back to my own diggings," he said. "So long,
old man."

He nodded, pushed off his canoe and stepped aboard. In a minute he was
gone around the bend, driving the red canoe with slow, deliberate
strokes.

Mr. Thompson gave over musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy's words and
attitude, and began to take stock of himself. It seemed to him that
Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his
earlier life and the code he had assimilated during that formative
period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of
shame. And he felt no shame. On the contrary he experienced nothing more
than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration. Why, he could not
determine. It was un-Christian, undignified, brutal, to give and take
blows, to feel that vicious determination to smash another man with his
bare fists, to know the unholy joy of getting a blow home with all the
weight of his body behind it. Mr. Thompson was a trifle dazed, a trifle
uncertain. His face was puffed out of its natural contours, and very
tender in spots to touch. He knew that he must be a sight. There was a
grievous stiffness creeping over his arms and shoulders, an ache in his
ribs, as his heated body began to cool. But he was not sorry for
anything. He experienced no regrets. Only a heady feeling that for once
in his life he had met an emergency and had been equal to the demand.

Perhaps the sweet memory of Sophie Carr's warm lips on his had something
to do with this.

At any rate he rose after a little and followed the creek bank to a
point well down stream, whence he crossed through the fringe of timber
to his cabin.

CHAPTER X

THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort
of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted,
and sleep withheld its restful oblivion until far in the night. As a
consequence he slept late. Dawn had grown old before he wakened.

When he opened his cabin door he was confronted by the dourest aspect of
the north that he had yet seen. The sky was banked full of slate-gray
clouds scudding low before a northeast wind that droned its melancholy
song in the swaying spruce tops, a song older than the sorrows of men,
the essence of all things forlorn in its minor cadences. A gray, clammy
day, tinged with the chill breath of coming snow. Thompson missed the
sun that had cheered and warmed those hushed solitudes. Just to l