"Oh, Tommy, there's another wounded one, swimming away. Quick!"
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 slaughtered ducks. After a time silence fell. Thompson's nose detected an odor. He turned hastily to his stove. But he had listened too long. The biscuits in his oven were smoking.
That did not matter greatly in itself. It was merely one of a long procession of culinary disasters. He could not, somehow, contrive to prepare food in the simple manner of Mike Breyette's instructions. If the biscuits had not scorched probably they would have been hopelessly soggy, dismal things compared to the brown discs Mike had turned out of the same oven. One was as bad as the other. Nothing seemed to work out right. Nothing ever tasted right. Only a healthy hunger enabled him to swallow the unsavory messes he concocted in the name of food.
He had been at Lone Moose two weeks now. His real work, his essential labor in that untilled field, was no farther advanced. He made about the same progress as a missionary that he made as a cook. In so far as Lone Moose was concerned he accomplished nothing because, like Archimedes, he lacked a foothold from which to apply his leverage. He had the intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message was vitiated by this utter absence of receptivity. He was, and realized that he was, as superfluous in Lone Moose as sterling silver and cut glass in a house where there is neither food nor drink.
Also he was no longer so secure in the comfortable belief that all things work for an ultimate good. He was not so sure that a sparrow, or even an ordained servant of God, might not fall and the Almighty be none the wiser. The material considerations which he had always scorned pressed upon him in an unescapable manner. There was no getting away from them. Thrown at last upon his own resources he began to take stock of his needs, his instincts, his impulses, and to compare them with the needs and instincts and impulses of a more Godless humanity,--and he could not escape certain conclusions. Faith may move mountains, but chiefly through the medium of a shovel. When a man is hungry his need is for food. When he is lonely he craves companionship. When he grieves he desires sympathy. And the Providence Mr. Thompson had been taught to lean so hard upon did not chop his wood, cook his meals, furnish him with congenial society, comfort him when he was sad.