Our hero collected a light camping outfit and loitered in town till he
was mustered out. His release came on the last day of June, just after
the death of the aged Lord Rayleigh, whose beautiful scientific work and
beautiful old face had long commanded his reverence. That a baron should
have gone over the whole field of physics, re-weighing, clearing up all
sorts of uncertainties, seemed to Marvin a proof of the good time
coming. He had heard of other English barons, for instance Fortinbras,
who were essentially democratic, but Rayleigh bore away the palm from
them all. Fortinbras was interested only in navies, but Rayleigh’s argon
would eventually prove more important than all the navies on earth.
Early in July he went by boat to Mackinac, secured a launch and an
engineer, and in three days set foot on every island in the St. Mary’s.
Most of them lay too far from the channel, but he made note of two,
lying about four miles apart, that seemed exactly the thing his father
wanted. Who owned them he had as yet no means of knowing.
At Sault Sainte Marie he dismissed the launch and let it find its way
home, for he desired no company when he should come to bargain for
islands. Also he wanted a launch that he himself could handle.
He would hardly have found it had not the great American people sent it
in a curious way. When Marvin had searched the river front in vain and
was walking along the stone wall below the locks, idly watching the
school of herring pursue a drifting mass of mayflies, an elegant launch
cut through the herring and drew up to make fast.
Marvin held out his hand for the rope, and smilingly answered questions.
He was invited on board by the youthful owner and was shown how nearly
automatic Kittiwake could boast herself to be. Presently the owner cast
off again and permitted his new acquaintance to run the launch up to the
locks and back again.
Then pleasant facts were revealed. The owner was seeking storage for his
craft for three weeks, because he was on his way to Winnipeg to persuade
that innocent city to chew his father’s sapodilla—in short, gum! So the
great and nervous American people presented Marvin with the loan of a
perfect boat and went on chewing.
That afternoon he loaded her with provisions and spare gasoline, hired a
skiff to tow, and ran down the river to a point midway between the two
islands which he had decided to buy. He landed at a pier called Upper
Encampment, which extended westward from the shore of a wooded American
island. It was a lonely place.
He carried some duffle ashore and pitched his tent. Then he wandered up
a wood road till he found a log house. It proved to be the post-office.
The postmistress, a sweet-faced woman, lived there with her aged father,
who was a gunsmith and a notary. Miss Mabel welcomed the supposed
fisherman and assured him that he could leave his launch at their pier
with perfect safety.
Her father talked freely. Fishing was poor. Bass did not really run
until September. The nearest bass ground was below, around the two
islands called the Duckling and Old Duck. There was also some fishing
above, at Keego, the slender little island so called because it looked
like a fish.
Marvin went to his bed of boughs contented, for he had learned the names
of the two islands he wanted. They were the Duckling and Keego. Next day
he would fish around the Duckling and find out who owned it.
He awoke early, arose and dressed, and went out into the cold dawn. He
built a fire and let it burn down while he laboriously captured some
crayfish from the edge of the icy river. Then he set his coffee pot on
the coals and sat down to wait until it simmered. He was lonesomer than
ever he was. He thought of the morning when he and Gregg and O. Fisher
drank coffee together before starting up the valley of the Surmelin. He
wished that O. Fisher were sitting there on the ground, polishing shoes
in silence.
The ground was stained with iron. So is all the earth, which would look
blanched and ghostly save for iron, but he was on the southern edge of
the narrow region from which a billion tons have already been quarried.
Men would go on digging iron till they suddenly discovered that they had
no means to smelt it. There it would lie, its atoms arranged in the form
of a cube with one atom at the centre, and twenty-six balanced charges
in every atom, as useless as it was a million years ago.
And all because the idiots that called themselves men persisted in
killing off their Moseleys. No matter. Of what earthly importance were
the regrets of a one-handed chemist sitting on the slag of a solid iron
earth?