Mr. A.H.  Markham, Sec.  M.E.  Board of Home Missions, 412 Echo St., Toronto, Ont.

He laid the letter on the bed and regarded it with an expression in which regret and relief were equally mingled.

“They’ll say—­they’ll think,” he muttered disconnectedly.

He got up, paced across the small room, swung about to look at the letter again.

“I’ve got to do it,” he said aloud defiantly.  “It’s the only thing I can do.  Burn all my bridges behind me.  If I can’t honestly be a minister, I can at least be a man.”

CHAPTER XII

A FORTUNE AND A FLITTING

Christmas had come and gone before Thompson finished his job at Porcupine Lake, some ninety-odd miles, as the crow flies, north of Fort Pachugan.  The Porcupine was a marshy stretch of water, the home of muskrat and beaver, a paradise for waterfowl when the heavy hand of winter was lifted, a sheet of ice now, a white oval in the dusky green of the forest.  Here the free trader had built a fair-sized structure of logs with goods piled in the front and the rearward end given over to a stove, a table, and two bunks.  In this place Thompson and Joe Lamont plied their traffic.  MacLeod sent them Indian and half-breed trappers bearing orders for so much flour, so much tea, so many traps, so much powder and ball and percussion caps for their nigh obsolete guns.  They took their “debt” and departed into the wilderness, to repay in the spring with furs.

So, by degrees, the free-trader’s stock approached depletion, until there remained no more than two good dog teams could haul.  With that on sleds, and a few bundles of furs traded in by trappers whose lines radiated from the Porcupine, Thompson and Joe Lamont came back to Fort Pachugan.

The factor seemed well pleased with the undertaking.  He checked up the goods and opined that the deal would show a rare profit for the Company.

“Ye have a hundred an’ twenty-six dollars due, over an’ above a charge or two against ye,” he said to Thompson when they went over the accounts.  “How will ye have it?  In cash?  If ye purpose to winter at Lone Moose a credit maybe’ll serve as well.  Or, if ye go out, ye can have a cheque on the Company at Edmonton.”

“Give me the hundred in cash,” Thompson decided.  “I’ll take the twenty odd in grub.  I’m going to Lone Moose, but I don’t know how long I’ll stay there.  There’s some stuff of mine there that I want to get.  After that—­I’m a bit undecided.”

In those long nights at the Porcupine he had done a good deal of pondering over his next move.  He had not yet come to a fixed decision.  In a general way he knew that he was going out into the world from whence he had come, with an altogether different point of view, to work out his future along altogether different lines.  But he had not made up his mind to do this at once.  He was clearly