The Great Lakes by James Oliver Curwood

I was watching a blockade of ships in a Lake Erie harbour -- a score of striving, crowding, smoking monsters of the Inland Seas, hung under a pall of black smoke, with screeching tugs floundering here and there, megaphone voices shouting curses and orders, and the crashing of chains and steel filling the air. And I thought of a theatre I had visited the night before where, arriving late, I was forced to crush in with the gallery gods and fight for a place in the fifth heaven. In the excitement of this "spring rush" of great ships for the freight-laden docks of the North, I spoke my sentiment to the man beside me -- a man who had always before him in his office five miniature lakes, on which miniature vessels represented his steel leviathans of commerce, which he moved about, and played, and watched, day by day and almost hour by hour, as a player might move his men at chess. And this man, I noticed, was regarding the scene before him with different eyes from mine. His face was set in a frown, his eyes stared in their momentary anxiety, and I could almost feel the eager tenseness of his body. Out there in that chaotic tangle, where captains were fighting for prestige and taking chances that might cost thousands, _he_ had ships. I saw him clench his hand as a black monster crept forward into the gap between two ships ahead; I saw it forge on, yard by yard, saw the other vessels close up on it as though it were an egg which they were bent on crushing between them, heard the rumbling of steel side against steel side, and when at last I witnessed this ship break triumphantly into the lead, great blotches of paint scraped from it, I looked at the man again, and he was smiling.

Then he turned to me, and as we walked away from the scene, he observed: