re caught by great
quicksilver plates,--seen booms and train loads of pulp on their way to
St. Marys--seen the white spruce shaven of its brown bark and ground
and sheeted and loaded into the gaping holds of Clark's
steamships--seen the blast furnaces vomit their molten metal--seen the
rhythmic pumps and dynamos send water and light through every artery of
the young city--seen the veneer mills ripping out flexible miles of
their satiny wood--seen the power house on the American side making
carbide to the low rumble of thousands of horsepower, and seen the
electric railway that linked Ironville with St. Marys. And all the
time Clark had put forward neither arguments in his own favor nor any
request for credit, but only allowed these things to speak for
themselves, till, as the aggregate became more and more rounded and the
picture more complete, Thorpe perceived that here was something which
initiated by an extraordinary brain had now grown to such vast
proportions that it supplied its own momentum, and must of necessity
move on to its appointed and final result.

But Clark did not distinguish in either Thorpe or Brewster any
determining factor of his future. They would do what they were meant
to do, and play the game as the master of the game decided. They might
modify, but they would never create. His mind was pitched so far ahead
that it was beside the mark to attempt to influence men who, he
conceived, were not themselves endowed with any prophetic vision. He
had to deal with them and he dealt with them, and though he wondered
mutely at their abiding sense of the present and their apparent lack of
faith in the inevitable future, he descended from the heights of his
own imagination and parleyed in the bald and merciless language of
strictly commercial affairs.

It was at the end of his visit that Thorpe asked about the sulphur
plant.

Clark glanced at him curiously. The sulphur plant was so small a
fraction of the whole.

"There's a certain step in the process we have not perfected--that's
all. You don't believe in economic waste, do you?"

"No, certainly not--if avoidable."

"Well, I'm satisfied that this is avoidable. It is just as much a
mistake to allow water to run away when it might be grinding pulp, as
it is to drive sulphur into the air instead of catching and selling it.
You pollute the air, you kill the trees, you spend a lot of money, and
you waste the sulphur. Nature has a lot of processes