Clark stared at the fragment of rock with a sudden and divine thrill. Gold! the ultima thule of the explorer. He had erected vast works to gain gold, not for himself for he desired no wealth, but for others, and here the precious thing lay in his hand. His heart leaped and the blood rushed to his temples while his eyes wandered to the impassive face of Fisette. Who and what was the breed that he could be so calm?

Out of a riot of sensations he gradually reËstablished his customary clearness of vision. Here was additional evidence of the inherent wealth of the country. It was that for which men dared death and peril and hardship, and it struck him that it would be a dramatic thing to ship steel rails and pulp and gold bullion on the same day.

But for all of this he was not carried away. However great the thrill, his mind could not be diverted by the discovery of a quartz vein. He knew, too, that mining of this character was a tricky thing and that nature, as often as not, left the shelves of her storehouses empty when by all the rules of geology they ought to be laden. He would explore and develop the find, but its chief value, he ultimately decided, was psychological, and would be seen in the continued support of his followers. Presently he looked up and caught the disappointed eyes of Fisette.

"It's all right, mon vieux," he said with an encouraging smile, "and it's very good. How far from the railway?"

"About six mile." Fisette's voice was unusually dull.

"And you have it all staked and marked and dated?"

"Yes, I'm not one damn fool."

Clark laughed outright. "Of course not—but listen—you remember when you found the iron last year what I told you?"

"You told me to keep my mouth shut. I keep it."

"That's right. And now I want you to keep your mouth open."

Fisette gasped. "What you mean?"

"I mean this. You told nobody about the iron, now you go and tell everybody about the gold. Shout about it. The more you tell the better. The whole town can prospect on our concession if they want to. I hope every one of them will find gold. I'll come out myself next week and see what you've turned up, and of course you get for it what I gave you for the iron last year. Au revoir, mon vieux, and when you go to town, talk—talk—talk! But just wait a minute in the outside office."

Fisette backed silently out, his dark brow pinched into puzzled wrinkles. He had expected his patron to take the samples and stare at them and then at him with that wonderful look he remembered so well and could never forget; a look that had made the breed feel strangely proud and happy. He had often seen it since when, quite alone in the woods, he peered through the gray smoke of his camp fire and imagined his patron sitting just on the other side. And now he was to go into St. Marys and do nothing but talk! He shook his head doubtfully.

No sooner had the door closed than Clark summoned the superintendent of his railway department.

"Fisette has found gold out near the line. There's going to be a rush, and you'd better get ready for it. Also you'd better run up some kind of an hotel at Mile 61,—it's the jumping off place. That's all—please send Pender here."

A moment later he turned to his secretary.

"Fisette is waiting outside. Talk to him, he's found gold. Get the story and give it to the local paper. Say that I've no objection to prospectors working on our concession, and that I'll guarantee title to anything they find. Get in touch with the Toronto papers and let them have it too. That's all."

The door closed again and, with a strange feeling of restlessness, he walked over to the rapids, seating himself close to their thundering tumult. What message had the rapids for him now? And just as the voice of irresistible power began to bore into his brain he noticed a girl perched on a rock close by. Simultaneously she turned. It was Elsie Worden.

She waved a hand, and he moved carefully up stream over the slippery boulders. She looked at him with startled pleasure. It was unlike Clark to move near to any one.

"I hope I'm not trespassing."

"No," his voice came clearly through the roar of many waters; "do you often come here?"

She smiled. "It's the most conversational place I know."

The gray eyes narrowed a little. "You have discovered that the rapids talk back?"

"They have told me all kinds of things ever since I was a child. When did you find it out?" Elsie's voice lifted a little.

"The very first day I reached St. Marys, almost the first hour." He was wondering inwardly why he should talk thus to any one.

"I'm so glad," she answered contentedly, "because they must have told you to do many things, and you've done them. But I can't half answer what they say to me."

