Category: Novels

Burned Bridges

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 sloug...

Chapters

6. Chapter 6

Pow! Tommy's twelve-gauge cracked again. The two voices called laughingly back and forth across the slough, mingled with the excited barking of the brown dog as he retrieved the...

12. Chapter 12

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 stre...

25. Chapter 25

It took Thompson approximately forty-eight hours to arrange his affairs. He managed things with a precipitancy that would have shocked a sound, practical business man, for he pu...

16. Chapter 16

But he found it did make a difference, a profoundly disturbing difference. He had grown insulated against the memory of Sophie Carr tugging at his heartstrings as the magnetic n...

5. Chapter 5

Mike Breyette took a last look over his shoulder as the current and the thrust of two paddles carried the canoe around the first bend. Thompson stood on the bank, watching them go.

30. Chapter 30

An hour or so later Sam Carr came trudging home with a rod in his hand and a creel slung from his shoulder, in which creel reposed a half dozen silver-sided trout on a bed of gr...

3. Chapter 3

In the factor's comfortable quarters Mr. Thompson sat down to the first meal he had thoroughly relished in two weeks. A corner of the verandah was screened off with wire netting...

1. Chapter 1

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...

11. Chapter 11

Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections, Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set about gathering himself together. He d...

13. Chapter 13

If it occurred to either of them that the last time they faced each other it had been in hot anger and in earnest endeavor to inflict bodily damage, they were not embarrassed by...

18. Chapter 18

Late that evening Thompson walked into his room at the Globe. He seated himself in a rickety chair under a fly-specked incandescent lamp, beside a bed that was clean and comfort...

15. Chapter 15

For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare which is to San Francisco what the a...

2. Chapter 2

At almost the same hour in which Sam Carr and his daughter held that intimate conversation on the porch of their home a twenty-foot Peterborough freight canoe was sliding down t...

28. Chapter 28

Within a gunshot of the heart of Vancouver lies a snug tidal basin where yachts swing to their moorings, where a mosquito fleet of motor craft lies along narrow slips, with the...

10. Chapter 10

Between the queer mixture of emotions which beset him and the discomfort of his bruised face and over-strained body Thompson turned and twisted, and sleep withheld its restful o...

21. Chapter 21

Even after Thompson reached Vancouver and the visible signs of a nation at war confronted him he experienced no patriotic thrill. After all, there was no great difference, on th...

14. Chapter 14

Being in a town that was at once a frontier camp and a minor seaport, and being there at a season when the major industry of salmon-packing was at its height, the search of Tomm...

9. Chapter 9

Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank. He was on his way to Carr's house, driven t...

23. Chapter 23

It was in this period that certain phases of the war began to shake the foundation of things. I do not recall who said that an army marches on its stomach, but it is true, and i...

4. Chapter 4

To Breyette and MacDonald that forlorn cabin was after all nothing new or disheartening in their experience. They knew how a deserted house goes to rack and ruin. They knew also...

27. Chapter 27

On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab ware...

20. Chapter 20

Thompson went to Vancouver to spy out the land. He made no confidants. He went about the Terminal City with his mouth shut and his ears and eyes open. What he saw and heard soon...

24. Chapter 24

At a minute or two of ten the next morning Thompson stopped his car before the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The bolt-studded doors were still closed, and so he kept his seat behin...

22. Chapter 22

That winter and the summer which followed, and the period which carried him into the spring of 1916, was materially a triumphal procession for Wes Thompson. Tommy's forecast of...

17. Chapter 17

For the few minutes it took the red roadster to slip under the green summits of Twin Peaks and by a maze of boulevards debouch at length upon Valencia and so into the busy lengt...

29. Chapter 29

Thompson drove his canoe around a jutting point and came upon a white cruiser swinging at anchor in an eddy. Her lines were familiar though he had not seen her in two years. In...

8. Chapter 8

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...

26. Chapter 26

Thompson received his preliminary training in a camp not greatly distant from his birthplace and the suburban Toronto home where the spinster aunts still lived. He did not go to...

19. Chapter 19

This is not a history of the motor car business, nor even of the successive steps Wes Thompson took to win competent knowledge of that Beanstalk among modern industries. If it w...

7. Chapter 7

Mr. Thompson gradually became aware of a change in the season. The calendar lost a good deal of its significance up there, partly because he had no calendar and partly because o...