Bertrand W. Sinclair - Burned Bridges

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BURNED BRIDGES

by

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

Author of North of Fifty-Three, etc.

Frontispiece by Ralph P. Coleman

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Published, August, 1919
Reprinted, September, 1919
Reprinted, October, 1919
Reprinted, November, 1919
Reprinted, February, 1920

[Illustration: He felt with an odd exaltation the quick hammer of her
heart against his breast. Frontispiece. _See page 95._]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I The First Problem 1

II The Man and His Mission 14

III The Deserted Cabin 24

IV In Which Mr. Thompson Begins to Wonder Painfully 37

V Further Acquaintance 46

VI Certain Perplexities 60

VII A Slip of the Axe 80

VIII --And the Fruits Thereof 86

IX Universal Attributes 93

X The Way of a Maid with a Man 102

XI A Man's Job for a Minister 111

XII A Fortune and a Flitting 123

XIII Partners 139

XIV The Restless Foot 150

XV The World Is Small 158

XVI A Meeting by the Way 168

XVII The Reproof Courteous (?) 183

XVIII Mr. Henderson's Proposition 191

XIX A Widening Horizon 203

XX The Shadow 210

XXI The Renewed Triangle 218

XXII Sundry Reflections 227

XXIII The Fuse-- 235

XXIV --And the Match That Lit the Fuse-- 244

XXV --And the Bomb the Fuse Fired 252

XXVI The Last Bridge 267

XXVII Thompson's Return 273

XXVIII Fair Winds 282

XXIX Two Men and a Woman 291

XXX A Mark to Shoot at 298

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST PROBLEM

Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open stretches
of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python--a python that rested
its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail was lost in a
great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy sloughs and
hushed lakes far northward.

The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no others. No
wheeled vehicles traverse that silent region which lies just over the
fringe of the prairies and the great Canadian wheat belt. The canoe is
lord of those watery roads; when a man would diverge therefrom he must
carry his goods upon his back. There are paths, to be sure, very faint
in places, padded down by the feet of generations of Athabascan
tribesmen long before the Ancient and Honorable Company of Adventurers
laid the foundation of the first post at Hudson's Bay, long before the
_Half Moon's_ prow first cleft those desolate waters. They have been
trodden, these dim trails, by Scotch and French and English since that
historic event, and by a numerous progeny in whose veins the blood of
all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. But these paths
lead only from stream to stream and from lake to lake. No man familiar
with the North seeks along those faint trails for camp or fur posts or
villages. Wherever in that region red men or white set up a permanent
abode it must of necessity be on the bank of a stream or the shore of a
lake, from whence by canoe and paddle access is gained to the network of
water routes that radiate over the fur country.

Lone Moose Creek was, so to speak, a trunk line. The ninety miles of its
main channel, its many diverging branches, tapped a region where mink
and marten and beaver, fox and wolf and lesser furs were still fairly
plentiful. Along Lone Moose a dozen Cree and half-breed families
disappeared into the back country during the hazy softness of Indian
summer and came gliding down in the spring with their winter's catch, a
birch-bark flotilla laden indiscriminately with mongrel dogs and
chattering women and children and baled furs and impassive-faced men,
bound for Port Pachugan to the annual barter.

Up Lone Moose some twenty-odd miles from the lake the social instinct
had drawn a few families, pure-blooded Cree, and Scotch and French
half-breeds, to settle in a permanent location. There was a
crescent-shaped area of grassy turf fronting upon the eastern bank of
Lone Moose, totaling perhaps twenty acres. Its outer edge was ringed
with a dense growth of spruce timber. In the fringe of these dusky
woods, at various intervals of distance, could be seen the outline of
each cabin. They were much of a sort--two or three rooms, log-walled,
brush laid upon poles, and sod on top of that for a roof, with
fireplaces built partly of mud, partly of rough stones. Folk in such
circumstances waste no labor in ornamentation. Each family's abiding
place was purely utilitarian. They cultivated no land, and the meadow
during the brief season supplied them with a profusion of delicate
flowers a southern garden could scarcely excel. Aside from a few trees
felled about each home site, their common effort had cleared away the
willows and birch which bordered the creek bank, so that an open landing
was afforded the canoes.

