The canoe slid delicately forward till presently it floated in the tiny lock. Naqua said nothing, being seized by an enormous fear that clutched at her stringly throat and held her silent, but Shingwauk felt something stirring in his breast. Here, surrounded by the confused vibrations of the works, he resigned himself to ancient memories. Putting out a brown hand he touched the rough walls, and at the touch the year rolled back. He saw himself a young man, the bow paddle of a great thirty-foot canoe that came down through the broken waters of the big lake to the rapids above, with the Hudson Bay factor enthroned in the middle, surrounded by the precious takings of the winter. He saw Ojibway faces, now long forgotten, and smelt the smoke of vanished camp fires. He saw the thirty-foot canoe lowered delicately into just such a lock as this, and automatically thrust out his own paddle to protect her tender tawny sides from the rough masonry. The hewn gates had opened when he floated out, and here were the gates looking non-understandably new, and with the adze marks still on the yellow timber. Involuntarily he cast about for the blockhouse and found it hard by. He looked at his own hands--they were knotted and wrinkled; he scanned the twelve-foot canoe--it seemed small and hastily built of poor bark; he stared at the back of Naqua and reflected how bent and rounded it was instead of being straight and strong and supple; he glanced up and where once there stretched green bush and small running streams now stood things bigger than he had ever seen; he sniffed at the wind and, without knowing what it was, caught the sharp odor of metal and machinery. Last of all, he lifted his gaze straight into the eyes of a man who stood staring down from the coping of the little lock. From the blockhouse window Clark had seen him since first the canoe approached the shore. With a curious thrill he had watched the old chief enter the tiny chamber and float motionless--a visitant from the past. So complete was the picture and so almost poignant the pleasure it afforded, that, loath to mar it, he had hesitated to approach. Never had he conceived anything so intimately appropriate as this linking of bygone days with the insistent present. They stared at each other, Clark's keen features suffused with interest, Shingwauk's black eyes gazing lustrous from a dark bronze face seamed with innumerable wrinkles. His visage was noble with the proud wisdom of the wilderness and the unnamable shadow of traditions that went back through uncounted centuries of forest life. Clark, recognizing it, felt strangely juvenile. Presently Shingwauk, with some subtle intuition of who and what was the man who stood so quietly, waved his hand. The motion took in the works, the blockhouse, the canal, in short the entire setting. "You?" he asked in deep, hollow tones. Clark nodded, smiling. "Yes, me."