Clark studied her silently. Her face was not only beautiful but supremely intelligent, and had, moreover, the signet of imagination. She was, he concluded, utterly truthful and courageous.

"I wonder you get time to come here at all," she hazarded after a thoughtful pause.

"It is time well spent." He pointed to the heaped crests in midstream. "The solution of many a problem lies out there; I've got one to think of now."

Had Elsie been an ordinary girl she would have disappeared forthwith, but between them sped something that convinced her that he wanted her to stay.

"Am I allowed to know what it is?"

"It's this." Clark took a fragment of rock from his pocket and laid it in her palm.

"What is it?" she said curiously.

"Gold!"

"Oh!" The color flew to her cheeks and her eyes became very bright.
"Where did it come from and who found it?"

"About sixty miles from here, and Fisette found it—he's one of my prospectors."

"He's the man who discovered iron for you?"

"Yes."

"How very extraordinary," she said under her breath.

"Why should it be?"

"The last time we talked you had just found iron, and now it's gold.
This is even more wonderful, isn't it?"

He shook his head. "It's pretty—but not nearly so important." Something in the girl's manner attracted him strangely and he went on talking as he seldom talked. Her eyes never left his face.

"Yes," she said presently, "I'm glad to understand. But the strange thing to me is that all these people," here she pointed towards the works, "are doing things they would not have done if you hadn't come. Why is that?"

"Some people think that the most successful man is the one who gets others to work the hardest for him," said Clark, smiling.

She shook her head. "That doesn't suit. I know what it is."

"Do you?"

"It's vision." There was a thrill in her low voice. Then she added, very swiftly, "You haven't many friends, have you, Mr. Clark?"

He stared at her in surprise, and in the next instant decided that she was right. "Why do you ask that?"

"Because you must see past most people, don't you, to what is ahead?
It is hard to put just what I mean into words."

He nodded gravely. "It is quite true that I haven't any very close personal friends, I've moved about too quickly to make them. As for my employees, I see them chiefly through their work."

"Then you don't really know them," she announced.

"Possibly,—but I know their results. It sounds a little inhuman, doesn't it?"

"I think I understand." Elsie was tempted to probe this gray-eyed man about Belding, but presently gave it up. She was conscious that while she was talking to Clark the figure of the engineer faded into the background.

"So there's really no one?" she went on reflectively.

"Only my mother," he said gravely, "that is, so far."

At that her heart experienced a new throb. He was infinitely removed from any man she had ever dreamed of.

"Are you never lonely?"

"Perhaps I am," he replied with utter candor, "but I fill my life with things which to most people are inanimate, though to me they are very much alive. And what about yourself?"

"I don't know." Her voice was a little unsteady. She had a swift conviction that Clark was essentially kind, as well as a great creator. "You want this, don't you?" She held out the piece of ore while the flakes of gold shone dully in the sun.

"Please keep it, the first bit out of what I hope will make a mine.
And I hope you will have iron as well as gold in your life."

She glanced at him genuinely touched. "Can it really matter to you?"

"Why shouldn't it?"

"The first time I met you I was a little afraid of you."

Clark chuckled. "Am I so formidable?"

"Not to me any more. Perhaps it is because we understand the same things." She pointed to the rapids. "This, for instance."

"Would you tell me just what you hear out there."

She shook her head doubtfully. "There are no words for most of it, but I seem to catch the voices of things that want to be expressed somehow." Then, with sudden breathlessness, "It's a universal language—like music."

"That's it," he said soberly, "it has all the majors and minors." He regarded the girl with quickening interest. What was the elemental note in her that responded to this thundering diapason?

"It's a voice crying in the wilderness," she continued in the same low tone, then, with a smile, "at least it was a wilderness before you came. I wonder if you would do—" she broke off suddenly, her eyes brilliant.

"Tell me, and I'll do it."

She clapped her hands. "I wish you would visit us all when we go camping next month; you'd like it."