There was but one exception to the monotonous similitude of these
several habitations. A few paces back from the stream and standing
boldly in the open rose a log house double the size of any other there.
It contained at least four rooms. Its windows were of ample size, the
doors neatly carpentered. A wide porch ran on three sides. It bore about
itself an air of homely comfort, heightened by muslin at the windows, a
fringe of poppies and forget-me-nots blooming in an orderly row before
it, and a sturdy vine laden with morning-glories twining up each
supporting column of the porch roof.

Between the house and the woods an acre square was enclosed by a tall
picket fence. Within the fence, which was designed as a barricade
against foraging deer, there grew a variety of vegetables. The produce
of that garden had grown famous far beyond Lone Moose village. But the
spirit and customs and traditions of the gardener's neighbors were all
against any attempt to duplicate it. They were hunters and trappers and
fishermen. The woods and waters supplied their every need.

Upon a blistering day in July, a little past noon, a man stepped out on
the porch, and drawing into the shadiest part a great, rude homemade
chair upholstered with moosehide, sat down. He had a green-bound book in
his hand. While he stuffed a clay pipe full of tobacco he laid the
volume across his knees. Every movement was as deliberate as the flow of
the deep stream near by. When he had stoked up his pipe he leaned back
and opened the book. The smoke from his pipe kept off what few
mosquitoes were abroad in the scorching heat of midday.

A casual glance would at once have differentiated him from a native,
held him guiltless of any trace of native blood. His age might have been
anywhere between forty and fifty. His hair, now plentifully shot with
gray, had been a light, wavy brown. His eyes were a clear gray, and his
features were the antithesis of his high-cheekboned neighbors. Only the
weather-beaten hue of his skin, and the scores of fine seams radiating
from his eyes told of many seasons squinting against hot sunlight and
harsh winds.

Whatever his vocation and manner of living may have been he was now
deeply absorbed in the volume he held. A small child appeared on the
porch, a youngster of three or thereabouts, with swarthy skin, very dark
eyes, and inky-black hair. He went on all fours across Sam Carr's
extended feet several times. Carr remained oblivious, or at least
undisturbed, until the child stood up, laid hold of his knee and shook
it with playful persistence. Then Carr looked over his book, spoke to
the boy casually, shaking his head as he did so. The boy persisted after
the juvenile habit. Carr raised his voice. An Indian woman, not yet of
middle age but already inclining to the stoutness which overtakes women
of her race early in life, appeared in the doorway. She spoke sharply to
the boy in the deep, throaty language of her people. The boy, with a
last impish grin, gave the man's leg a final shake and scuttled indoors.
Carr impassively resumed his reading.

An hour or so later he lifted his eyes from the printed page at a
distant boom of thunder. The advanced edge of a black cloudbank rolling
swiftly up from the east was already dimming the brassy glare of the
sun. He watched the swift oncoming of the storm. With astonishing
rapidity the dark mass resolved itself into a gray, obscuring streak of
rain riven by vivid flashes of lightning. Carr laid down his book and
refilled his pipe while he gazed on this common phenomenon of the
dog-days. It swept up and passed over the village of Lone Moose as a
sprinkling wagon passes over a city street. The downpour was accompanied
by crashing detonations that sent the village dogs howling to cover.
With the same uncanny swiftness of gathering so it passed, leaving
behind a pleasant coolness in the air, clean smells of the washed earth
arising. The sun blazed out again. A million rain-pearls hung glistening
on the blades of grass in the meadow before Sam Carr's house.

With the passing of the thunder shower, before Carr left off his
contemplation of the freshened beauty of meadow and woods, a man and a
woman emerged from the spruce forest on the farther side of the meadow.

They walked a little way in the open, stopped for a minute, facing each
other. Their conversation ended with a sudden quick gesture by the man.
Turning, they came on again toward Carr's house. Sam Carr's clear gray
eyes lit up. The ghost of a smile hovered about his bearded lips. He
watched them approach with that same quizzical expression, a mixture, if
one gauged his look aright, of pleasure and pride and expectation.

They were young as years go, the pair that walked slowly up to the
cabin. The man was certainly still in his twenties, of medium height,
compactly muscular, a good-looking specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon manhood.
The girl was a flower in perfect bloom, fresh-colored, slender and
pliant as a willow, with all of the willow's grace in every movement.
For all the twenty-odd years between them, and the gulf of sex
differentiation, there was in her glance and bearing much of the
middle-aged man who sat on the porch with a book across his knees and a
clay pipe in his mouth. It did not lie in facial resemblance. It was
more subtle than likeness of feature. Perhaps it was because of their
eyes, alike deep gray, wide and expressive, lifted always to meet
another's in level unembarrassed frankness.

