nothing for
it but a church. He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan's house,
with Lachlan senior to interpret his words. The Indians had come.
Indeed, they had come en masse. They packed the room he spoke in, big
and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the
overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond. The day was very hot, the roof
low, the windows closed. There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that
was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and sturdy smell that
came near to sickening Mr. Thompson. He was extraordinarily glad when he
got outside. That closeness--to speak mildly--coupled with the heavy,
copper-red faces, impassive as masks, impersonally listening with
scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another
attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and
speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man's thoughts would
not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.

Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an
eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the
more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men
felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from
foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be
done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect
to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be
consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete
accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to
see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.

Axe in hand, he set to work. He had learned the first lesson of manual
labor--that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body
is swaddled in clothes. His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all
slung across a fallen tree. Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt
joined the discarded garments.

Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform
to the clerical figure. He was the antithesis of asceticism, of
gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose. He was simply a big man
lustily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat
standing out on brow and cheek, his sturdy neck all a-glisten with
moisture. Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled
and played. The flat muscle-bands across his broad c