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?