"But Clark doesn't need you--and I do."
"Do you object to my having friends?" she said tremulously.
"Elsie, will you marry me to-morrow?" Belding's voice was shaky but in
deadly earnest.
"What nonsense."
He shook his head. "It isn't to me,--I mean it. There is no one else.
There never will be. Can't you realize that?"
"I don't want to be married--now--" she said slowly.
He snatched up his transit. "Thanks, I thought it would come to that."
He took off his hat very formally and strode on. In his angry brain
burned the thought that the sooner Clark came to grief, the sooner
Elsie would get rid of this illusion. And then, as always, the brave
and loyal soul of him sent out a silent protest.
By now the wires were humming, and through St. Marys the news ran like
quicksilver. In years past there had been individual discoveries by
wandering bushmen, but none of them of value. Tales were afloat that
old Shingwauk down at the settlement knew of a gold bearing vein, and
that the knowledge would die with him. But at the formal announcement
that the Consolidated had found gold, it was universally believed that
it was of a necessity a bigger and better thing than ever before, and
carried with it all the reputation of Clark's immense undertaking.
So began the rush to the woods. It was not one in which tenderfeet
deserted their jobs and took to the hills, but a stirring amongst the
stiff bones of old prospectors who had given up the fight but were now
infused with new courage. In Fisette they saw the man who had won out
for the second time while they sat and smoked. There was a seeking out
and sharpening of picks blunted by inumerable taps on forgotten ridges,
and a stuffing of dunnage bags, and a sortie to Filmer's store for
flour and bacon and a few sticks of forty per cent. dynamite, and
patching of leaky shoe packs. Twenty-four hours later the little
station up at the works was crammed with men whose leathern faces were
alight with an old time joy, and whose eyes sparkled with the flame of
a nearly extinguished fire. After them came others from greater
distance, then peddlers and engineers representing mining firms in
search of properties, and keepers of road houses where the lamps burned
all night, and there were women and songs and whiskey that flouted the
peace of the forest. And with all this the traffic returns of the
Consolidated Company's railway leaped up, and Fisette, who was in
charge of a dozen men stripping his find of roots and earth and moss,
began to hear all round him, both near and far, the dull thud of
blasting and the faint clink of hammer on steel.
But it was a month before the general manager's private car slid into
the siding at Mile 61, where Clark, descending, found Fisette waiting
for him, and together they stepped out for the discovery. Here and
there along the trail other prospectors fell in silently behind. They
wanted to see Clark when he got the first glimpse of the vein.
Arriving a little breathless, he looked down at the bluish, white
streak that nakedly crossed a little ridge, clipped to a ravine on
either side, and reappeared boldly further on. Fisette picked up
samples from time to time, at which his patron glanced, and finally,
taking mortar and pan, crushed a fist full of ore and washed it
delicately, till a long tapering tail of yellow metal clung to the
rounded angle of the pan. And at that Clark asked a few questions of
the mining engineer who had come with him, nodded contentedly and
started back, leaving Fisette with the pan still in his muscular hands.
That night the breed squatted by his camp fire, too offended to smoke
and wondering dumbly why his patron had left so soon and said so
little, for this was a day to which he had looked forward for weeks.
He did not dream that Clark was even that moment thinking of him as the
private car clicked evenly over the rail joints on the way to the iron
mines. And this indeed was the case, for in the first tide of the rush
of gold seekers Clark had discerned the workings of an ancient rule.
Always it had been gold which inflamed the human mind to endure to the
uttermost. His imagination went back, and he saw the desperate influx
heading for California, for Australia, for South Africa, that mob of
adventurous spirits for whom there burned nightly over the hills the
lambent promise of the morrow, strengthening and invigorating to
further effort. He saw this mob lose itself in forest, mountain, plain
and canyon, a wild-eyed herald of civilization. He saw roads and
bridges, farms and villages take form along the trail it traversed,
till, slowly but inexorably, the wilderness was conquered, and the sons
of the pioneers sat in contentment under their own roof-tree in full
possession of a wealth greater by far than that their ancestors had
come to seek. But it was gold with its yellow finger that first
beckoned the way.
Next day, at the iron mine, he stood listening to the deep cough of the
big crusher and the loose rattle of machine drills. A little on one
side, and as yet unshaken by dynamite, was the knoll on which Wimperley
and the rest had been told what they were sitting on, and he smiled at
the recollection. Surveying the widening excavation, he reflected that
here, after all, was the heart of the entire enterprise. In fifty--in
a hundred years--the mine would still be unexhausted. It did not seem
romantic like Fisette's vein of gold ore, this barren-looking upheaval,
but to him the romance of a thing was in its potentiality and not its
appearance, and it moved in his mind now that there was every reason
for haste. Philadelphia was beginning to weary of capital expenditure,
and demanded an output of steel rails at the earliest possible moment.
Completing his round with a visit to Baudette's headquarter camp, he
inspected train loads of pulp wood ready for the mills. The areas
originally secured were nearly denuded and Baudette was forced further
afield. The mills were doing and had always done well, but their
profits were so instantly absorbed by allied and interlinked
undertakings that Clark at times wondered whether he was asking one
dollar to do too much. He reflected with a touch of surprise that the
small company formed to supply St. Marys with water and light was,
after all, the only one which from the first had actually disbursed
dividends. But the rail mill would settle all that. Returning to the
works he found a note on his desk that Townley, the chemist, would like
audience. He sent for him.
"Well?" he demanded impatiently; "what about that sulphur?"
Townley submitted a condensed report. "We can get it out at a cost of
about half the market price." He spoke with a note of triumph. He had
been slaving over the problem with the sacrificial zeal that
characterizes all keen chemists. But Townley did not know, and it was
impossible for him to know, that many things are feasible in a
laboratory which are irreducible to commercial terms.