CHAPTER I. A QUITTER.

I was feeling pretty blue that night as we pounded through the Yuculta rapids in the darkness and the rain. Eight months before the Canadian Presbyterian Church had brought me back from Edinburgh to take over their Loggers’ Mission. The missionary was expected to minister to tide-water logging camps in lonely districts along the British Columbia coast. I had “signed on” for five years and now at the end of eight months I was getting fed up. The launch we had was the MinaW a dilapidated second-hand affair with an ancient gasoline engine, on it that at times was enough to make, a preacher swear! The hull of the boat was rotten and leaked badly. Caulking it was practically useless. The first "storm would open the seams again and it would be as bad as ever. Usually my engineer and I had to stay up until about eleven at night, pumping it dry with a hand-pump, in order to be able to stay in our berths until seven in the morning. If we delayed rising much beyond that hour we would find the water seeping through the floor!
                                                                                                                         11

I knew then very little about motor-boats and thought that these discomforts were just the usual thing and that I must keep on and try to be “a hero in the strife.” No one was to blame. The responsible Vancouver committee thought, I suppose, as I did, that a boat is a boat and a gas-engine is a gas-engine. Sometimes I heard them called by other names not commonly used in polite society. Such was the Mina B^., and such was the engine. Experience has taught us much and we are wiser. I have now a fine, new boat, well- engined. But that’s looking two years ahead. That night I was in the doldrums when, after running the aforesaid six miles of howling tidal rapids in the dark, (a fool thing that only a greenhorn would attempt), I anchored in Shoal Bay. During these fall and winter months of 1920-21 1 an unknown preacher, had been endeavoring to get a footing of friendship and confidence in the camps. I had found it very difficult. In fact it seemed to me that I was as much an outsider as when I started. I find no fault with the loggers. In general they were good fellows I never went hungry or lacked a place to sleep) When I was back in the camps, but they seemed to have little use for a preacher. They presumed that I adopted the attitude so frequently taken by a missionary that the loggers were all rough fellows going plumb to hell. Their antagonism had been aroused by some peripatetic missionary, earnest but ignorant who had approached them with the "holier-than-thou" atmosphere.
                                                                                                            12

They had become disgusted by his unintentionally insulting manners. This had put them against preachers. Then, too, it was immediately after the war and there was a spirit of revolt in the air against the old conditions and institutions from which the world conflict had come. The church was one of these old institutions. It had failed to prevent the war, had indeed never raised a voice against it. But enough of that. All I want to have you realize just here is that I had dismally failed so far to get a hearing in the camps, and it was taking the heart out of me. I was almost always treated with reasonable courtesy, never the slightest sight of horse-play, but in camp after camp, after I had announced my evening meeting in the cookhouse and rung the gong for the men to gather, nobody, or only one or two, would show up. This kind of thing and the misery of the boat was gradually forcing me to the shameful decision I made that night.
                                                                                                               13