FullReads

Six weeks later we came down into Roes Welcome Sound, planning to get out through Hudson Strait before winter set in. The fact that we were almost homeward bound didn’t seem to affect Thomas Jefferson. I saw the beginning of the end when he said to me one day:

“Bobby, I’ve never seen this northern country. It’s a big, glorious country, and I’d like to go ashore.”

There wasn’t any use arguing with him. The cap’n tried it, we all tried it, and at last Thomas Jefferson prepared to take his leave of us at Point Fullerton, just eight hundred miles north of civilization, where there’s an Eskimo village and a police station of the Royal Northwest Mounted. He came to me the day before we were going to take him ashore, and said:

“Bobby, why don’t you come along? Let’s chum it, old man, and see what happens.”

When he went ashore, the next day, I went with him, and we each took three months’ supply of grub and our pay. From that hour there began the big change–the change which turned Thomas Jefferson back into Thomas Jefferson Brown, and which it took a girl to finish.

It came first in his eyes, and then in his laugh. After that he seemed to grow an inch or two taller, and he lost that careless, shiftless way which comes of what he called the wanderlust bug. There wasn’t so much laughter in his eyes, but something better had taken its place–a deeper, grayer, more thoughtful look, and he didn’t play those queer things with his mouth any more.

The police at Point Fullerton hardly had a glimpse of him as the big, sunny, loose-jointed giant, Thomas Jefferson. He had become a bronze-bearded god, with the strength of five men in his splendid shoulders, and a port to his head that made you think of a piece of sculpture.

“You can’t be anything but a man up here, Bobby,” he said one day, and I knew what he meant. “It’s not the air, it’s not the cold, and it’s not the fight you make to keep life in your body,” he added, “but it’s God! That’s what it is, Bobby. There’s not a sound or a sight up here, outside of that little cabin, that’s human. It’s all God–there’s nothing else–and it makes you think!”

III

It was spring when we came down to Fort Churchill, and it was summer when we struck York Factory. It was the middle of one of those summer days when strawberries ripen even up there, that the last prop fell out from under Thomas Jefferson, and he became Thomas Jefferson Brown. He met Lady Isobel. The title did not really belong to her, for she was only the cousin of Lord Meton; but Thomas Jefferson Brown called her that from the first.

It was down close to the boats, where their launch lay, and the wind had frolicked with Lady Isobel’s hair until it rippled about her face and shoulders like a net of spun gold. She was bareheaded, and he was bareheaded, and they stared for a moment, her blue eyes flashing into his gray ones; and then there came into her face a color like rose, and he bowed, as one of the old-time Presidents might have bowed to a hair-powdered beauty in the days when the Capitol was young.

That was the beginning, and to his honor be it said that Thomas Jefferson Brown never revealed that he was a gentleman born, though his heart was stricken with love at that first sight of Lady Isobel’s lovely face. Lord Meton wanted a man–one who could handle a canoe and shoulder two hundred pounds of duff; and “Tom” became the man, working like a slave for a month; but always with the pride and bearing of a king.

It wasn’t difficult to see what was happening. Lord Meton saw, and understood; but he knew that the proud blood in Lady Isobel was an invulnerable armor that would protect her from indiscretion. And as for Thomas Jefferson Brown–