The Project Gutenberg eBook, Burned Bridges, by Bertrand W. Sinclair, Illustrated by Ralph P. Coleman

Title: Burned Bridges

Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair

Release Date: August 19, 2005 [eBook #16553]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BURNED BRIDGES***

He felt with an odd exaltation the quick hammer
of her heart against his breast. Frontispiece.

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

CONTENTS

1. The First Problem
2. The Man and His Mission
3. The Deserted Cabin
4. In Which Mr. Thompson Begins to Wonder Painfully
5. Further Acquaintance
6. Certain Perplexities
7. A Slip of the Axe
8. --And the Fruits Thereof
9. Universal Attributes
10. The Way of a Maid with a Man
11. A Man's Job for a Minister
12. A Fortune and a Flitting
13. Partners
14. The Restless Foot
15. The World Is Small
16. A Meeting by the Way
17. The Reproof Courteous (?)
18. Mr. Henderson's Proposition
19. A Widening Horizon
20. The Shadow
21. The Renewed Triangle
22. Sundry Reflections
23. The Fuse—
24. —And the Match That Lit the Fuse—
25. —And the Bomb the Fuse Fired
26. The Last Bridge
27. Thompson's Return
28. Fair Winds
29. Two Men and a Woman
30. A Mark to Shoot at

BURNED BRIDGES

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