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 intere