ot reach. The desire to get profit by honest
toiling was dying down to ashes.

Against such men had Ingolby worked--the tricksters, the manipulators.
At the basis of his schemes was organization and the economy which
concentrated and conserved energy begets, together with its profit. He
had been the enemy of waste, the apostle of frugality and thrift; and
it was that which had enabled him, in his short career, to win the
confidence of the big men behind him in Montreal, to make good every
step of the way. He had worked for profit out of legitimate product and
industry and enterprise, out of the elimination of waste. It was his
theory (and his practice) that no bit of old iron, no bolt or screw, no
scrap of paper should be thrown away; that the cinders of the engines
could and should be utilized for that which they would make; and that
was why there was a paper-mill and foundry on the Sagalac at Manitou.
That was why and how, so far, he had beaten the tricksters.

But while his schemes flashed before his mind, as the opiate suspended
him in the middle heaven between sleep and waking, the tricksters and
manipulators came hurrying after him like marauders that waited for the
moment when they could rush the camp in the watches of the night. His
disordered imagination saw the ruin and wreck of his work, the seizure
of what was his own--the place of control on his railways, the place of
the Master Man who cared infinitely more to see his designs accomplished
than for the profit they would bring to himself. Yesterday he had been
just at the top of the hill. The key in his fingers was turning in the
lock which would make safe the securities of his life and career, when
it snapped, and the world grew dark as the black curtain fell and shut
out the lighted room from the wayfarer in the gloom. Then, it was,
came the opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in
despair: "Blind! I am blind!"

He did not know that he had taken an opiate, that his friend had
mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves. These visions he was seeing
were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture. It
was as though one saw an operation performed upon one's body with the
nerves stilled and deadened by ether. Yet he was cruelly conscious of
the disaster which had come to him. For a time at least. Then his mind
seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go,
they went. And others came in broken patches,