ith
Indians and breeds--no matter how dirty and unkempt--going impassively
about their business, an organized community, however rude. Here he saw
nothing save the enfolding forest he had been passing through since
dawn. He scarcely troubled to ask himself why they had stopped. Breyette
and MacDonald were given to casual haltings. He sat in irritable
discomfort brushing aside the hordes of mosquitoes that rose up from the
weedy brink and the shore thickets to assail his tender skin. He did
not notice that MacDonald was waiting for him to move. Mike Breyette
looked down on him from the top of the bank.

"Well, we here, M'sieu Thompson," he said.

"What?" Thompson roused himself. "Here? Where is the village?"

Breyette waved a hand upstream.

"She's 'roun' de nex' bend," said he. "Two-three hundred yard. Dees
w'ere de meeshonaire have hees cabanne."

Thompson could not doubt Breyette's statement. He recalled now that Mike
had once told him the mission quarters were built a little apart from
the village. But he peered up through the screen of birch and willow
with a swift wave of misgiving. The forest enclosed him like the blank
walls of a cell. He shrank from it as a sensitive nature shrinks from
the melancholy suggestiveness of an open grave, and he could not have
told why he felt that strange form of depression. He was wholly
unfamiliar with any form of introspective inquiry, any analysis of a
mental state. He had never held sad intellectual inquest over a dead
hope, nor groped blindly for a ray of light in the inky blackness of a
soul's despair.

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 conf