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 nothing for it but a church.  He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan’s house, with Lachlan senior to interpret his words.  The Indians had come.  Indeed, they had come en masse.  They packed the room he spoke in, big and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond.  The day was very hot, the roof low, the windows closed.  There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and sturdy smell that came near to sickening Mr. Thompson.  He was extraordinarily glad when he got outside.  That closeness—­to speak mildly—­coupled with the heavy, copper-red faces, impassive as masks, impersonally listening with scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man’s thoughts would not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.

Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an eye over the scene of his undertaking.  The longer he looked at it the more of an undertaking it seemed.  He had heard Lachlan speak of two men felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from foundation to ridgelog in three days.  He did not see how it could be done.  He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement.  But he did expect to roof in that church before the snow fell.  Its walls would be consecrated with sweat and straining muscles.  It would be a concrete accomplishment.  The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.

Axe in hand, he set to work.  He had learned the first lesson of manual labor—­that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body is swaddled in clothes.  His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all slung across a fallen tree.  Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt joined the discarded garments.

Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform to the clerical figure.  He was the antithesis of asceticism, of gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose.  He was simply a big man lustily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat standing out on brow and cheek, his sturdy neck all a-glisten with moisture.  Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled and played.  The flat muscle-bands across his broad chest slackened and tightened as his arms swung.  For Mr. Thompson had been fashioned by Nature in a generous mood.  He was not a heroic figure, but he was big and built as a man should be, deep in the chest, flat-backed, very straight when he stood erect.  He had escaped the scholarly stoop.  If his muscles were soft they were in a fair way to become hardened.