“What are my plans?” Ingolby drew along breath of satisfaction. “Well, just here where we are will be seen a great thing. There’s the Yukon and all its gold; there’s the Peace River country and all its unploughed wheat-fields; there’s the whole valley of the Sagalac, which alone can maintain twenty millions of people; there’s the East and the British people overseas who must have bread; there’s China and Japan going to give up rice, and eat the wheaten loaf; there’s the U. S. A. with its hundred millions of people--it’ll be that in a few years--and its exhausted wheat-fields; and here, right here, is the bread-basket for all the hungry peoples; and Manitou and Lebanon are the centre of it. They will be the distributing centre. I want to see the base laid right. I’m not going to stay here till it all happens, but I want to plan it all so that it will happen, then I’ll go on and do a bigger thing somewhere else. These two towns have got to come together; they must play one big game. I want to lay the wires for it. That’s why I’ve got capitalists to start paper-works, engineering works, a foundry, and a sash-door-and-blind factory--just the beginning. That’s why I’ve put two factories on one side of the river and two on the other.”
“Was it really you who started those factories?” she asked incredulously.
“Of course! It was part of my plans. I wasn’t foolish enough to build and run them myself. I looked for the right people that had the money and the brains, and I let them sweat--let them sweat it out. I’m not a manufacturer; I’m an inventor and a builder. I built the bridge over the river; and--”
She nodded. “Yes, the bridge is good; but they say you are a schemer,” she added suggestively.
“Certainly. But if I have schemes which’ll do good, I ought to be supported. I don’t mind what they call me, so long as they don’t call me too late for dinner.”
They both laughed. It was seldom he talked like this, and never had he talked to such a listener before. “The merging of the three railways was a good scheme, and I was the schemer,” he continued. “It might mean monopoly, but it won’t work out that way. It will simply concentrate energy and: save elbow-grease. It will set free capital and capacity for other things.”