he
market-price of English steel at such times; and, third, the cost of
fabrication at the various mills. The first two he believed could
be easily learned, but the third promised to afford appalling
difficulties to a man unfamiliar with foreign methods and utterly
lacking in trade acquaintances. He went at them systematically,
however, only to run against a snag within the hour. Not only did he
fail to find the answer to question number one, but he could find no
market quotations whatever on structural steel shapes such as entered
into the Krugersdorpf job.

He searched through every possible trade journal, through reading
rooms and libraries, for the price of I-beams, channels, Z-bars, and
the like; but nowhere could he even find mention of them. His failure
left him puzzled and panic-stricken; he could not understand it. If
only he had more time, he reflected, time in which to learn the usages
and the customs of this country. But time was what he had not. He was
tired, very tired from his sleepless nights and hours of daylight
strain--and meanwhile the days were rushing past.

While engaged in these side labors, he had, of course, been working
on his draftsmen friends, and more assiduously even than upon his
blue-prints. On Tuesday night, with but one more day of grace ahead of
him, he gave a dinner to all of them, disregarding the fact that his
bank-roll had become frightfully emaciated.

For several days after that little party blue-printing in the
Robinson-Ray office was a lost art. When his guests had dined and had
settled back into their chairs, Mitchell decided to risk all upon one
throw. He rose, at the head of the table, and told them who he was. He
utterly destroyed their illusions regarding him and his position with
Comer & Mathison, he bared his heart to those stoop-shouldered, shabby
young men from Threadneedle Street and came right down to the nine
hundred and twenty dollars and the girl. He told them what
this Krugersdorpf job meant to him and to her, and to the four
twenty-dollar bills in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Those Englishmen listened silently. Nobody laughed. Perhaps it was the
sort of thing they had dreamed of doing some day, perhaps there were
other girls in other tiny furnished flats, other hearts wrapped up in
similar struggles for advancement. They were good mathematicians, it
seemed, for they did not have to ask Mitchell how the nine hundred
and twenty was doing, or to inquire regardi