They halted at the edge of the porch. The girl sat down. The young man
nodded to Carr. Though they had but lately been fair in the path of the
thunderstorm they had escaped a wetting. The girl's eyes followed her
father's glance, seemed to read his thought.

"We happened to find a spruce thick enough to shed the rain," she
smiled. "Or I suppose we'd have been soaked properly."

The young fellow tarried only till she was seated. He had no more than
greeted Carr before he lifted his old felt hat to her.

"I'll be paddling back while the coolness lasts," said he. "Good-by."

"Good-by, Tommy," the girl answered.

"So long," Carr followed suit. "Don't give us the go-by too long."

"Oh, no danger."

He walked to the creek bank, stepped into a red canoe that lay nose on
to the landing, and backed it free with his paddle. Ten strokes of the
blade drove him out of sight around the first brushy bend upstream.

The girl looked thoughtfully after him. Her face was flushed, and her
eyes glowed with some queer repressed feeling. Carr sat gazing silently
at her while she continued to look after the vanished canoe whose
passing left tiny swirls on the dark, sluggish current of Lone Moose.
Presently Carr gave the faintest shrug of his lean shoulders and resumed
the reading of his book.

When he looked up from the page again after a considerable interval the
girl's eyes were fixed intently upon his face, with a queer questioning
expression in them, a mute appeal. He closed his book with a forefinger
inserted to mark the place, and leaned forward a trifle.

"What is it, Sophie?" he asked gently. "Eh?"

The girl, like her father, and for that matter the majority of those
who dwelt in that region, wore moccasins. She sat now, rubbing the damp,
bead-decorated toe of one on top of the other, her hands resting idle in
the lap of her cotton dress. She seemed scarcely to hear, but Carr
waited patiently. She continued to look at him with that peculiar,
puzzled quality in her eyes.

"Tommy Ashe wants me to marry him," she said at last.

The faint flush on her smooth cheeks deepened. The glow in her eyes gave
way altogether to that vaguely troubled expression.

Carr stroked his short beard reflectively.

"Well," he said at length, "seeing that human nature's what it is, I
can't say I'm surprised any more than I would be surprised at the trees
leafing out in spring. And, as it happens, Tommy observed the
conventions of his class in this matter. He asked me about it a few days
ago. I referred him to you. Are you going to?"

"I don't know, Dad," she murmured.

"Do you want to?" he pursued the inquiry in a detached, impersonal tone.

"I don't know," she repeated soberly. "I like Tommy a lot. When I'm with
him I feel sure I'd be perfectly happy to be always with him. When I'm
away from him, I'm not so sure."

"In other words," Carr observed slowly, "your reason and your emotions
are not in harmony on that subject. Eh? So far as Tommy Ashe goes, your
mind and your body pull you two different ways."

She looked at him a little more keenly.

"Perhaps," she said. "I know what you mean. But I don't clearly see why
it should be so. Either I love Tommy Ashe, or I don't, and I should know
which, shouldn't I? The first and most violent manifestation of love is
mostly physical, isn't it? I've always understood that. You've pointed
it out. I do like Tommy. Why should my mind act as a brake on my
feelings?"

"Because you happen to be made the way you are," Carr returned
thoughtfully. "As I've told you a good many times, you've grown up a
good deal different from the common run of girls. We've been isolated.
Lacking the time-occupying distractions and pleasures of youth in a more
liberal environment, Sophie, you've been thrown back on yourself and me
and books, and as a result you've cultivated a natural tendency to
_think_. Most young women don't. They're seldom taught any rational
process of arriving at conclusions. You have developed that faculty. It
has been my pride and pleasure to cultivate in you what I believed to be
a decided mentality. I've tried to show you how to get down to
fundamentals, to work out a philosophy of life that's really workable.
Knowledge is worth having for its own sake. Once you find yourself in
contact with the world--and for you that time is bound to come--you'll
apply all the knowledge you've absorbed to problems as they arise. If
there's a rational solution to any situation that faces you, you'll make
an effort to find that solution. You'll do it almost instinctively. You
can't help it. Your brain is too alert ever to let you act blindly. At
the present your lack of experience probably handicaps you a little. In
human relations you have nothing much but theory, got from the books
you've digested and the way we've always discussed every possible angle
of life. Take Tommy Ashe. He's practically the first young, attractive
white man you've ever met, the very first possibility as a lover.
Tommy's a nice boy, a pleasant, sunny-natured young fellow. Personally
he's just the sort of fellow that would sweep a simple country girl
clean off her feet. With you, your mind, as you just put it, acts as a
brake on your feelings. Can't you guess why?"

