to have tried yet. Quite
sure it wouldn't be wiser to make what terms you can and let them have
the mine?"

"I'm afraid I haven't considered the wisdom of the course I mean to
adopt. Anyway, it's a simple one. If those people want that mine they
must break us first."

"Well," Stirling said, "I guess if I were you I'd allot very few of
those shares to what one might call general applicants. Locate them
among your friends and Wannop's clerks."

"There are uncommonly few general applicants, and my friends are not
the kind of men who have money to invest. The same thing probably
applies to Wannop's clerks. It's quite certain that nobody connected
with the Grenfell Consolidated could make them a present of the
shares."

"Considering everything, that's unfortunate, for, as I once pointed
out, the next move will probably be to sell your stock down. It's a
game that contains a certain hazard in the case of a small concern,
because the stock is generally in few hands; but I've no doubt your
friends will try it."

"Then we're helpless," said Weston. "We must raise sufficient money
among the general investors, or give up the mine."

"The situation," said Stirling, dryly, "seems unpleasant, but it's the
kind of one in which a little man who will neither make terms with a
big concern nor let his friends help him might expect to find
himself."

Weston sat silent awhile, gazing at the steamer's smoke trail which
stretched far back, a dingy smear on the blueness, across the shining
lake; and the contractor watched him with a certain sympathy which,
however, he carefully refrained from expressing. There had been a time
in his career when it had seemed that every man of influence in his
profession and all the powers of capital had been arrayed against him.
He had been tricked into taking contracts the bigger men would not
touch; his accounts had been held over until long after the
convenanted settling day, and he had been compelled to submit to every
deduction that perverted ingenuity could suggest. He had, however,
hardened his heart, and toiled the more assiduously, planning half the
night and driving machine or plying shovel himself by day, whenever a
few dollars could be saved by doing so. He had lived on the plainest
fare, but he had, without borrowing or soliciting favors from any man,
borne the shrewd blows dealt him and struggled on inch by inch uphill
in spite of them. Now it seemed to him that this young Englishman w