udely fashioned 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 astonishingly accurate
standard. His only defense, he decided, was to be perfectly natural,
and in this he was judicious, as the assumption 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."

"The trouble is that the specimens might have been obtained from
anywhere," said Stirling, dryly.

"There's one concern anyway in whose case the objection does not