"It's more what they don't say, since they're mostly Scotch. I mean
the financial crowd--most of Toronto is like that. The Scotch got
their hooks in long ago and it was a good thing for the country. They
reckon it should take twenty-five years to build up a concern like
this--not five. You're too fast for that lot."
"Ah! Perhaps I'd better go down and see them."
Semple gazed in astonishment, then concluded he had not made the other
sufficiently aware of the criticism as to himself and his affairs that
was now so widely spread.
"What's the object?" he blurted; "you've got all you want."
Clark shook his head. "You don't understand me--and these people don't
understand their own country,--that's all. They don't believe it
because they don't know it. They've never tried to know it. To
Toronto the district of Algoma is a howling wilderness where there's
good fishing and shooting. You may call Canadians pioneers, but some
of them are the stickiest lot imaginable. I'm an American, but I have
more faith in their country than they have."
"Just what do you propose to do?"
"What would you say was the most influential body of business and
financial men?"
"The Toronto Board of Trade--without question; bankers, and, by the
way, the president of your bank here is the president of the Board;
manufacturers, brokers, commission men,--oh, most every one who is
worth anything."
"Then I'd better go and talk to them. There ought to be some Canadian
money in this concern and there isn't a cent. The only thing we got in
Canada was one hundred and thirty thousand dollars--but that was
debt--St. Marys' debt--" laughed Clark. "We'll get some Canadian
directors, too; I don't know but that new blood would be good for us."
"Well," hazarded Semple, "I'd like to be there."
"You will. We'll go together as soon as it's arranged. You ought to
be there. They'll probably ask you to confirm what I assert." He
touched a bell and a moment later said to his secretary, "See Mr.
Bowers and ask him to get in touch with our Toronto solicitors at once.
I want them to arrange that I address the Toronto Board of Trade as
soon as convenient to that body. I'll speak of developments in
Northern Ontario. You understand that this will not be a suggestion
from me, but will come from them. Get the idea going in the Toronto
papers. You might let it be known that a special car will leave for
St. Marys the evening of the address--with the Company's guests--that's
all."
The door closed and he turned again to Semple. "I'm no prophet, but I
don't mind saying that a month from to-day your Conservative opposition
won't be so stiff necked. Man alive! it's nothing but ignorance. This
district of yours--" he added very slowly, "is a bigger, richer thing
than even I imagined."
Semple went away shaking his head doubtfully. He knew better than
Clark that chilling regard with which Toronto financiers contemplated
an undertaking in which they had little faith. They were a cold-nosed
group, immune, he considered, to the dramatic and strangers to any
sudden impulse. And Clark, to their minds, was tarred with the same
brush as his undertakings. He might be big and imaginative, but he was
over impetuous and haphazard.
Clark himself was disturbed by no discomfort, nor did he make any
special preparations for that address, and gave it as arranged some two
weeks later, and the manner and substance and effect of it will be
vividly remembered by every man who was a member of that Board of Trade
some twenty-five years ago. There were the bankers and the rest of
them, just as Semple had said, and Clark, surveying them from the
platform with steady gray eyes, knew what make of men they were and
knew also that they had come there not so much with a thirst for
knowledge about their own country as that they might coldly analyze him
and that vast undertaking of which they had, as yet, but a fantastic
and fragmentary knowledge.
It is without question that the speaker had to an infinitely greater
extent than any of the men who stared at him through a blue haze of
cigar smoke, a fluid mind and the capacity for instantly seizing upon a
situation and determining how to meet it. He possessed as well a voice
unrivaled in magnetic power and above all an unshakable faith in the
potentiality of the district in which he labored, so that, estimating
the mental and professional characteristics of those he faced, Clark
began to talk in the coolest and most level way possible without any
trace of flamboyant enthusiasm. Touching first of all on the
development of the far West, a subject with which, since much Toronto
money was involved, they were directly familiar, he diverted to St.
Marys, describing Arcadia as he found it, the apparently unpromising
nature of the surrounding territory and his own conclusion as to its
possible future. Then the rapids became woven into his speech, the
nucleus of power which made so many things possible. From this he
moved into the wilderness and before his listeners there began to
unroll the north country in its primeval silence, broken only by the
occasional tap of a prospector's pick or the heavy crash of a moose
through a cluster of saplings. And with the story of the wilderness
came that of pulp wood and great areas now tributary to St. Marys. And
after the pulp mills came the discovery of iron.
