ut and rebuilt just as it was before. No cement--but random
masonry and gates of hewn timber--they hewed everything a hundred years
ago--grass around it and a sign saying what it was and when. Fix it up
and make a job of it--that's all, and make that block house basement of
field stone--you can see why."

Whereupon Clark turned to a pile of letters and telegrams and promptly
forgot all about Belding.

In six weeks, to a day, he moved in, and it is a question whether any
of his subsequent achievements occasioned such interest in St. Marys.
Old inhabitants were there who had memories of the Hudson Bay Company
and the thirty foot bark canoes that once voyaged from Lake Superior,
and, treading the upper reaches of a branch of the rapids, slid into
the old lock and were let gingerly down while the crew held their
paddles against the rough stone walls of the tiny but ancient chamber.

Now the thing in its entirety had been recreated. The block house sat
squat beside the lock, with its mushroom top projecting just as in
years before. Clark, it seemed, was, after all traditional, and not
one who lived entirely in the future, and with this touch of romance he
took new attributes. His Japanese cook inhabited the lower story
through which one entered to mount to the main floor. Inside the place
revealed the taste of the man of the world. It looked pigmy beside the
enormous structures which began to rise hard by, but was all the more
diminutively impressive. One passed it on the way to the works, and
often by night drifted out the sound of Clark's piano mingling with the
dull boom of the rapids. For it would seem that these were the two
voices to which the brain of this extraordinary man took most heed.

VI.--CONCERNING IRON, WOOD AND A GIRL

A year passed and the folk of St. Marys had not yet accustomed
themselves to drawing water from a tap and turning on the light with a
switch ere Clark began a frontal attack on the resources of the country
to the north. It was typical of his methods that he invariably used
new agencies by which to approach affairs which, in the main, differed
from those already existing. Thus he called on many and widely
separated individuals, who, answering his imperious summons, fell
straightway under the spell of his remarkable personality, and found
themselves shortly in positions of increasing responsibility. They
became the heads of various activities, but, in a way, the secondary