Probing still deeper, it became apparent that while the pulp mills made steady profits, these were so adjusted as to form but one link in a chain. In all there were some ten companies, each drawing from the others its business and its surplus. Clark had not been far wrong 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 interest, and was anxious to learn details.
"It worked in the laboratory but not on a commercial basis. Belding, the chief engineer, is all cut up about it. Consequence is Clark is buying sulphur, and just now pulp prices are so low he's not making anything out of it."
"Have you seen Wimperley lately?"
"He was up with Birch a week or so ago."
"Say anything particular?"
Brewster smiled reflectively. "He didn't seem to want to talk."