Then they drew a little apart and squatted on the bank of the creek to lave their battered faces in the cold water.

For a period of possibly five minutes they sat dabbling water-soaked handkerchiefs upon their faces.  The blood ceased to ooze from Thompson’s nostrils.  Tommy Ashe looked over at his late antagonist and remarked casually.

“We’re a pair of capital idiots, eh, Thompson?”

Mr. Thompson tried to smile.  But his countenance was swelling rapidly and was in no condition for smiling.  He mustered up a grimace, nodding assent.

“I hope Sophie didn’t see us making such asses of ourselves,” Tommy continued ruefully.

“I hardly think she would,” Thompson returned.  “It couldn’t have been the sort of spectacle a woman would care to watch.”

“You never can tell about a woman,” Ashe observed thoughtfully.  “Nor,” he added, “a man.  I could never have imagined myself going off half-cocked like that.  I suppose the primitive brute in us is never really far from the surface.  Especially in this country.  There’s something,” he looked up at the surrounding depths of forest, down along the dusky channel of Lone Moose, curving away among the spruce, “there’s something about this infernal solitude that brings out the savage.  I’ve noticed it in little things.  We’re loosed, in a way, from all restraint, except what we put upon ourselves.  Funny world, eh?  You couldn’t imagine two chaps like us mauling each other like a pair of bruisers in Mrs. Grundy’s drawing-room, could you?  Over a girl—­oh, well, it’ll be all the same a hundred years from now.”

There was nothing apologetic in either Tommy’s tone or words.  Thompson understood.  Tommy Ashe was thinking out loud, that was all.  And presently, after another silent interval, he stood up.

“I think I’ll be getting back to my own diggings,” he said.  “So long, old man.”

He nodded, pushed off his canoe and stepped aboard.  In a minute he was gone around the bend, driving the red canoe with slow, deliberate strokes.

Mr. Thompson gave over musing upon Tommy Ashe and Tommy’s words and attitude, and began to take stock of himself.  It seemed to him that Tommy Ashe felt ashamed of himself, whereas by all the precepts of his earlier life and the code he had assimilated during that formative period he, Wesley Thompson, was the one who should suffer a sense of shame.  And he felt no shame.  On the contrary he experienced nothing more than an astonishing feeling of exhilaration.  Why, he could not determine.  It was un-Christian, undignified, brutal, to give and take blows, to feel that vicious determination to smash another man with his bare fists, to know the unholy joy of getting a blow home with all the weight of his body behind it.  Mr. Thompson was a trifle dazed, a trifle uncertain.  His face was puffed out of its natural contours, and very tender in spots to touch.  He knew that he must be a sight.  There was a grievous stiffness creeping over his arms and shoulders, an ache in his ribs, as his heated body began to cool.  But he was not sorry for anything.  He experienced no regrets.  Only a heady feeling that for once in his life he had met an emergency and had been equal to the demand.