incomprehensible misgivings. The work he had come there to do seemed to
have lost much of its force as a motive, as an inspiration. He felt
himself--so far as his mission to Lone Moose was concerned--in the
anomalous position of one compelled to make bricks without straw.

He was, in a word, suffering an acute attack of loneliness.

That was why the empty space of the clearing affected him with a
physical shrinking, why the neatly arranged interior of his cabin seemed
hollow, abandoned, terribly dispiriting. He longed for the sound of a
human voice, found himself listening for such a sound. The stillness was
not like the stillness of a park, nor an empty street, nor any of the
stillnesses he had ever experienced. It was not a kindly, restful
stillness,--not to him. It was the hollow hush of huge spaces emptied of
all life. Life was at his elbow almost but he could not make himself
aware of that. The forested wilderness affected him much as a small
child is affected by the dark. He was not afraid of this depressing
sense of emptiness, but it troubled him.

Before nine o'clock in the forenoon had rolled around he set off with
the express purpose of making himself acquainted with Sam Carr. Carr was
a white man, a scholar, MacLeod had said. Passing over the other things
MacLeod had mentioned for his benefit Thompson, in his dimly realized
need of some mental stimulus, could not think of a white man and a
scholar being aught but a special blessing in that primeval solitude.
Thompson had run across that phrase in books--primeval solitude. He was
just beginning to understand what it meant.

He set out upon his quest of Sam Carr with a good deal of unfounded
hope. In his own world, beginning with the churchly leanings of the