"No," she said quietly. "I can't. I don't understand myself and my
shifts of feeling. It makes me miserable."

"Look here, Sophie girl," Carr reached over and taking her by the hand
drew her up on the low arm of his chair, "you're asking yourself a more
or less important question directly, and you're asking it of me
indirectly. Maybe I can help you. At least I can tell how I see it. You
have all your life before you. You want to be happy. That's a universal
human attribute. Sometime or other you're going to mate with a man. That
too is a universal experience. Ordinary mating is based on sex instinct.
Love is mostly an emotional disturbance generated by natural causes for
profoundly natural and important ends. But marriage and the intimate
associations of married life require something more substantial than a
mere flare-up of animal instinct. Lots of men and women aren't capable
of anything else, and consequently they make the best of what's in
them. But there are natures far more complex. You, Sophie, are one of
those complex natures. With you, a union based on sex alone wouldn't
survive six months. Now, in this particular case, leaving out the fact
that you can't compare Tommy Ashe with any other man, because you don't
know any other man, can you conceive yourself living in a tolerable
state of contentment with Tommy if, say, you didn't feel any more
passion for him than you feel for, say, old Standing Wolf over there?"

"But that's absurd," the girl declared. "Because I have got that feeling
for Tommy Ashe, and therefore I can't imagine myself in any other state.
I can't look at it the cold-blooded way you do, Daddy dear."

"I'm stating a hypothetical case," Carr went on patiently. "You do now.
We'll take that for granted. Would you still have anything fundamental
in common with Tommy with that part left out? Suppose you got so you
didn't care whether he kissed you or not? Suppose it were no longer a
physical pleasure just to be near him. Would you enjoy his daily and
hourly presence then, in the most intimate relation a man and a woman
can hold to each other?"

"Why, I wouldn't live with him at all," the girl said positively. "I
simply couldn't. I know."

"You might have to," Carr answered gently. "You have never yet run foul
of circumstances over which you have no more power than man has over the
run of the tides. But we'll let that pass. I'm trying to help you,
Sophie, not to discourage you. There are some situations in which, and
some natures to whom, half a loaf is worse than no bread. Do you feel,
have you ever for an hour felt that you simply couldn't face an
existence in which Tommy Ashe had no part?"

Sophie put her arm around his neck, and her fingers played a tattoo on
his shoulder.

"No," she said at last. "I can't honestly say that I've ever been
overwhelmed with a feeling like that."

"Well, there you are," Carr observed dryly. "Between the propositions I
think you've answered your own question."

The girl's breast heaved a little and her breath went out in a
fluttering sigh.

"Yes," she said gravely. "I suppose that is so."

They sat silent for an interval. Then something wet and warm dropped on
Carr's hand. He looked up quickly.

"Does it hurt?" he said softly. "I'm sorry."

"So am I," she whispered. "But chiefly, I think, I am sorry for Tommy.
_He'd_ be perfectly happy with me."

"Yes, I suppose so," Carr replied. "But you wouldn't be happy with him,
only for a brief time, Sophie. Tommy's a good boy, but it will take a
good deal of a man to fill your life. You'd outgrow Tommy. And you'd
hurt him worse in the end."

She ran her soft hand over Carr's grizzled hair with a caressing touch.
Then she got up and walked away into the house. Carr turned his gaze
again to the meadow and the green woods beyond. For ten minutes he sat,
his posture one of peculiar tensity, his eyes on the distance
unseeingly--or as if he saw something vague and far-off that troubled
him. Then he gave his shoulders a quick impatient twitch, and taking up
his book began once more to read.

