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.

It was so utterly and dishearteningly foreign to the orderly arrangement, the meticulous neatness of the home wherein Thompson had grown to young manhood under the tutelage of the prim spinsters that he could scarcely accept as a reality that this, henceforth, was to be his abode.

He could only stand, with a feeling in his throat that was new in his experience of emotions, staring in dismay at this forlorn habitation abandoned to wind and weather, to the rats and the birds.

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH MR. THOMPSON BEGINS TO WONDER PAINFULLY

To Breyette and MacDonald that forlorn cabin was after all nothing new or disheartening in their experience. They knew how a deserted house goes to rack and ruin. They knew also how to restore such an abandoned place to a measure of its original homeliness. And neither the spectacle of the one nor the labor of the other gave them any qualms. They were practical-minded men to whom musty, forsaken cabins, isolation, the hollow emptiness of the North, the sultry heat of the brief summer, the flies, the deep snows and iron frosts of the long winter, were a part of their life, the only life they knew.

But they were not wholly devoid of sentiment and perception. They recognized in Thompson a lively susceptibility to certain disagreeable things which they accepted as a matter of 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. And so—although their bargain with him was closed when they deposited him and his goods on the bank of Lone Moose—they set to work with energy to renovate his forlorn-looking abode.

They made short work of the rats' and the swallows' nests. Breyette quickly fashioned a broom of fine willow twigs, brought up a shovel from the canoe, and swept and shovelled 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 perfectly despite the red rust of disuse. With buckets of boiling water they flooded and drenched the floor and walls till the interior was as fresh and clean as if new erected.

The place was habitable by sundown. While the long northern twilight held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe, and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.

That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the hard floor.

In the morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so that there would be some semblance of order instead of 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 otherwise mysterious expansion of rice and beans and dried apples in boiling water, all of which Breyette was shrewd enough to realize that Thompson knew nothing about. He had a ready ear for instructions but a poor understanding of these matters. So Mike reiterated out of his experience of camp cooking, and Thompson tried to remember.

Meanwhile, MacDonald, who had vanished into the woods with a rifle in his hand at daybreak, came back about noon with a deer's carcass slung on his sturdy back. This, after it 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. The purpose and preparation of "jerky" was duly elucidated to Thompson; rather profitless explanation, for he had no rifle, nor any knowledge whatever in the use of firearms.

"Bagosh, dat man Ah'm wonder w'ere hees raise," Mike said to his partner once when Thompson was out of earshot. "Hees ask more damfool question een ten minute dan a man hees answer een t'ree day. W'at hees gon' do all by heemself here Ah don' know 'tall, Mac. Bagosh, no!"

By midafternoon all that was possible in the way of settling their man had been accomplished, even to a pile of firewood sufficient to last him two weeks. MacDonald contributed that after 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 did not run to that beneficent extreme. And so about three o'clock Mike Breyette surveyed the orderly cabin, the pile of chopped wood, and the venison drying in the sun, and said briskly:

"Well, M'sieu Thompson, Ah theenk we go show you hon Lone Moose village now. Dere's one w'ite man Ah don' know 'tall. But der's breed familee call Lachlan, eef she's not move 'way somew'ere. Dat familee she's talk Henglish, and ver' fond of preacher. S'pose we go mak leetle veesit hon dem Lachlan, eh? Ah theenk us two feller we're gon' beet dat water weeth de paddle een de morneeng."

A man does not easily forego habits that have become second nature. Breyette and MacDonald put on their dilapidated hats, filled their pipes, and were ready for anything from a social call to a bear hunt. Thompson had to shave, wash up, brush his hair, put on a tie and collar, 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 preparing himself to face the units of his future congregation, and he went about it precisely as he would have gone about getting ready for a Conference, or a cup of tea with a meeting of the Ladies' Aid. Eventually, however, the three set out across the trunk-littered clearing.

The thin place in the belt of timber to the northward proved barely a hundred yards deep. On the farther side the brushy edge of the woods gave on 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 so dwellings huddling as it were under the protecting wings