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Twenty-four hours ago he was sitting on the deck of the Evangeline with the genial bishop. Now he was very much alone. What would Wimperley and the rest do in such an emergency? He had never seen them in a corner. His reverie was interrupted by a message that Manson desired to see him. "Riots?" said Clark to himself, then aloud, "Bring him here." The big man came up, extending a friendly hand.
His normal condition of mind was one in which he balanced operating costs against traffic returns and analyzed the results. And Wimperley was getting anxious. The profits from the pulp mill, for there were profits, had gone straight into other undertakings, and the god of construction who reigned at St. Marys demanded still further offerings.
Chemical analyses show too high carbon and this can be rectified. Now awaiting remittance for payroll. Wimperley read it without a trace of accentuation, while Stoughton got up and stared, as once before, at the sky line of Philadelphia. "Well," drawled Birch dryly, "we've heard from our prophet." "He's got more confidence in our future than we have in his past," put in Riggs.
He surmounts our resolutions, the ones we make when our pulse is normal. I have never seen him fail to carry his point. Take the matter of this railway. I don't mind betting that if we go up there to-morrow to kill that road we'll be committed to it in twenty-four hours." "I'll take that for a thousand." There was a spot of faint color in Birch's hollow cheeks. Wimperley laughed. "I'm on.
Wimperley and the rest had come up to congratulate him and gone away elated but at the same time puzzled that he should regard the discovery with such apparent indifference. It was true that creditors were becoming pressing, but the rail mill, it was universally admitted, would pull the thing through. Now a reaction set in and he longed for a little solitude.
This new birth this upholding trust was conceived at the very moment when Wimperley and the others were gathered in harassed counsel, and through Philadelphia and the surrounding state was broadening a dark cloud of rumor that carried swift fear to thousands of hearts. But it was not fear that came to the keen brain of Henry Marsham.
Presently Wimperley scratched at the moss with his heel, bared a strip of rock and stared at it as though he had hurt it. Stoughton rolled over and shot side glances at Clark, whose eyes were fixed on the jagged horizon. "What?" whispered Riggs. "The discovery was made some days ago by one of our own prospectors, but I could not speak definitely until the various analyses were completed.
Wimperley nodded gravely. "That sounds good to me. But I've got something else in my mind." "Well," snapped Birch, "spit it out." "I've got to go back a bit to a day you'll all remember, except you, Birch." "The day of hypnosis?" suggested Stoughton. "I guess it was, if you like to put it that way.
The very fact that we hung together told him the whole thing. However, it might just as well begin that way." Wimperley laughed, a foolish little laugh that drew the older man's puzzled glance. "There's something ridiculous about all this," he tittered suddenly. "We're like a flock of sheep afraid of a dog. We need a ram. You'd better be the ram, Stoughton, you're the bulkiest."
Next day, at the iron mine, he stood listening to the deep cough of the big crusher and the loose rattle of machine drills. A little on one side, and as yet unshaken by dynamite, was the knoll on which Wimperley and the rest had been told what they were sitting on, and he smiled at the recollection.
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