CHAPTER II

THE MAN AND HIS MISSION

At almost the same hour in which Sam Carr and his daughter held that
intimate conversation on the porch of their home a twenty-foot
Peterborough freight canoe was sliding down the left-hand bank of the
Athabasca like some gray river-beast seeking the shade of the birch and
willow growth that overhung the shore. The current beneath and the
thrust of the blades sent it swiftly along the last mile of the river
and shot the gray canoe suddenly beyond the sharp nose of a jutting
point fairly into the bosom of a great, still body of water that spread
away northeastward in a widening stretch, its farthest boundary a watery
junction with the horizon.

There were three men in the canoe. One squatted forward, another rested
his body on his heels in the after end. These two were swarthy, stockily
built men, scantily clad, moccasins on their feet, and worn felt hats
crowning lank, black hair long innocent of a barber's touch.

The third man sat amidships in a little space left among goods that were
piled to the top of the deep-sided craft. He was no more like his
companions than the North that surrounded them with its silent waterways
and hushed forests is like the tropical jungle. He was a fairly big
man, taller, wider-bodied than the other two. His hair was a
reddish-brown, his eyes as blue as the arched dome from which the hot
sun shed its glare.

He had on a straight-brimmed straw hat which in the various shifts of
the long water route and many camps had suffered disaster, so that a
part of the brim drooped forlornly over his left ear. This headgear had
preserved upon his brow the pallid fairness of his skin. From the
eyebrows down his face was in the last stages of sunburn, reddened,
minute shreds of skin flaking away much as a snake's skin sheds in
August. Otherwise he was dressed, like a countless multitude of other
men who walk the streets of every city in North America, in a
conventional sack suit, and shoes that still bore traces of blacking.
The paddlers were stripped to thin cotton shirts and worn overalls. The
only concession their passenger had made to the heat was the removal of
his laundered collar. Apparently his dignity did not permit him to lay
aside his coat and vest. As they cleared the point a faint breeze
wavered off the open water. He lifted his hat and let it play about his
moist hair.

"This is Lake Athabasca?" he asked.

"Oui, M'sieu Thompson," Mike Breyette answered from the bow, without
turning his head. "Dees de lak."

"How much longer will it take us to reach Port Pachugan?" Thompson made
further inquiry.

"Bout two-three hour, maybeso," Breyette responded.

He said something further, a few quick sentences in the French patois
of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur in
the stern laughed. Their gayety stirred no response from the midship
passenger. If anything, he frowned. He was a serious-minded young man,
and he did not understand French. He had a faint suspicion that his
convoy did not take him as seriously as he wished. Whether their talk
was badinage or profanity or purely casual, he could not say. In the
first stages of their journey together, on the upper reaches of the
river, Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald had, after the normal habit of
their kind, greeted the several contingencies and minor mishaps such a
journey involved with plaintive oaths in broken English. Mr. Wesley
Thompson, projected into an unfamiliar environment and among a--to
him--strange manner of men, took up his evangelistic cudgel and
administered shocked reproof. It was, in a way, practice for the tasks
the Methodist Board of Home Missions had appointed him to perform. But
if he failed to convict these two of sin, he convinced them of
discourtesy. Even a rude voyageur has his code of manners. Thereafter
they invariably swore in French.

They bore on in a northerly direction, keeping not too far from the lake
shore, lest the combination of a sudden squall and a heavy-loaded canoe
should bring disaster. When Mike Breyette's "two-tree" hour was run Mr.
Thompson stepped from the canoe to the sloping, sun-blistered beach
before Fort Pachugan, and if he did not openly offer thanks to his Maker
that he stood once more upon solid ground he at least experienced
profound relief.

For many days he had occupied that midship position with ill-concealed
misgivings. The largest bodies of water he had been on intimate terms
with heretofore had been contained within the dimensions of a bathtub.
He could not swim. No matter that his faith in an all-wise Providence
was strong he could not forbear inward tremors at the certain knowledge
that only a scant quarter-inch of frail wood and canvas stood between
him and a watery grave. He regarded a canoe with distrust. Nor could he
understand the careless confidence with which his guides embarked in so
captious a craft upon the swirling bosom of that wide, swift stream they
had followed from Athabasca Landing down to the lake of the same name.
To Thompson--if he had been capable of analyzing his sensations and
transmuting them into words--the river seemed inexplicably sinister, a
turbid monster writhing over polished boulders, fuming here and there
over rapids, snarling a constant menace under the canoe's prow.

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