Nevertheless, he was conscious that he felt very much as he might have
felt if, for instance, his guides had stopped anywhere in those somber
woods and without rhyme or reason set him and his goods ashore and
abandoned him forthwith. And when he crawled over the bow of the canoe
and ascended the short, steep bank to a place beside Mike Breyette, this
peculiar sense of being forsaken grew, if anything, more acute, more
appalling.
They stood on the edge of the bank, taking a reconnaissance, so to
speak. The forest flowed about them like a sea. On Thompson's left hand
it seemed to thin a trifle, giving a faint suggestion of open areas
beyond. Beginning where they stood, some time in past years a square
place had been slashed out of the timber, trees felled and partly
burned, the stumps still standing and the charred trunks lying all askew
as they fell. The unlovely confusion of the uncompleted task was
somewhat concealed by a rank growth of weeds and grass. This
half-hearted attack upon the forest had let the sunlight in. It blazed
full upon a cabin in the center of the clearing, a square, squat
structure of logs with a roof of poles and dirt. A door and a window
faced the creek, a window of tiny panes, a door that stood partly open,
sagging forlornly upon its hinges.
"Is that the house?" Thompson asked. It seemed to him scarcely
credible. He suspected his guides, as he had before suspected them, of
some rude jest at his expense.
"Dat's heem," Breyette answered. "Let's tak' leetle more close look on
heem."
Thompson did not miss the faint note of commiseration in the
half-breed's voice. It stung him a little, nearly made him disregard the
spirit of abnegation he had been taught was a Christian's duty in his
Master's service. He closed his lips on an impulsive protest against
that barren unlovely spot, and stiffened his shoulders.
"I understand it has not been occupied for some time," he said as they
moved toward the cabin.
But even forewarned as he was his heart sank a few degrees nearer to his
square-toed shoes when he stepped over the threshold and looked about.
Little, forgotten things recurred to him, matters touched upon lightly,
airily, by the deacons and elders of the Board of Missions when his
appointment was made. He recalled hearing of a letter in which his
predecessor had renounced that particular field and the ministry
together, with what to Thompson had seemed the blasphemous statement
that the North was no place for either God or man.
The place was foul with dirt and cobwebs, full of a musty odor. The
swallows had nested along the ridge-pole. They fluttered out of the
door, chattering protest against the invasion. Rat nests littered the
corners and the brown rodents scuttled out with alarmed squeaks. The
floor was of logs roughly hewn to flatness. Upon four blocks stood a
rusty cookstove. A few battered, smoke-blackened pots and pans stood on
a shelf and hung upon nails driven in the walls. A rough bedstead of
peeled spruce poles stood in a corner. The remains of a bedtick moldered
on the slats, its grass stuffing given over to the nests of the birds
and rodents.