At this a stir went through the audience. In another part of the north
country was Cobalt, that prodigious reservoir of silver, and it was
realized that while Cobalt lay almost next door to Toronto, the
Canadian investor had for the most part looked on incredulously, till,
too late, he realized that the American had seized and acted with
characteristic energy. And now the thing had happened again.
"The iron was there," went on Clark's voice with a subtle and impelling
note, "and it only took a year or so to find it. The country was
unexplored, that is, in a scientific manner, and no geological maps
worth anything were in existence. We have proved by now not less than
fifteen million tons of excellent ore. The formation near St. Marys
carries an abundance of limestone and the rapids furnish ample power.
I think you will admit, gentlemen, that this is non-speculative."
Then one by one he spoke of various phases of the works. In every case
the product was there--the merchantable produce--to prove the point;
and the evident fact that Clark was actually selling goods over his
gigantic counter, coupled with the cool confidence of the man, was all
that was needed to convert an audience of critics into one of friendly
believers.
He saw the change as it took place. His voice lifted a little and
became that of one crying in the wilderness.
"What I have been able to do any man can do. If you don't believe in
it, other people do; if you don't develop it, other people will. From
Canada we have moved across to Michigan and are developing power on the
south side of the river. You Canadians could have done all this. In a
few months Canadian railways will be buying steel rails made of Ontario
ore, but the rails will be made and sold by Americans in Ontario.
Gentlemen, all I ask is that you have faith in your own country, as
much faith as has been shown by your neighbors across the line. Your
Dominion is now what the United States was fifty years ago and we did
not waver. The capital of our allied companies is twenty-seven million
dollars. It comes, every cent of it, from Philadelphia. We do not
need your money, but will welcome any who wish to join us. Once again,
gentlemen, and last of all, have faith in your own country!" Then,
with a graceful acknowledgment of the assistance of Semple and the
Ontario Government, he sat down.
For a moment there was silence, till came applause, moderate at first,
as befitted the meeting, but swelling presently into great volume.
Louder and deeper it grew while Clark sat still with the least flush on
his usually colorless cheek and a keen light in his gray eyes. He had
touched them to the quick, touched them not only by his own evident
faith and courage, but also by his superlative energy and the
inexorable comparison he had made. It was true! Cobalt was nearly
lost to them, and now the iron of Algoma had passed into other hands.
Old bankers and financiers cast their minds back and were surprised at
the number of similar instances they recalled. And here was Clark, the
protagonist, Clark the speculator, Clark the wild man from
Philadelphia, demonstrating in the cold language to which they were
accustomed and which they perfectly understood, that he had done the
same thing over again and on a more imposing scale than ever before.
The dénouement was what he had anticipated and what invariably takes
place when men with calculating and professionally critical brains are
for the first time profoundly stirred by a supremely magnetic spirit
that appeals not to their emotions but to those instincts in which the
memory of lost opportunities is effaced by confidence in future
success. There was, too, a general feeling that Clark in the past was
misunderstood. They had been hard on him. It was strange for men who
were daily besought to invest in this or that to be told that their
money was not asked for; that, as Clark had put in--the job was nearly
done, capital expenditure nearly over and steady returns about to
begin. And these returns, they reflected, would go straight out of the
country to Philadelphia. All this and much more was moving through
their minds when the president moved a vote of thanks which was
tumultuously carried, whereupon Clark announced that the private car
would leave that night for St. Marys, and that he and Mr. Semple would
accompany such visitors as cared to spend a day or two at the works.
That afternoon he sent a short letter to his mother. "I have been
giving a talk on Toronto--it went quite well," he wrote in closing.
"Canadians do not attract, but certainly interest me. There's much
underneath that needs work to discover, and I have so little time for
work of that kind."
He glanced at the last sentence and nodded approvingly. Perhaps
Canadians were too Scotch to be spontaneous. They were worthy, he
admitted, but the word implied to him certain attributes that made life
a little difficult, and, he silently concluded, a little cold. He
would have desired them to be a trifle less deliberate and a shade more
responsive. He felt that, however, he might persuade they would never
fundamentally understand him, and perceived in this the cause of that
condescension he had observed in so many Canadians toward the American.
