Adventure, August 1917 — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Northwoman Wallace did not take time to analyze this attraction or his susceptibility to it. Rarely if ever did he think of the girl in Detroit. Joan Malloch brought something into his life which had never been there before. She reached depths of which he had known nothing. In her presence he experienced a peculiar intoxication that was new, inefia- ble. It remained with him when he was alone in his camp at night. It prolonged the hours between his visits to the mission. It whirled away those he spent with her. In the first few days, so engrossed was he with the delights of companionship with this fresh, free girl of the wilderness, Wal- lace did not think of reciprocation. It was enough to be with her, to talk with her, to think of her when he was absent. Then came the sudden, compelling desire to have her always, to be with her through the years, not the days, to prolong indefinitely this new and wonderful form of intoxication. Joan, despite her three years in Toronto, was still thoroughly of the wilderness. New associations, new standards, new ways, had in no wise changed her. She was as frank and simple and sincere as in the days when her horizon had been limited to the mission and those connected with it. Only, per- haps, there had been a slight allurement in the less essential things of civilization. First of all she was a woman, and the city, a monument to man, is the home of woman. The city held those things which appealed to Joan, as they appeal to all women. It afforded the comforts, the diversions, the little things which mean so much to women, without which the lives of so many of them are completely empty. And, if Joan re- mained the same in manner and thought, she had not escaped the lure of the softer things. Wallace Searles typified much of this to her. He was so thoroughly of the city he seemed to bring its atmosphere with him. The very work on which he was engaged, for he had soon forgotten his caution and explained his presence in the country to Joan, was emblematic of civilization. Further, Wallace was good-looking, seri- ously intent on his mission, bred to success, possessed of those qualities which made him equally a man’s man and a woman’s. Culminating all were the romantic circum- stances attending their first meeting. So, while she showed, womanlike, no evidences of this new element in an otherwise care- 25 free life, Joan, too, looked forward to the afternoons and evenings when Wallace came to the mission. In that week Stanton did not return. Wallace expressed some apprehension but both Mrs. Knox and Joan maintained that he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself and that they need not worry. Wallace, too, had ceased to think of what he had believed was the first expression of opposition to his work. He had regathered his notes and figures at the falls in two days and always after carried them with him. He had purposely left his camp unguarded but with things left so that he could tell instantly if any one had been there. But in that week no one visited the camp-site and no one, so far as he was able to learn, spied upon him while he worked around the falls. In time Wallace came to believe that Frank, while drunk, had taken the notes, not knowing what he was doing, or prompted by a maudlin desire to learn what they were about. Wallace believed, too, that he had obtained the whisky from Fleenor and that what had appeared to be an evidence of op- position held no such significance. After three days at the falls Wallace spent two more paddling around the great lake. In that time he visited practically every part of it, studying the shores, the two large streams which flowed into it, and the character of the surrounding country. From Joan he learned that these streams drained other large lakes and that not once had the lake been known to be much lower than it then was. The result of this work left Wallace in high spirits. While his experience in water- power was not great, nothing he had ever heard or read of, except Niagara, rivaled this site in natural advantages. An enor- mous supply of water, a natural reservoir far better than man could build, a falls perfect in every respect—the thing was almost unbelievable. The knowledge that his would be the vic- tory when this power was turned to man’s use, added to the young engineer’s intoxica- tion. He felt confident that success was achieved, that nothing could now stop the culmination of a dream that had been his father’s and that had fired his life. When he went to the mission the evening of his re- turn from the trip around the lake this conquering spirit was evidenced in a new attitude toward Joan. CoMmiclsoo CO S|