"Well," hazarded Semple, "I'd like to be there."
"You will. We'll go together as soon as it's arranged. You ought to be there. They'll probably ask you to confirm what I assert." He touched a bell and a moment later said to his secretary, "See Mr. Bowers and ask him to get in touch with our Toronto solicitors at once. I want them to arrange that I address the Toronto Board of Trade as soon as convenient to that body. I'll speak of developments in Northern Ontario. You understand that this will not be a suggestion from me, but will come from them. Get the idea going in the Toronto papers. You might let it be known that a special car will leave for St. Marys the evening of the address--with the Company's guests--that's all."
The door closed and he turned again to Semple. "I'm no prophet, but I don't mind saying that a month from to-day your Conservative opposition won't be so stiff necked. Man alive! it's nothing but ignorance. This district of yours--" he added very slowly, "is a bigger, richer thing than even I imagined."
Semple went away shaking his head doubtfully. He knew better than Clark that chilling regard with which Toronto financiers contemplated an undertaking in which they had little faith. They were a cold-nosed group, immune, he considered, to the dramatic and strangers to any sudden impulse. And Clark, to their minds, was tarred with the same brush as his undertakings. He might be big and imaginative, but he was over impetuous and haphazard.
Clark himself was disturbed by no discomfort, nor did he make any special preparations for that address, and gave it as arranged some two weeks later, and the manner and substance and effect of it will be vividly remembered by every man who was a member of that Board of Trade some twenty-five years ago. There were the bankers and the rest of them, just as Semple had said, and Clark, surveying them from the platform with steady gray eyes, knew what make of men they were and knew also that they had come there not so much with a thirst for knowledge about their own country as that they might coldly analyze him and that vast undertaking of which they had, as yet, but a fantastic and fragmentary knowledge.
It is without question that the speaker had to an infinitely greater extent than any of the men who stared at him through a blue haze of cigar smoke, a fluid mind and the capacity for instantly seizing upon a situation and determining how to meet it. He possessed as well a voice unrivaled in magnetic power and above all an unshakable faith in the potentiality of the district in which he labored, so that, estimating the mental and professional characteristics of those he faced, Clark began to talk in the coolest and most level way possible without any trace of flamboyant enthusiasm. Touching first of all on the development of the far West, a subject with which, since much Toronto money was involved, they were directly familiar, he diverted to St. Marys, describing Arcadia as he found it, the apparently unpromising nature of the surrounding territory and his own conclusion as to its possible future. Then the rapids became woven into his speech, the nucleus of power which made so many things possible. From this he moved into the wilderness and before his listeners there began to unroll the north country in its primeval silence, broken only by the occasional tap of a prospector's pick or the heavy crash of a moose through a cluster of saplings. And with the story of the wilderness came that of pulp wood and great areas now tributary to St. Marys. And after the pulp mills came the discovery of iron.