somebody to take out sometime," Henry struggled.
"Somebody! Sometime? . . ." Mr. Boland's mounting scorn blasted the whole idea from consideration; and then, as tapping the reservoirs of a very great patience, he began to pour out counsel. "But, don't you see, Henry, my boy, we—you and I—are living today. Your duty and mine is to our own time. Look out around us at these thriving, happy towns. Our policy has created them out of raw wilderness. I will build a city on Shell Point finer than Edgewater. Where now a few Indians fish and hunt, I'll show you in five years fifty thousand people earning a good living, some of them getting rich—the world paying them wages that they will buy food with and build homes with and educate their children with and enjoy life with—just because they are sending the Shell Point oil out to make ships go and drive automobiles and turn factory wheels and help do the world's work for it.
"That's the idea, Henry. These little matters of land laws and commissioners' rulings and congressional committees, all that—they are circumstances. They are the native obstacles that empire builders like me—and you, now you are one of us—have to cope with.
"We don't quit before things like that, do we? Any more than we quit when we find timber growing a long way from the water. We build a log chute, don't we? or a railroad, or we rig up a cable and snake it out. That's what we do with obstacles, Henry." Mr. Boland was standing up and slapping Harrington cheeringly on the shoulder. "We go around 'em if we can, and if we can't we go through 'em." The chest of Old Two Blades swelled proudly.
