So he did not stay long enough to observe Carr lay two of his letters on the table after a brief glance, and sit looking fixedly at the third, which by the length of envelope and thickness of enclosure might conceivably have contained some document of a legal or official nature.

Carr looked at this letter a long time before he tore it open.  He took a still longer time to peruse its contents.  He sat for several minutes thereafter turning the sheets over and over in his lean fingers, until in fact he became aware that his daughter’s eyes were fixed on him with a lively curiosity in their gray depths.

“What is it, Dad?” she asked, as he tucked envelope and foolscap pages into the inside pocket of his coat.

“Oh, nothing much,” he said shortly.

But he leaned back in his chair and immediately became absorbed in thought that accentuated the multitude of fine lines about his eyes and drew his lips together in a narrow line.  Sophie sat regarding him with a look of wonder.

This trifling incident, naturally, did not come under the notice of Mr. Thompson.  Conceivably he would not have noticed had he been present, nor have been in any degree interested.

He was, as a matter of fact, fully occupied at that precise moment with the painful and disagreeable consequences of attempting to split kindling by lantern light.  To be specific the axe had glanced and cut a deep gash in one side of his foot.

At about the particular moment in which Sam Carr leaned back in his chair and fell into that brown study of a matter that was to have a far-reaching effect, Mr. Thompson was seated on his haunches on his cabin floor, his hands stained with blood and a considerable trail of red marking his progress from woodpile to cabin.  His face was white, and his hands rather shaky by the time he finished binding up the wound.  The cut stung and burned.  When he essayed to move he found himself quite effectually crippled.

For the first time in his twenty-five years of carefully directed existence Mr. Thompson swore a loud, round, Anglo-Saxon oath.  Whether this relieved his pent-up feelings or not he appeared to suffer no remorse for the burst of profanity.  Instead, he rose and limped painfully about the building of a fire and the preparation of his supper.

CHAPTER VIII

—­And the Fruits thereof

Mr. Thompson slept fitfully that night.  A hard day’s paddling had left him tired and sleepy, but the swarm of pain-devils in his slashed foot destroyed his rest.  When he got up at daylight and examined the wound again he found himself afflicted with a badly swollen foot and ankle, and a steady dull ache that extended upward past the knee.  He was next to helpless since every movement produced the most acute sort of pain—­sufficiently so that when he had made shift to get some breakfast he could scarcely eat.  In the course of his experiments in self-aid he discovered that to lie flat on his back with the slashed foot raised higher than his body gave a measure of ease.  So he adopted this position and stoically set out to endure the hurt.  He lay in that position the better part of the day—­until, in fact, four in the afternoon brought Sam Carr, shotgun in hand, to his door.