in this city?" he asked.

"Yes," said Weston, "I've been endeavoring to sell a mine."

"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 r