It did not worry him in the slightest as an American. He put it down
to that self-satisfaction which is not infrequently acquired by
self-made men in the process of their own manufacture, and to remnants
of that cumulative British arrogance of forebears who had for centuries
led the world.
Early next morning the private car swung through the mining district of
Sudbury. Clark's Toronto visitors were still asleep, but he was up and
dressed and on the rear platform. The district, covered once by a
green blanket of trees, now seemed blasted and dead. Close by were
great piles of nickel ore, from which low clouds of acrid vapor rose
into the bright air. Clark knew that the ore was being laboriously
roasted in order to dissipate the sulphur it contained, prior to
further treatment.
The scene, naked and forbidding, struck him forcibly, and the great
mining buildings towering in the midst of the desolation they had
created looked like ugly castles of destruction. He had noted the
place often before, but this morning, refreshed by the incidents of the
previous day, his mind was working with unexampled ease and insight.
Here, he reflected, two things of value--sulphur and vegetation--were
being arduously obliterated. It suddenly appeared fundamentally
against nature, and whatever violated nature was, he held,
fundamentally wrong.
The train stopped for a few moments and, jumping from the platform, he
ran across to the nearest pile. Here he picked up several pieces of
ore fresh from the mine, inhaling as he stood the sharp and killing
fumes. At St. Marys he made but one kind of pulp--mechanical pulp--in
which the soft wood was disintegrated by revolving stones against which
it was thrust under great pressure. But he had always desired to make
another kind of pulp, so now he thrust the ore samples in his pocket
and climbed back into the private car.
Two days later the chief chemist of the works stood beside the general
manager's desk looking from the nickel samples into Clark's animated
face.
"These are from Sudbury," the latter was saying, "where they waste
thousands of tons of sulphur a year, and it costs them a lot to waste
it. I want the sulphur to make sulphite pulp."
"Yes?" The reply was a little uncertain.
"To buy what we want is out of the question at the present price. In
Alabama and Sicily they are spending a lot of money to get sulphur; in
Sudbury they're spending a lot of money to get rid of it. The thing is
all wrong."
"Have we any nickel mine, sir?"
"No, but that's the small end of it. I want you to analyze this ore
and see if you can devise a commercial process for the separation of
nickel from sulphur and save both. If you can, I'll buy a mine.
Incidentally we'll produce some pretty cheap nickel. Get busy!"
The chemist nodded and went out, and Clark, glancing after him, fell
into profound contemplation. He himself was neither engineer, chemist
nor scientist, but had a natural instinct for the suitable uses of
physical things. Thus, though without any advanced technical training,
his brain was relieved from any consciousness of difficulties which
might be encountered in the working out of the problems he set for
others with such remarkable facility. He was, in truth, a practical
idealist, who, ungrafted to any particular branch of effort, embarked
on them all, radiating that magnetic confidence which is the chief
incentive toward accomplishment.
The visit of the Toronto financiers had been a success. Clark went
round with them, unfolding the history of the works. Nor was this by
any means the first tour he had made with similar intent. It was now
an old story with him to watch the faces of men reflect their gradual
surrender to the spell of his mesmeric brain. What the Torontonians
saw was physical and concrete, and, as their host talked, they
perceived the promise of that still greater future which he had put
before them. Here, they decided, was not a speculation, but an
investment of growing proportions. Then from the works to the
backwoods by the new railway, where was iron by millions of tons and
pulp by millions of cords, the foundations on which were built the
gigantic structures at St. Marys. So they had gone back in the glow of
that sudden conversion which in its nature is more emotional than the
slow march of a purely intellectual process, Clark smiled a little at
the thought. He had seen it all so often before.
A little later a knock sounded at his door and Fisette entered,
stepping up to the desk, one brown hand in his pocket. Clark glanced
at him.
"Well, mon vieux?"
The half-breed laid on the desk half a dozen pieces of bluish gray
rock. They were sharp, angular and freshly broken. Through them ran
yellow threads, and floating in their semi-translucent depths were fine
yellow flakes.
"Gold," said Fisette quietly.