A queer warmth flushed Thompson’s cheek when he thought of Sophie this wise.  A jealous feeling stabbed at him.  The virus was still in his blood, he became suddenly aware.  And then he laughed out loud, at his own camouflaging.  He had known it all the time.  And this trip it would be kill or cure, he said to himself whimsically.

Still it was odd, now he came to think of it, that Sophie had never in those years found a man quite to her liking.  She had had choice enough, Thompson knew.  But it was no more strange, after all, than for himself never to have looked with tender eyes on any one of the women he had known.  He had liked them, but he hadn’t ever got past the stage of comparing them with Sophie Carr.  She had always been the standard he set to judge the others.  Thompson realized that he was quite a hopeless case in this respect.

“I must be a sort of a freak,” he muttered to himself when he was stowed away in his blankets.  “I wonder if I could like another woman, as well, if I tried?  Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.”

CHAPTER XXIX

TWO MEN AND A WOMAN

Thompson drove his canoe around a jutting point and came upon a white cruiser swinging at anchor in an eddy.  Her lines were familiar though he had not seen her in two years.  In any case the name Alert in gold leaf on her bows would have enlightened him.  He was not particularly surprised to find Tommy’s motor boat there.  He had half-expected to find Tommy Ashe hereabouts.

A man’s head rose above the after companion-hatch as the canoe glided abreast.

“Is Mr. Ashe aboard?” Thompson asked.

The man shook his head.

“Went up to Carr’s camp a while ago.”

“When did you get in?” Thompson inquired further.

“Last night.  Lost a day laying up at Blind Bay for a southeaster.  Gee, she did blow.”

Thompson smiled and passed on.  Blind Bay was only two miles from Cape Coburn.  Just a narrow neck of land had separated them that blustery night.  It was almost like a race.  Tommy would not be pleased to see him treading so close on his heels.  Thompson felt that intuitively.  All was fair in love and war.  Still, even in aerial warfare, ruthless and desperate as it was, there were certain courtesies, a certain element of punctilio.  Thompson had an intuition that Ashe would not subscribe to even that simple code.  In fact he began to have a premonition of impending conflict as he thrust stoutly on his paddle blade.  Tommy had changed.  He was no longer the simple, straightforward soul with whom Thompson had fought man-fashion on the bank of Lone Moose, and with whom he had afterward achieved friendship on a long and bitter trail.

Three hundred yards past the Alert he came to a landing stage which fitted the description given by the skipper of the Squalla.  Thompson hauled his canoe out on the float, gained the shore, and found a path bordering the bank.  He followed this.  Not greatly distant he could hear the blows of chopping, the shrill blasts of a donkey-engine whistle and the whirr of the engine itself as it shuddered and strained on its anchored skids, reeling up half a mile, more or less, of inch and a quarter steel cable, snaking a forty-foot log out of the woods as a child would haul a toothpick on the end of a string.