“I didn’t dream that fate had decreed me to stir up what I’m going to tell you about, Greggy.  I followed the line of the proposed railroad, looking for chances.  All Canada was asleep, or too much interested in its west, and gave me no competition.  I was alone west of the surveyed line; east of it steel-corporation men had optioned mountains of iron and another interest had a grip on coal-fields.  Six months I spent among the Indians, French, and half-breeds.  I lived with them, trapped and hunted with them, and picked up a little Cree and French.  The life suited me.  I became a northerner in heart and soul, if not quite yet in full experience.  Clubs and balls and cities grew to be only memories.  You know how I have always hated that hothouse sort of existence, and you know that same world of clubs and balls and cities has gripped at my throat, downing me again and again, as though it returned my sentiment with interest.  Up here I learned to hate it more than ever.  I was completely happy.  And then—­”

He had refolded the map, and drew another from the bundle of papers.  It was drawn in pencil.

“And then, Greggy,” he went on, smoothing out this map where the other had been, “I struck my chance.  It fairly clubbed me into recognizing it.  It came in the middle of the night, and I sat up with a camp-fire laughing at me through the flap in my tent, stunned by the knockout it had given me.  It seemed, at first, as though a gold-mine had walked up and laid itself down at my feet, and I wondered how there could be so many silly fools in this world of ours.  Take a look at that map, Greggy.  What do you see?”

Gregson had listened like one under a spell.  It was one of his careless boasts that situations could not faze him, that he was immune to outward betrayals of sensation.  This seeming indifference—­his light-toned attitude in the face of most serious affairs would have made a failure of him in many things.  But his tense interest did not hide itself now.  A cigarette remained unlighted between his fingers.  His eyes never took themselves for an instant from his companion’s face.  Something that Whittemore had not yet said thrilled him.  He looked at the map.

“There’s not much to see,” he said, “but lakes and rivers.”

“You’re right,” exclaimed Philip, jumping suddenly from his chair and beginning to walk back and forth across the cabin.  “Lakes and rivers—­hundreds of them—­thousands of them!  Greggy, there are more than three thousand lakes between here and civilization and within forty miles of the new railroad.  And nine out of ten of those lakes are so full of fish that the bears along ’em smell fishy.  Whitefish, Gregson—­whitefish and trout.  There is a fresh-water area represented on that map three times as large as the whole of the five Great Lakes, and yet the Canadians and the government have never wakened up to what it means.  There’s a fish supply in this northland large enough to feed the world, and that little rim of lakes that I’ve mapped out along the edge of the coming railroad represents a money value of millions.  That was the idea that came to me in the middle of the night, and then I thought—­if I could get a corner on a few of these lakes, secure fishing privileges before the road came—­”