The young manager of the local bank through which Clark transacted his
affairs sat late one night in his office. He had just returned from
dinner at the big house, where he left his host in an unusually genial
and communicative mood. It seemed that Clark's mind, tightened with
the continued strain of years, had wished to slacken itself in an hour
or two of utter candor, and Brewster had listened with full
consciousness that this was an occasion which might never be repeated.
But in his small cubicle, walled in with opaque glass, Clark's magnetic
accents appeared to dwindle before the inexorable character of the
statement Brewster now scrutinized. It was the detailed and financial
history of each successive company, a history in which birth and bones
and articulation were clearly set forth, and what struck the young man
most forcibly was the extraordinary way in which each was interlinked
with the rest. The combined capital of all was, he noted, twenty-seven
million dollars, and greater than that yet reached by the Canadian
Pacific Railway. Brewster had known it before, but the bald and
cumulative figures in front of him made the fact the more momentous.
Probing still deeper, it became apparent that while the pulp mills made
steady profits, these were so adjusted as to form but one link in a
chain. In all there were some ten companies, each drawing from the
others its business and its surplus. Clark had not been far wrong when
he reflected that he might be asking one dollar to do too much, and now
the sharp brain of the young manager was coming to the same conclusion.
Behind his office building passed Clark's steamships, for there was a
transportation company, and into the wilderness Clark's trains plunged
with unfailing regularity. Up at the works the blast furnaces were
vomiting flame and smoke, and the rail mill was nearly completed.
Baudette was sending down train loads and rafts of wood, and at the
iron mine dynamite was lifting thousands of tons of ore. The entire
aggregation of effort and expenditure had been so systematically
interwoven that Brewster there and then decided that if one link in the
chain should part, the whole fabric of the thing would dissolve. It
was true that he made no advances without authority from his
headquarters, but he had long been aware that Clark's was the largest
commercial account in Canada and, he reflected gravely, it all went
through his own office. Two days later he reached Toronto, and asked
audience of his general manager.
Now since this record is partly that of the relative standing of
different individuals in the development of a little known district,
consider Brewster in consultation with Thorpe, the general manager of
his great bank. Brewster was young, active, in close touch with Clark
and his enterprises, enthusiastic, yet touched with a certain power of
quick and ruthless decision. He had been interested and even thrilled
by the doings at St. Marys, but he had never yielded himself completely
to Clark's mesmeric influence. Thorpe, a much older man and of noted
executive ability, was one of those who by that noted address at the
Board of Trade had been rooted out of long standing indifference and
imbued with surprised confidence, and this translation, so rapid in its
movements, still survived. In consequence, he listened to the younger
man with a thinly veiled incredulity.
"I can't quite see it," he said thoughtfully, "even from your own
account. It's probably the proportions of the thing that makes you
anxious."
Brewster shook his head. "No, it isn't that. There's a big power
house on the American side and it didn't earn a cent for a year,
something wrong with the foundations, though it's all right now.
There's the sulphur extraction plant that doesn't extract sulphur,
and--"
"What?" interrupted Thorpe. He, like others, had read of the new
process with keen interest, and was anxious to learn details.
"It worked in the laboratory but not on a commercial basis. Belding,
the chief engineer, is all cut up about it. Consequence is Clark is
buying sulphur, and just now pulp prices are so low he's not making
anything out of it."
"Have you seen Wimperley lately?"
"He was up with Birch a week or so ago."
"Say anything particular?"