Burned Bridges

knew how a deserted house goes to rack and ruin. They knew also how to restore such an abandoned place to a measur

mptiness of the North, the sultry heat of the brief summer, the flies, the deep snows

course. They saw that he was rather less capable of coping with such a situation than a ten-year-old native boy, that a dirty cabin in a lonely clearing made him stand aghast. A

lled the place out. MacDonald meanwhile cleared the weeds and grass from a space before the cabin and burned up the unseemly refuse. The stove fulfilled its functions perf

ght that burdened the canoe, and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt pork, boxes of

a meager thickness of blank

f an indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at the bottom. Incidentally he strove to impart to Thompson certain rudimentary principles in the cooking of simple food. He illustrated the method of mixing a batch of baking-powder bread, and how to parboil salt pork before cooking, explained to him the othe

was skinned, the two breeds cut into pieces the thickness of a man's wrist and as long as they could make them, rubbed well with salt and hung on a stretched line in the sun.

n was out of earshot. "Hees ask more damfool question een ten minute dan a man hees answer

r one brief exhibition of Thompson's axemanship. Short of remaining on the spot like a pair of swarthy guardian angels there was no further help they could give him, and their solicitude

breed familee call Lachlan, eef she's not move 'way somew'ere. Dat familee she's talk Henglish, and ver' fond of preacher. S'pos

ar, which article of dress he donned without a thought that the North was utterly devoid of laundries, that he would soon be reduced to flannel shirts which he must wash himself. His preparations gave the breeds another trick of his to grin slyly over. But Thompson was prep

the open meadow around which the Lone Moose villagers had built their cabins. Thompson swept the crescent with a glance, taking in the dozen or s

te responded to Thompson's inquiry. "Ah don' neve

sign of life about the Carr place, and his men were headed straight for their objective, walking hurriedly to get away from the hungry swarms of mosquitoes that rose out

is, to Thompson they seemed incongruities. The little things that go to make up a whole were each impinging upon him with a force he could not understand. He could not, for instance, tell why he thought only with difficulty, with extreme haziness, of the great good he desired to accomplish at Lone Moose, and found his attention focussing sharply upon the people, their m

mself more or less tongue-tied with them, unable to find any common ground of intercourse. They were wholly illiterate. As a natural consequence the world beyond the Athabasca region was as much of an unknown quantity to them as the North had been to Thompson before he set foot in it-as much of its needs and customs were yet, f

ly rose from its several knees with an air of some embarrassing matter well past. And they hastened to converse volubly upon the weather and the mosquitoes and Sam Carr's garden and a new canoe that Lachlan's boys were building, and

emed to regard him as a very great man, whose presence among the

ich he began to perceive resentfully could never have existed save in his imagination. He had been full of the impression, and the advice and information bestowed upon him by the Board of Missions had served to heighten the impression, that in Lone Moose he would fill a crying want.

uides would leave him to his lonely quarters. He beheld terrible vistas of loneliness, a state of feeling to which he had always been a stranger. He foresaw a series of vain struggles over that rusty cookstove. It

lity of these things until he faced them. Now that he did

enthusiasms and his tenuous plans-and slipped so far into the slough of despond as to call himself a misguided fool for rearing so fine a structure of dreams upon so slender a foundation

y Thompson turned upon himself with a bitter accusation of self-see

ntent and discouragement were stil