y his mood changed and he added
provocatively, "But you're doomed, I see it in your face."

Belding smiled. "I haven't met her yet."

"It isn't a case of your meeting her; it's the other way on. You may
never know it, but she will."

Belding glanced at him, puzzled. This was not the Clark he knew ten
minutes ago. And just then the other man pulled himself up.

"I think I'd move that mill about a hundred feet west," he went on,
bending over a drawing. "It will shorten the head race and save money."

The engineer nodded and drew a long breath. He had expected to get a
glimpse of the inner man, but the door was banged in his face.

That winter was, for him, an adventure in regions fascinating and
remote. It is probable that at the time there was not on the North
American continent a man more highly endowed than Clark with gifts of
sheer psychological power. Belding, young in his world, could not
recognize it as such, but he fell the more completely under the
wizard-like spell of his companion's imagination. The days, shortened
by late sun and long nights, passed with early journeys to the
temporary office which Clark had built at the canal, where they
compiled endless surveys and plans in which the scope of the future was
graphically depicted. On these miniature spaces factory shouldered
against factory and mill against mill. The canal doubled in size, and,
stupendous as it all seemed, Belding could see no reason why these
things should not shortly exist. It was vastly different from former
days.

As the weeks passed, he began to get Clark in clearer prospective. It
became forced on him that this hypnotic stranger had no desire except
that of creation. It seemed that his supreme determination was to win
from the earth that which he believed it offered, and express himself
in steel and stone and concrete, in the construction of great buildings
and in the impressive rumble of natural power under human control.
There was talk of many things, colored by keen, incisive comments from
this man of many parts, but never once did he put forward the subject
of wealth or the means of its amassing. The possession, or at least
the direction, of great sums was imperative to him, but he valued them
only for what they could achieve, and Belding always got the sensation
of his new approach to subjects hitherto deemed well worn, and that
remarkable mixture of impatience and intuitive power which
characterized his analy