The man’s final retort was quite unanswerable, and the white man left it at that.
He glanced out over the grey, cold-looking waters. The whole bay was more than usually desolate and bleak now that the height of summer had spent itself. The fall lay ahead. It was already in the atmosphere. That swiftly passing fall, when days shorten mercilessly and the nights grow in length with the coming of the fierce season when the interminable northern light makes life a burden hard to bear. His absence of ten weeks was a slice out of the northern summer that left little enough of a season in which the heart of man can rejoice.
He had completed his work—that urgent work which meant so much to his Corporation, and to himself, and those who shared in his labours. But he knew that the importance of it by no means ended there. In the end it would mean the complete establishment of the whole region, and the well-being of those adventurers who had made it their hunting ground. It had been ten weeks of enthralling labour crowned by a success of which even he had hardly dared to dream. All he had suspected, hoped for, all the astute Peter Loby had assured him of, had been proved beyond any element of doubt. The greatest coal and oil belt the world had ever known had been definitely discovered.
It ran right back from within sixty miles of the coast sheer through the hill country across into Canadian territory. And beyond that it was almost impossible to say how much it occupied of that chaotic region. The work had been hard. There had been times when breaking trail by river and portage through well-nigh unexplored regions was almost fierce. But nothing had deterred, nothing had deflected his purpose. His investigation had been as complete as the time permitted. And now he had returned to his home on the bay with a rough draft map sufficiently detailed for the purposes of obtaining at Washington and Ottawa the coveted concessions.
But his return had been an even greater triumph than that. After all, the work of survey had been something prospective. It was a wide searching forward for the future. It was something appealing to his engineering mind, and would doubtless appeal to the men of finance supporting him. But it would mean infinitely less to those folk in Beacon who were yearning for the immediate. The appeal of the immediate was awaiting his return to camp.
The great news reached him on the river fully three days east of his oil camp. It came by a special river man who had been despatched to locate his outfit. The man had been sent with an urgent recall. For the lesser men in the camp, in the absence of their chiefs, found themselves incapable of dealing with the amazing situation that had arisen. A gusher had broken out at “Number eight” drill. It was a tremendous gusher at a drilling that had given no sign of the oil they were about to strike. It had come in a flood that looked like thousands of barrels a day, a stream for which their preparations were wholly inadequate. So the urgency of the despatch.
That was more than a week ago now. They had speeded home in a delirium of anticipation. And even their anticipation failed to approach the reality. The thing was infinitely greater than the fancy of the messenger had painted it, and the difficulties of its control were immense. But their presence was a tremendous spur, and the genius of Loby did the rest. At length order was achieved out of chaos, and all chance of permanent disaster was averted.
Now McLagan was on his way to Beacon with his amazing news. All sorts of urgent work lay before him. But on one thing he was fully determined. Whoever else must wait, Claire should be the first person to learn of the triumph in which his work of this drab grey coast was about to terminate.
His mood was a happy one in which to greet the henchman who served him so faithfully. Little wonder then there was a smile behind the eyes witnessing the half-breed’s demonstration of human cupidity. Even he found it difficult to administer the necessary chiding. In a few hours’ time he would be in Beacon with his sensational news that would send the stocks of his Corporation soaring sky high. He would be gazing into wonderful eyes which had been one long tantalizing dream to him during the week of his labours. He would be holding Claire’s fair slim body in a tight embrace, and telling her of the great things Fortune had cast for them. It was all so very, very good to contemplate.
It was really all too good to permit of the obtrusion of lesser things. But McLagan refused to yield to his natural excitement. There were other things which must not be ignored. And the sense of their importance was the more deeply impressed upon him as he contemplated Sasa Mannik with his collection on the beach, and the desperate shape which had befallen the pitiful wreck lying at the far side of the bay.