Carr had seldom been in the cabin.  This evening, for some reason, he put his head in the door, and whistled softly at sight of Thompson’s bandaged foot cocked up on a folded overcoat.

“Well, well,” he said, standing his gun against the door casing and coming in.  “What have you done to yourself now?”

“Oh, I cut my foot with the axe last night, worse luck,” Thompson responded petulantly.

“Bad?” Carr inquired.

“Bad enough.”

“Let me see it,” Carr suggested.  “It’s a long way to a sawbones, and Providence never seems quite able to cope with germs of infection.  Have you any sort of antiseptic dressing on it?”

Thompson shook his head.  He would not confess that the pain and swelling had caused him certain misgivings, brought to his mind uneasily a good deal that he had read and heard of blood-poisoning from cuts and scratches.  He was secretly glad to let Carr undo the rude bandage and examine the wound.  A man who had spent fifteen years in the wilderness must have had to cope with similar cases.

“You did give yourself a nasty nick and no mistake,” Carr observed.  “You won’t walk on that foot comfortably for two or three weeks.  Just grazed a bone.  No carbolic, no peroxide, or anything like that, I suppose?”

Thompson shook his head.  He had not reckoned on cuts and bruises.  Carr put back the wrapping and sat whittling shavings of tobacco off a brown plug, while Thompson got up, hopped on one foot across to the stove and began to lay a fire.  He had eaten nothing since morning, and was correspondingly hungry.  In addition, a certain unministerial pride stirred him to action.  He was ashamed to lie supinely enduring, to seem helpless before another man’s eyes.  But the effort showed in his face.

Carr lit his pipe and watched silently.  His gaze took in every detail of the cabin’s interior, of Thompson’s painful movements, of the poorly cooked remains of breakfast that he was warming up.

“You’ll put that foot in a bad way if you try to use it much,” he said at last.  “The best thing you can do is to come home with me and lie around till you can walk again.  I’ve got stuff to dress it properly.  Think you can hobble across the clearing if I make you a temporary crutch?”

Thompson at first declined to be such a source of trouble.  He was grateful enough, but reluctant.  Carr, however, went about it in a way that permitted nothing short of a boorish refusal, and presently Mr. Thompson found himself, with a crutch made of a forked willow, crossing the meadow to Sam Carr’s house.

His instincts had more or less subconsciously warned him that it would not be well for his peace of mind or the good of his soul to be in intimate daily contact with Sophie Carr.  But his general inability to cope with emergencies—­which was patent enough to a practical man if not wholly so to himself—­culminating in this misadventure with a sharp axe, had brought about that very circumstance.