This hermit existence he kept up for over a fortnight. He had fought with Tommy Ashe and he felt diffident about inflicting his company on Tommy, considering the casus belli. Nor could he bring himself to a casual dropping in on Sam Carr. He shrank from meeting Sophie, from hearing the sound of her voice, from feeling the tumult of desire her nearness always stirred up in him. And there was nowhere else to go, no one with whom he could talk. He could not hold converse with the Crees. The Lachlan family relapsed into painful stiffness when he entered their house. There was no common ground between him and them.
He was really marking time until the next mail should arrive at Fort Pachugan. The days were growing shorter, the nights edged with sharp frosts. There came a flurry of snow that lay a day and faded slowly in the eye of the weakening sun.
Mr. Thompson, watching his daily diminishing food supply with sedulous consideration, knew that the winter was drawing near, a season merciless in its rigor. He knew that one of these days the northerly wind would bring down a storm which would blanket the land with snow that only the sun of the next May would banish. He was ill-prepared to face such an iron-jawed season.
If he stayed there it would just about take his quarterly salary to supply him with plain food and the heavier clothing he needed. But—he drew a long breath and asked himself one day why he should stay there. Why should he? He could not forbear a wry grimace when he tried to see himself carrying out his appointed task faithfully to the end—preaching vainly to uncomprehending ears month after month, year after year, stagnating mentally and suffocating spiritually in those silent forests where God and godly living was not a factor at all; where food, clothing, and shelter loomed bigger than anything else, because until these primary needs were satisfied a man could not rise above the status of a hungry animal.
Yet he shrank from giving up the ministry. He had been bred to it, his destiny sedulously shaped toward that end by the maiden aunts and the theological schools. It was, in effect, his trade. He could scarcely look equably upon a future apart from prayer meetings, from Bible classes, from carefully thought out and eloquently delivered sermons. He felt like a renegade when he considered quitting that chosen field. But he felt also that it was a field in which he had no business now.
He was still in this uncertain frame of mind a few days later when he borrowed a canoe from Lachlan and set out for the Fort. He had kept away from Carr's for nearly five weeks. Neither Sophie nor her father had come to his cabin again. Once or twice he had hailed Carr from a distance. In the height of his loneliness he had traversed the half-mile to Tommy Ashe's shack up Lone Moose, only to find it deserted. He learned later that Lachlan's oldest son and Ashe had gone partners to run a line of traps away to the north of the village. It occurred to Thompson that he might do the same—if—well, he would see about that when he got home from Pachugan.
The birch bark Lachlan let him have occasioned him many a rare tussle before he finally beached it at the Fort. The fall winds were roughening the lake. It was his first single-handed essay with the paddle. But he derived a certain satisfaction from winning alone against wind and water, and also gained food for thought in the odd circumstance of his growing tendency to get a glow out of purely physical achievements. It did not irk nor worry him now to sweat and strain for hours on end. Instead, he found in that continued, concentrated muscular effort a happy release from troublesome reflection.
His cheque was waiting. As he fingered the green slip whose face value was one hundred and twenty dollars, one fourth of his yearly stipend, he felt relieved, and at the same time oddly reluctant. Not until late in the evening did he get at the root of that reluctance. MacLeod had hospitably insisted on putting him up. They sat in the factor's living room before a great roaring fireplace. Their talk had lapsed into silence. MacLeod leaned back in his chair, pipe in hand, frowning abstractedly.
"Man," he said at length, his bearded face wrinkled with a smile, "I wish ye were no a preacher wi' labors i' the vineyard of the Lord tae occupy yer time. I'd have ye do a job for me."
"A job?" Thompson came out of his preoccupation.