Part 44

"Because you must see past most people, don't you, to what is ahead? It is hard to put just what I mean into words."

He nodded gravely. "It is quite true that I haven't any very close personal friends, I've moved about too quickly to make them. As for my employees, I see them chiefly through their work."

"Then you don't really know them," she announced.

"Possibly,--but I know their results. It sounds a little inhuman, doesn't it?"

"I think I understand." Elsie was tempted to probe this gray-eyed man about Belding, but presently gave it up. She was conscious that while she was talking to Clark the figure of the engineer faded into the background.

"So there's really no one?" she went on reflectively.

"Only my mother," he said gravely, "that is, so far."

At that her heart experienced a new throb. He was infinitely removed from any man she had ever dreamed of.

"Are you never lonely?"

"Perhaps I am," he replied with utter candor, "but I fill my life with things which to most people are inanimate, though to me they are very much alive. And what about yourself?"

"I don't know." Her voice was a little unsteady. She had a swift conviction that Clark was essentially kind, as well as a great creator. "You want this, don't you?" She held out the piece of ore while the flakes of gold shone dully in the sun.

"Please keep it, the first bit out of what I hope will make a mine. And I hope you will have iron as well as gold in your life."

She glanced at him genuinely touched. "Can it really matter to you?"

"Why shouldn't it?"

"The first time I met you I was a little afraid of you."

Clark chuckled. "Am I so formidable?"

"Not to me any more. Perhaps it is because we understand the same things." She pointed to the rapids. "This, for instance."

"Would you tell me just what you hear out there."

She shook her head doubtfully. "There are no words for most of it, but I seem to catch the voices of things that want to be expressed somehow." Then, with sudden breathlessness, "It's a universal language--like music."

"That's it," he said soberly, "it has all the majors and minors." He regarded the girl with quickening interest. What was the elemental note in her that responded to this thundering diapason?

"It's a voice crying in the wilderness," she continued in the same low tone, then, with a smile, "at least it was a wilderness before you came. I wonder if you would do--" she broke off suddenly, her eyes brilliant.

"Tell me, and I'll do it."

She clapped her hands. "I wish you would visit us all when we go camping next month; you'd like it."

"I'm sure I would, but--"

"But what? I knew there'd be something."

"I'd have to take the works with me."

"But you said you'd do it." She glanced at him as though confidence were shattered.

"Then I will, if it's humanly possible."