Old Lucas lit a fresh cigar and, puffing at it, he strode vigorously southward beside the water, looking down at the grinding floes. He became absent-minded as he stared at the ice and water, and suddenly, with a jerk of his shoulders, he looked up and all around as though some one, if near by, might have been eavesdropping on his thoughts. But no one was about, except the occupants of hurrying motor cars on the Drive at his right.
He came to the great, imposing jetty of the Municipal Pier, extending out half a mile into the lake, and he crossed to the south walk of the pier, where the sunshine was warmest, and proceeded to the furthermost point, where he stood gazing out at the spray-swept moles forming the harbor defenses, at the lighthouses marking the passages, and at the steamer hurling white spume before it as it approached the city. Turning, Chicago lay before him, its water front cleanly etched in this afternoon of sunshine, with the lake wind blowing the smoke and dust far to the west.
Lucas's keen old eyes rested momentarily upon its river mouth with the Life Saving Station at the flank; he watched critically the progress of a powerful, deepwater tug ploughing, unhindered, through the field of ice cakes which the current was drawing into the river; then, roving as he stared, he considered the great, abrupt row of mighty buildings rising before the water and beyond them the block after block, mile after mile, of the city, too huge to be visible even from such a vantage point as his but hinted at by the aura of haze hanging, opalescent, as far as the eye followed under the western sun.
Lucas gazed at it, mute with unwilling wonder; then he bit his cigar savagely and was turning away when he
