The Gold Trail Part 40

"You feel that you must fight this thing out with such weapons as you have?" she asked. "I suppose you wouldn't allow your friends to provide you with more efficient ones? I know I have suggested as much already, and you would not listen, but it would make success so much easier."

It was not remarkably explicit, but Weston, to some extent at least, understood what she had implied, and he gazed at her with a curious kindling in his eyes. She leaned forward in her chair, wonderfully alluring, with a suggestive softness in her face, and he felt his resolution deserting him. It was clear to the girl, who watched every change of his expression, that the issue of the moment was in her hands, and had he told her that the rest of the struggle he was engaged in would be fought out in the snow-bound ranges where men not infrequently died, she would have exerted all her strength. As it was, however, and because of her pride in him, she suddenly determined that she would let him win his spurs. Though it was beyond defining, there was a subtle change in her manner when she leaned back in her chair.

"I think," said Weston, "the first course you mentioned is the only one open to me."

The words did not cost him as great an effort as they would have a moment or two earlier. He felt that in the meanwhile something had snapped and the tension had suddenly slackened. This was a vast relief to him, and he had recovered a good deal of his composure when the girl spoke again.

"Still," she said, "you evidently have no great liking for the market-place."

"I'm afraid I haven't," admitted Weston, with a little laugh. "After all, when one has seen how some of these mining syndicates and mortgage companies get in their work, a certain prejudice against such things isn't quite unnatural."

"Ah," said Ida, who had now decided that the conversation must be kept within safe limits, "you don't, however, mind using the shovel."

Weston was quite ready to follow the lead she had given him.

"What are we to do when we come out here?" he asked, with an air of whimsical reflection. "Half of us have no professions, and we haven't a trade. They bring us up to take life easily, and then, when some accident pitches us out into the Colonies, it's rather a shock to discover that n.o.body seems to have any use for us. As a matter of fact, I don't blame your sawmill bosses, your railroad men and your ranchers, considering that it takes several years to learn how to chop a tree, and that to keep pace with an average construction gang is a liberal education."

Ida laughed. The further they got away from the crisis now the better she would be pleased.

"I fancy there's still a notion in the old country that the well-brought-up young Englishman excels at anything he cares to undertake, even if it's only manual labor," she said.

"Oh, yes," laughed Weston, "I've heard it. Let them keep such notions over yonder if it pleases them. One naturally likes to think we're as good as the rest, and perhaps we're warranted, but it seems to me that the man of equal muscle raised to swing the ax and shovel is going to beat the one who's new to it every time."

"But the pride of caste!" said Ida. "Doesn't that count? Doesn't success even at such things as track-laying or chopping trees depend on moral _as_ well as physical strength?"

"I think with most of us courage is largely a matter of experience,"

said Weston. "We learn to know what can't hurt us and to avoid the things that can. As to the other kind, the man who hazards his life and limbs in half-propped wild-cat adits, or running logs down the rapids, is hardly likely to be less cool in a tight place than the one who has never been accustomed to anything of the kind."

He was evidently expatiating on this subject merely because he felt that it was safe ground, but Ida, who partly agreed with what he said, felt that, after all, there was probably something in the insular English notion that he was too proud to uphold. This man, at least, possessed a courage that made him willing to carry the fight into the market-place with wholly unaccustomed weapons, and a pride that impelled him to lay a stern restraint upon his pa.s.sion. She fancied that there were men in Canada who would not have been deterred by her money had they wished to marry her, and, for that matter, one or two in England had delicately permitted the fact to become apparent. In the meanwhile she had decided that he should have his wish. It would perhaps be possible to offer support in some shape later on, if it became apparent that he was badly beaten.

"I suppose it is not a very easy matter to dispose of an undeveloped mine?" she inquired.

Weston smiled rather dryly.

"It can be done without much trouble if you're content to give the thing away, but it's rather different if you wish to sell it. In fact, until the last week I'd no idea how hard the latter was."

"Then you have been here a week?"

There was a hint of reproach in her tone, and Weston, who understood her to mean that she was a little astonished that he had not presented himself earlier, realized that here was an opportunity that he might have profited by had he only succeeded in selling the mine. As it was, he let it pa.s.s, for he felt that if once he let himself go he would probably say a good deal more than was advisable.

"Yes," he said, with a laugh. "Still, at the rate I'm progressing, several months will hardly see me through."

Ida had formed a reasonably accurate notion of what was in his mind, and she was half vexed with him and half pleased. He was, at least, consistent, and meant to persist in the att.i.tude he had adopted; but it was significant that he evidently was afraid to venture an inch outside his defenses. After all, she decided that it was probably advisable that he should remain behind them in the meanwhile. It was, however, more or less of a relief to her when her father came in. He did not appear in the least astonished to see Weston, and shook hands with him as though it were the most natural thing to find him sitting there.

"Business 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 rudely 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 a.s.sumption 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."