She waved a slim hand towards the rapids. "As near as you can, then round into the big bay."
He put his back into his work and the canoe shot forward, reaching presently those long foam-flecked swells that mark the foot of the turmoil. In ten minutes they were in the heel of the rapids and as far as Belding dared go with so precious a burden. Elsie felt the cold spray on her face and her eyes shone with delight. After a little she pointed northward and the canoe edged into the big bay that stretched below, the works.
The bulk of the pulp mill loomed darkly into the quiet air, and further up they could hear the rattle of machine drills hammering into the great sandstone ledges. Passing the pigmy lock of the old Hudson Bay Company, they floated a hundred yards from shore and immediately opposite the blockhouse. Here Elsie lifted her hand, and Belding, with a queer feeling of resentment, backed water.
The upper part of the house was softly lighted and the windows were open. Its gabled roof seemed diminutive compared to the structures which were taking shape close by and, as they looked, there drifted out the sound of a piano. Clark himself was invisible, but his finger tips were talking to the glistening keys. Elsie listened breathlessly. This was the man within the man who now sat plunged in profound meditation.
Presently the music ceased and Clark's figure appeared at the window. He was staring at the rapids, and it seemed that as he stared he set up some mysterious communication that linked his own force and determination with their irresistible sweep.
On the way back Elsie was very silent and it came upon Belding with dull insistency that whatever attraction he had hoped to have for the girl had been merged in the fact that, for the present at any rate, he was nothing more than a means of satisfying her sudden and, to him, fantastical interest in the man under whose dominant bidding the color of so many lives was being modified and blended.
VIII.—IRON
A year later a prospector was slowly pushing his way through the wilderness some seventy miles northward of St. Marys. It was springtime and the air was mild, but, while the ridges were already bare, great banks of snow still lay in the deep folds of the hills where the sun but touched them at noon hour. The endless lacework of naked branches now began to be feathered with tender green, and everywhere the bush was alive with the voices of wild things whose blood was stirred to mating by the soft caresses of the southerly wind. Thrusting through a patch of tangled undergrowth, the man reached higher ground and, advancing to a hillock, stood with his hat off and his brown face steaming with sweat.
He was of middle age, with short, sturdy frame, a broad face of pale, copper color, swarthy black brows and a small, stringy mustache. His feet were enclosed in shoepacks, soggy with water, and he was otherwise clad in the nondescript fashion of old bushmen. Around his shoulders were strung a compass, binoculars and map case, and at his belt dangled a small ax and a prospector's hammer pick. He was torn, scratched, and in a general way disheveled, but the clear glance of the black eyes and the easy grace of his pose proclaimed him fit for action.
He stood for some time while his keen glance searched the country ahead—a frozen sea in which congealed billows of rock thrust up their tumbled heads in a gigantic confusion. Here and there were more definite ridges that took a general trend, but for the most part it was a chaos of rock and timber, slope and swamp, the refuse from the construction of a more attractive country which had been assembled elsewhere.