and windows in place—what then?
He would still lack hearers for the message which he daily grew a little more doubtful of his ability to deliver. A native streak of stubbornness kept him studying the language along with his daily tussle with the axe and saw. But the rate of his progress was such that he pessimistically calculated that it would take him at least two years before he could preach with any degree of understanding in the Athabascan tongue.
So far he had never gone the length of candidly asking himself whether by then it would be a task he could put his heart into, if he were even fitted for such a work, or if it were a useful and worthy task if he were gifted with a fitness for it. He had been taught that preaching the gospel was a divinely appointed function. He had not questioned that. But he had now a lively sense of difficulties hitherto unreckoned, and an ill-stifled doubt of the good that might accrue. His blank ignorance of the salient points of human contact, of why men work and play, why they love and fight and marry and bend all their energies along certain given lines until they grow old and gray and in the end cease to be, only served to bewilder him. His association with Tommy Ashe and with Carr and Carr's daughter—especially with Carr's daughter—further accentuated the questioning uncertainty of his mind.
But that was all—merely an uncertainty which he tried to dissipate by prayer and stern repression of smoldering doubts. At the same time while he decried and resented their outspoken valuation of material considerations he found himself constantly subject to those material factors of daily living.
The first of these was food. When Mr. Thompson outfitted himself for that spiritual invasion of Lone Moose he brought in four months' supplies. He discovered now that his supply of certain articles was not so adequate as he had been told it would be. Also he had learned from Carr and Lachlan that if a man wintered at Lone Moose it was well to bring in a winter's grub before the freeze-up—the canoe being a far easier mode of transport than a dog-team and sled.
So Thompson stopped his building activities long enough to make a trip to Pachugan. He got Lachlan's oldest son to go with him. His quarterly salary was due, and he had a rather reluctant report of his work to make. With the money he would be able to replenish his stock of sugar and tea and dried fruit and flour. He decided too that he would have to buy a gun and learn to use it as the source of his meat supply.
His sublime confidence in the organization which had sent him there suffered a decided shock when he reached Fort Pachugan, and found no remittance awaiting him. There was a letter from the Board secretary breathing exhortations which sounded rather hollow in conjunction with the absence of funds. Mr. Thompson, for the first time in his career, found himself badly in need of money, irritated beyond measure by its lack, painfully cognizant of its value. But he was too diffident to suggest a credit on the strength of the cheque which, upon reflection, he decided was merely delayed in the more or less uncertain mails. He could make shift with what he had for another month. Nor did he mention this slight difficulty to MacLeod.
That gentleman had greeted him heartily enough.
"Man, but ye look as if the country agreed wi' you," he observed, after an appraising glance. "How goes the good work at Lone Moose?"
"There are difficulties," Thompson responded with an unintentional touch of ambiguity. "But I daresay I'll manage in time to overcome them."