body of his cab,
late that evening, and sank his legs knee-deep into those hateful
blue-prints, he blessed that engineer, for Dell had told him all he
wished to know, all he had tried so vainly to discover through other
sources. The average "overhead" in British mills was one hundred and
thirty per cent., and Dell _knew_.

The young man laughed hysterically, triumphantly, but the sound was
more like a tearful hiccough. To-morrow at ten-thirty! It was nearly
over. He would be ready. As he lolled back inertly upon the cushions
he mused dreamily that he had done well. In less than two weeks, in a
foreign country, and under strange conditions, without acquaintance or
pull or help of any sort, he had learned the names of his competitive
firms, the dates of their bids, and the market prices ruling on every
piece of steel in the Krugersdorpf job when those bids were figured.
He had learned the rules governing English labor unions; he knew all
about piece-work and time-work, fixed charges and shop costs, together
with the ability of every plant figuring on the Robinson-Ray contract
to turn out the work in the necessary time. All this, and more, he
had learned legitimately and without cost to his commercial honor.
Henceforth that South-African contract depended merely upon his own
ability to add, subtract, and multiply correctly. It was his just as
surely as two and two make four--for salesmanship is an exact science.

The girl would be very happy, he told himself. He was glad that she
could never know the strain it had been.

Again, through the slow, silent hours of that Wednesday night,
Mitchell fought the fatigue of death, going over his figures
carefully. There were no errors in them.

Dawn was creeping in on him when he added a clean thirty-per-cent.
profit for his firm, signed his bid, and prepared for bed. But he
found that he could not leave the thing. After he had turned in he
became assailed by sudden doubts and fears. What if he had made a
mistake after all? What if some link in his chain were faulty? What if
some other bidder had made a mistake and underfigured? Such thoughts
made him tremble. Now that it was all done, he feared that he had been
overconfident, for could it really be possible that the greatest steel
contract in years would come to him? He grew dizzy at the picture of
what it meant to him and to the girl.

He calmed himself finally and looked straight at the matter, sitting
up in bed, his knees