Her father talked freely. Fishing was poor. Bass did not really run until September. The nearest bass ground was below, around the two islands called the Duckling and Old Duck. There was also some fishing above, at Keego, the slender little island so called because it looked like a fish.
Marvin went to his bed of boughs contented, for he had learned the names of the two islands he wanted. They were the Duckling and Keego. Next day he would fish around the Duckling and find out who owned it.
He awoke early, arose and dressed, and went out into the cold dawn. He built a fire and let it burn down while he laboriously captured some crayfish from the edge of the icy river. Then he set his coffee pot on the coals and sat down to wait until it simmered. He was lonesomer than ever he was. He thought of the morning when he and Gregg and O. Fisher drank coffee together before starting up the valley of the Surmelin. He wished that O. Fisher were sitting there on the ground, polishing shoes in silence.
The ground was stained with iron. So is all the earth, which would look blanched and ghostly save for iron, but he was on the southern edge of the narrow region from which a billion tons have already been quarried.
Men would go on digging iron till they suddenly discovered that they had no means to smelt it. There it would lie, its atoms arranged in the form of a cube with one atom at the centre, and twenty-six balanced charges in every atom, as useless as it was a million years ago.
And all because the idiots that called themselves men persisted in killing off their Moseleys. No matter. Of what earthly importance were the regrets of a one-handed chemist sitting on the slag of a solid iron earth?
Chapter 27. Cobalt
He lifted his eyes and gazed on the Laurentians. Pencils of incandescence swept across them, whitening their tender purple and then fading, a sight to thrill the heart. Sometimes the pulsation would cease and the whole mountain, older than any Alp, would deepen to cobalt blue, reminding him that there might be cobalt within ten miles of him. In fact within a hundred all the noble metals were being mined. Like most men he loved blue, and what he chiefly loved was a soft cobalt blue saturated with white light, as in petals of forgetmenot.
But that was mere personal preference. When he thought of color he should not be diverted by living tissue, but ought always to consider electricity. The more charges on the nucleus, the more color there ought to be. Since the first twenty-seven elements are comparatively light and abundant, color in real richness ought to begin at number twenty-eight He closed his eyes and dreamed of ascending scales—oxides running soberly in red and brown and black, sulphides fitting in with dusky gold, chlorides almost prismatic.
He opened his eyes and perceived a faint mauve, and presently saw that it came from a musk mallow blooming there in the thin soil. It gave him a little shock, for no English or American chemist sees mauve without feeling that English and American must stick together against Germans. It was an Englishman who first discovered how to make mauve, but it was Germans who acted on the hint, ruining the madder fields of France and the indigo fields of Asia. Germans might yet ruin American labor and come to blows with Americans, but Marvin did not seem to care. In the hospital he had hated Germans with a consuming hatred. Now the languor of color seemed to have fallen on him like a dream.