Burned Bridges

Burned Bridges

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Burned Bridges, by Bertrand W.
Sinclair, Illustrated by Ralph P. Coleman
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Burned Bridges
Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair

Release Date: August 19, 2005 [eBook #16553]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BURNED
BRIDGES***
E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Graeme Mackreth, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

BURNED BRIDGES
by
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

Author of North of Fifty-Three, etc.
Frontispiece by Ralph P. Coleman
Grosset & Dunlap Publishers New York Published, August, 1919
Reprinted, September, 1919 Reprinted, October, 1919 Reprinted,
November, 1919 Reprinted, February, 1920

[Illustration: He felt with an odd exaltation the quick hammer of her
heart against his breast. Frontispiece. _See page 95._]

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The First Problem 1
II The Man and His Mission 14
III The Deserted Cabin 24
IV In Which Mr. Thompson Begins to Wonder Painfully 37
V Further Acquaintance 46
VI Certain Perplexities 60
VII A Slip of the Axe 80
VIII --And the Fruits Thereof 86
IX Universal Attributes 93
X The Way of a Maid with a Man 102
XI A Man's Job for a Minister 111

XII A Fortune and a Flitting 123
XIII Partners 139
XIV The Restless Foot 150
XV The World Is Small 158
XVI A Meeting by the Way 168
XVII The Reproof Courteous (?) 183
XVIII Mr. Henderson's Proposition 191
XIX A Widening Horizon 203
XX The Shadow 210
XXI The Renewed Triangle 218
XXII Sundry Reflections 227
XXIII The Fuse-- 235
XXIV --And the Match That Lit the Fuse-- 244
XXV --And the Bomb the Fuse Fired 252
XXVI The Last Bridge 267
XXVII Thompson's Return 273
XXVIII Fair Winds 282
XXIX Two Men and a Woman 291
XXX A Mark to Shoot at 298
CHAPTER I

THE FIRST PROBLEM
Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open
stretches of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python--a python
that rested its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail
was lost in a great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy
sloughs and hushed lakes far northward.
The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no others. No
wheeled vehicles traverse that silent region which lies just over the
fringe of the prairies and the great Canadian wheat belt. The canoe is
lord of those watery roads; when a man would diverge therefrom he
must carry his goods upon his back. There are paths, to be sure, very
faint in places, padded down by the feet of generations of Athabascan
tribesmen long before the Ancient and Honorable Company of
Adventurers laid the foundation of the first post at Hudson's Bay, long
before the _Half Moon's_ prow first cleft those desolate waters. They
have been trodden, these dim trails, by Scotch and French and English
since that historic event, and by a numerous progeny in whose veins the
blood of all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. But these
paths lead only from stream to stream and from lake to lake. No man
familiar with the North seeks along those faint trails for camp or fur
posts or villages. Wherever in that region red men or white set up a
permanent abode it must of necessity be on the bank of a stream or the
shore of a lake, from whence by canoe and paddle access is gained to
the network of water routes that radiate over the fur country.
Lone Moose Creek was, so to speak, a trunk line. The ninety miles of
its main channel, its many diverging branches, tapped a region where
mink and marten and beaver, fox and wolf and lesser furs were still
fairly plentiful. Along Lone Moose a dozen Cree and half-breed
families disappeared into the back country during the hazy softness of
Indian summer and came gliding down in the spring with their winter's
catch, a birch-bark flotilla laden indiscriminately with mongrel dogs
and chattering women and children and baled furs and impassive-faced
men, bound for Port Pachugan to the annual barter.
Up Lone Moose some twenty-odd miles from the lake the social

instinct had drawn a few families, pure-blooded Cree, and Scotch and
French half-breeds, to settle in a permanent location. There was a
crescent-shaped area of grassy turf fronting upon the eastern bank of
Lone Moose, totaling perhaps twenty acres. Its outer edge was ringed
with a dense growth of spruce timber. In the fringe of these dusky
woods, at various intervals