Part 40 (2/2)

”Then you struck the lode?”

”I've been abusing Miss Stirling's good-nature with an account of how we did it.”

Stirling made a little gesture that might have meant anything, but Ida was pleased with the fact that he expressed no astonishment. It seemed to her that he had expected Weston to succeed, and she knew that he was very seldom wrong in his estimate of any man's character. She made some excuse and left them together; and when the door closed behind her Stirling turned to Weston.

”If you'll come along to my room I'll give you a cigar,” he said.

”Then, if you feel like it, you can tell me about the thing.”

CHAPTER XXV

STIRLING GIVES ADVICE

The contractor lay back in an easy-chair when he had lighted a cigar, and watched Weston, who glanced with evident interest around the room.

Its furniture consisted of very little besides a roll-top desk and a couple of chairs, but the walls were hung with drawings of machines and large-scale maps, which had projected railroad routes traced across them. An Englishman, as a rule, endeavors, with a success which varies in accordance with his temperament, to leave his business behind him when he goes home, but across the Atlantic the man of affairs usually thinks and talks of nothing else. As one result of this he has very little time to discuss the concerns of other people, which is apt to become a habit of those who have very few of their own. Stirling was, however, for private reasons willing to make an exception of Weston in this respect, and when he noticed how the latter's eyes rested on two or three models of machines which stood on a shelf near him, he took down one of them.

”I bought up the patent rights of that thing,” he said. ”As you see, it's a power excavator, and, while it works all right in loose stuff and gravel, the two I have on the Mule Deer road have been giving me trouble.”

Weston, who was deeply interested, laid the machine on his knee and spun it round once or twice.

”The elevator buckets are the weak point,” he said. ”They won't deliver stiff, wet spoil freely.”

Stirling's nod was very expressive, in that it suggested that he had expected his companion to locate the cause of trouble.

”You've hit it,” he said, and opening the desk took out a little model of an excavator bucket, beautifully made in burnished copper, and another one more rudely fas.h.i.+oned out of bent card. He handed Weston the former.

”That's a rather famous man's idea,” he added, with a little dry smile. ”I had to leave the thing to my secretary when I was west. I've tried it on the Mule Deer road, and I'm not quite satisfied. The other's one that I've been thinking over.”

Weston looked at both the models, and then, taking up the card one, unfolded it, and, after paring part of it away with his knife, bent it into a slightly different shape.

”I think that should meet the purpose. I once worked under the engineer of a very similar machine for a month or two,” he said.

Stirling picked up the model and examined it carefully before he replaced it in the roll-top desk, which he shut with a snap.

”Do you feel like taking a hundred dollars for the notion?” he asked.

”I'd rather make you a present of it,” said Weston, quietly.

”Well,” laughed Stirling, ”I'll take it. My secretary paid the other man a good deal more than that for the copper one, and it won't do quite what is wanted. If that man had run an excavator in the mud and rain I guess he'd have made it different. He sits tight in a smart office, and tries to remember what they taught him twenty years ago in the erecting shop.”

It seemed to Weston that there was a good deal to be said for this point of view, though it was a matter which did not concern him. His companion's manner was friendly, and to some extent familiar, but Weston had already had an uneasy feeling in his presence that he was being carefully weighed, or measured, by an astonis.h.i.+ngly accurate standard. His only defense, he decided, was to be perfectly natural, and in this he was judicious, as the a.s.sumption of any knowledge or qualities he did not possess would in all probability have been promptly detected. He said nothing, which is a very excellent rule when one does not know what to say, and Stirling changed the subject when he spoke again.

”So you have found the mine and come here to sell it,” he observed. ”I guess you have had the usual experience?”

”I don't quite know what is usual,” said Weston, with a smile. ”Still, I've been round this city with a bag of what people admit are rather promising specimens of milling ore, and I certainly haven't succeeded in selling the mine yet.”

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