He discovered in himself a disinclination to talk about his labors in that field.
MacLeod smiled and forbore to press the subject. There were sundry parcels for Sam Carr, a letter or two, and a varied assortment of magazines. Thompson took these, after tarrying overnight at the post, and started home, refusing MacLeod's cordial invitation to stay over a day or two. He would be back again when the next mail was due, a matter of four or five weeks. And late that same evening, by dint of a favorable breeze that kept the canoe flying, and some hard pulling up Lone Moose Creek, Thompson and the breed boy reached home.
Young Lachlan went off to his cabin. Mr. Thompson conscientiously lugged the assortment of parcels and magazines over to Sam Carr's house, duly delivered the three letters to Carr himself, and—for reasons that he could not define as anything but an unwarrantable access of shyness—declining the first invitation he had ever received to break bread at Carr's table, hurried back to his own primitive quarters. Perhaps the fact that Sophie Carr, curled up in a big chair, smiled at him in a way that made his pulses quicken had something to do with his hasty retreat. He was wary of the impulses and emotions she never failed to stir in him when he was near her. There were times when he suspected that she was aware of this power—which in his naïve conception of women he believed almost uncanny in her—and that she amused herself by exercising it upon him. And he resented that.
So he did not stay long enough to observe Carr lay two of his letters on the table after a brief glance, and sit looking fixedly at the third, which by the length of envelope and thickness of enclosure might conceivably have contained some document of a legal or official nature.
Carr looked at this letter a long time before he tore it open. He took a still longer time to peruse its contents. He sat for several minutes thereafter turning the sheets over and over in his lean fingers, until in fact he became aware that his daughter's eyes were fixed on him with a lively curiosity in their gray depths.
"What is it, Dad?" she asked, as he tucked envelope and foolscap pages into the inside pocket of his coat.
"Oh, nothing much," he said shortly.
But he leaned back in his chair and immediately became absorbed in thought that accentuated the multitude of fine lines about his eyes and drew his lips together in a narrow line. Sophie sat regarding him with a look of wonder.
This trifling incident, naturally, did not come under the notice of Mr. Thompson. Conceivably he would not have noticed had he been present, nor have been in any degree interested.
He was, as a matter of fact, fully occupied at that precise moment with the painful and disagreeable consequences of attempting to split kindling by lantern light. To be specific the axe had glanced and cut a deep gash in one side of his foot.