"I'm sure I would, but—"

"But what? I knew there'd be something."

"I'd have to take the works with me."

"But you said you'd do it." She glanced at him as though confidence were shattered.

"Then I will, if it's humanly possible."

"It will be about a hundred miles down the lake, near Manitoulin
Island. Father knows."

"I'm glad father knows," he smiled.

The girl walked slowly back with the feeling that she had seen further into the heart of this remarkable man than ever before. Opposite the blockhouse, at which she looked with a strange sensation, she met Belding, swinging in from the far corner of the works with a transit over his shoulder. She seemed thoughtful and distrait, and he glanced at her puzzled.

"Been exploring? I didn't know you were coming up."

"I didn't know either," she said a little nervously. "Will you come back to lunch?"

"Sorry, I'm too busy. Where have you been?"

"Over at the rapids. And, Jim, see what Mr. Clark gave me."

"Gold?" he said sharply.

"Yes, isn't it wonderful?"

"Who found it?"

"One of Mr. Clark's prospectors, Fisette."

"And who told you?"

"Mr. Clark himself." The girl had a sudden sense of discomfort. Why was Belding so inquisitive?

"I haven't heard anything about it," he said shortly.

"No one has outside of the office, except myself."

"But why should Clark tell you?"

"I don't know. Why shouldn't he?"

Belding thrust the legs of his instrument into the ground. "I have an idea that he's telling you too much." The young man's eyes were hot with resentment.

"Jim, how dare you!"

"Well, where do I come in? You haven't been much interested in me the last year or so."

She flushed. "That's not fair. You know how fond I am of you."

"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.

Clark nodded as though he expected this. "Bring Belding in here."

When the engineer appeared, he went on, "We're going to do something new. Townley will give you his end of it, and you work out the rest. It's chemical engineering, so get any assistance you need. Give me estimates of costs and say how soon the plant can be put up. Figure on a hundred tons of sulphite pulp per day—dry weight. That's all."

The two went out, and he leaned back, pressing his finger tips hard on his lids, and finding in the red blur that followed something that soothed and rested his eyes. He was not one who sought out problems and chased them to their solution, but rather one who perceived the problem and, by singularly acute vision, perceived also the solution just behind it. There were so many things that were overlooked by others but presented themselves to him for attention, that he had long since ceased to wonder why the world was full of men he considered ineffectual. Now he ran rapidly over the existing situation, marshaling his various undertakings in due order, when there sounded in his head something that seemed like the tearing of a piece of cloth. He drew a long breath, experiencing for the first time in his life a sense of intolerable weariness. And then, suddenly he thought of Elsie.

It was strange that he should think of her now—there were so many other and insistent things. Wimperley and the rest had come up to congratulate him and gone away elated but at the same time puzzled that he should regard the discovery with such apparent indifference. It was true that creditors were becoming pressing, but the rail mill, it was universally admitted, would pull the thing through. Now a reaction set in and he longed for a little solitude. It lay in his mind that just over the horizon was something more inviting than all that had taken place.

An hour later he was in the bow of a big tug, heading down stream, having left orders that he must not be disturbed. As the green landscape slid by he gave himself over to retrospection, and his mind wandered comfortably back through all the stages of the past years. Surveying the folk of St. Marys, he concluded that only Filmer and Bowers had been active supporters from the start. He would remember that. Came a voice at his elbow. It was the master of the tug.

"Where to, sir?"

"A hundred miles from here there's a camping party. Find them."

They anchored that night in a long and narrow inlet where the trembling reflection of the tug's funnel lay beside the mirrored tops of pine trees that clung to the rocky shore. Ahead and behind was the open lake. There was no sound but the twitter of sleepy birds and the honk of a startled heron that winged its flight to solitudes still more remote. Then Clark began to fish, and, just as he landed a five pound bass, a girl's voice sounded clearly while a canoe floated round a nearby point. Elsie was in it and alone.