_is_ a dog.

So, save for the fact that he continued to make money and was busy and
realized now and then that he had come to a disheartening impasse with
Sophie, the late spring of 1916 found Thompson mentally, morally and
spiritually holding fast by certain props.

He had come a long way, and he had yet a long way to go. He had come to
Lone Moose very much after the fashion of St. Simeon Stylites all
prepared to mount a spiritual pillar and make a bid for sainthood. But
pillar hermits, he discovered, when harsh, material facts tore the
evangelistic blinkers off his eyes, were neither useful in the world nor
acceptable on high. He had been in a very bad way for awhile. When a man
loses his own self-respect and the faith of his fathers at one stroke he
is apt to suffer intensely. Thompson had not quite reached that pass,
when he came down to Wrangel by the sea, but he was not far off. When he
looked back, he could scarcely trace by what successive steps he had
traveled. But he had got up out of that puddle into which a harsh
environment and wounded egotism had cast him. He was in a way to be what
the world called a success.

He was not so sure of that himself. But he stayed himself with certain
props, as before mentioned. The base of more than one of these useful
supports had been undermined some time before by a sequence of events
which presented the paradox of being familiar to him and still beyond
his comprehension.

He was a long way from being aware, in those early summer days of 1916,
that before long some of the aforementioned props were to buckle under
him with strange and disturbing circumstance.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE FUSE--

It was in this period that certain phases of the war began to shake the
foundation of things. I do not recall who said that an army marches on
its stomach, but it is true, and it is no less a verity that nations
function primarily on food. The submarine was waxing to its zenith now,
and Europe saw the gaunt wolf at its door. Men cried for more ships.
Cost became secondary. A vessel paid for herself if she landed but two
cargoes in an Allied port.

Every demand in the economic field produces a supply. On this side of
the Atlantic great shipbuilding plants arose by some superior magic of
construction in ports where the building of ships had been a minor
industry. In this Vancouver did not lag. Wooden ships could be built
quickly. Virgin forests of fir and cedar stood at Vanc