"Up at the north end,—you can see it better if you step a little this way—will be the head gates. That railway trestle—you see that trestle don't you, Wimperley?—"
Wimperley pulled himself together, but his feet had lost all feeling.
"Yes, any one could see that."
"Well, that will be replaced by a steel bridge at the railway's expense. We propose to widen the canal at that point to one hundred feet at the bottom, and now—" here he seized the unfortunate Stoughton and swung him so that he faced into the chilling blast—"I want to point out the booming ground for logs."
Stoughton muttered something that sounded like strong condemnation of all logs, but Clark did not seem to hear him.
"They'll come round that point, swing into the bay and feed down this way to the mill. You get that, don't you?"
They all got it, at least so they earnestly assured the speaker who stood with his overcoat half unbuttoned, his cap on the back of his head and apparently oblivious of the temperature. This frigid and desolate scene had no terrors for him. Beneath the icy skin he discovered its promise.
"There'll be two booms—one for pulp wood and the other for hard wood for the veneer mills. You make hard wood float by driving plugs of lighter wood into both ends of the log. And now, if you'll step down this way, I'll show you where the dredges will start work."
"Look here," said Riggs in a quavering voice, "what's the matter with my cheek? I can't feel it."
Clark glanced at him and shook with sudden laughter. "Only a bit of frost bite,—perhaps we'd better go back to the office. It's a pity, though,"—here he hesitated a little—"there's quite a lot more to see."
Whereupon Riggs and the other two at once assured him that unless they sought shelter forthwith they would flatly refuse to authorize the expenditure of any more money whatever in a country as blasted as this. After which they repaired to the office, where Belding waited with his blue prints and Clark outlined the possible future. As he put it, these developments were only possible and depended on what that future might bring forth. But as he talked, Belding, for one, knew that the whole magnificent program had been definitely determined in that astonishing brain.