itual darkness of these
primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation,
of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his
business to show them with certainty the paths that led to each.

But he could not reach them unless he could speak their tongue, he could
not gather them about him in the open meadow as the Man of Galilee
gathered his disciples about him. The climate was against that simple
procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a
beginning--to learn the tribal language and to build a church.

He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than
he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled
him to assimilate the messes he cooked without suffering acute
indigestion. Likewise only a naive turn of mind enabled him to ward off
mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the
defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had
considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was
not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the
Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of
eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he
struggled with pronunciations and meanings like a child learning the
alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons.
And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was
to be a meeting-house.

He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the
edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved.
He had to fell trees, to lop off the branches, and cut the trunks to
proper length, then roll them with infinite effort to their proper place
in the structure. He could only gather how a log building could be
erected by asking Lachlan, and by taking the Lone Moose cabins for his
model. And he was a fearful and wonderful axeman. His log ends looked as
if chewed by a beaver, except that they lacked the beaver's neatness of
finish. His feet suffered manifold hairbreadth escapes from the sharp
blade. He could never guess which way a tree would fall. For a week's
work he had got two courses of logs laid in position.

He did not allow his mind to dwell on the ultimate outcome of this task,
because he was uneasily aware that Lone Moose was smiling slyly behind
its brown hand at him and his works. In his mind there was