A man does not easily forego habits that have become second nature.  Breyette and MacDonald put on their dilapidated hats, filled their pipes, and were ready for anything from a social call to a bear hunt.  Thompson had to shave, wash up, brush his hair, put on a tie and collar, which article of dress he donned without a thought that the North was utterly devoid of laundries, that he would soon be reduced to flannel shirts which he must wash himself.  His preparations gave the breeds another trick of his to grin slyly over.  But Thompson was preparing himself to face the units of his future congregation, and he went about it precisely as he would have gone about getting ready for a Conference, or a cup of tea with a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid.  Eventually, however, the three set out across the trunk-littered clearing.

The thin place in the belt of timber to the northward proved barely a hundred yards deep.  On the farther side the brushy edge of the woods gave on the open meadow around which the Lone Moose villagers had built their cabins.  Thompson swept the crescent with a glance, taking in the dozen or so dwellings huddling as it were under the protecting wings of the forest, and his gaze came to rest on the more impressive habitation of Sam Carr.

“Dat’s white man married hon Enjun woman,” Breyette responded to Thompson’s inquiry.  “Ah don’ never see heem maself.  Lachlan she’s leev over there.”

Left to himself Thompson would probably have gravitated first to a man of his own blood, even though he had been warned to approach Carr with diplomacy.  But there was no sign of life about the Carr place, and his men were headed straight for their objective, walking hurriedly to get away from the hungry swarms of mosquitoes that rose out of the grass.  Thompson followed them.  Two weeks in their company, with a steadily growing consciousness of his dependence upon them, had inclined him to follow their lead.

They found Lachlan at home, a middle-aged Scotch half-breed with a house full of sons and daughters ranging from the age of four to twenty.  How could they all be housed in three small rooms was almost the first dubious query which presented itself to Thompson.  His mind, to his great perplexity, seemed to turn more upon incongruities than upon his real mission there.  That is, to Thompson they seemed incongruities.  The little things that go to make up a whole were each impinging upon him with a force he could not understand.  He could not, for instance, tell why he thought only with difficulty, with extreme haziness, of the great good he desired to accomplish at Lone Moose, and found his attention focussing sharply upon the people, their manner of speech, their surroundings, even upon so minor a detail as a smudge of flour upon the hand that Mrs. Lachlan extended to him.  She was a fat, dusky-skinned woman, apparently regarding Thompson with a feeling akin to awe.  The entire family, which numbered at least nine souls, spoke in the broad dialect of their paternal ancestors from the heather country overseas.