The young treasurer laughed a trifle uneasily.
“I can’t believe that anybody would make a bit of well-meant boasting like that an excuse for—but it’s altogether absurd, you know. Your case is unsupposable. Nobody pushes the button for the rains or the cloud-burst storms. When you introduce me to the fellow who really has the making of the weather in the Timanyoni head-waters, I’ll be very careful what I say to him.”
“Just so,” said the expert quietly; and then a long-continued blast of the locomotive whistle announced the approach to Brewster.
Sprague took leave of his latest acquaintance at the station entrance, where a trim, high-powered motor-car, driven by an exceedingly pretty young woman in leather cap, gauntlets, and driving-coat, was waiting for Smith.
“I am a soil expert, as you may have heard, Mr. Smith,” he said at parting, “and I am interested at the moment in alluvial washes—the detritus brought down from the high lands by the rivers. One of these days I may call upon you for a little information and help.”
“Command me,” said the young financier, with another of the hearty hand-grips; and then he climbed in beside the pretty young woman and was driven away.
Sprague was unusually silent during the tardy luncheon shared with Starbuck in the Topaz café; and Starbuck, who never had much to say unless he was pointedly invited, was correspondingly speechless. Afterward, with a word of caution to his table companion not to mention the morning’s adventure to any one, Sprague went to his laboratory, to test the specimens of soil gathered on the Mesquite mesa, Starbuck supposed.
But the supposition was wrong. What Mr. Calvin Sprague busied himself with during the afternoon was the careful developing of the film taken from his pocket camera, and the printing of several sets of pictures therefrom. These prints he placed in his pocket note-book, and the book and its enclosures went with him when, after the evening meal, at which he had somehow missed both Maxwell and Starbuck, he climbed the three flights of stairs in the Tribune Building and presented himself at the door of Editor Kendall’s den.
Kendall was glad to see him, or at least he said he was, and, waving him to a chair at the desk end, produced a box of rather dubious-looking, curiously twisted cigars, at which the visitor shook his head despondently.
“You’d say I was the picture of health, wouldn’t you, Kendall, and you wouldn’t believe me if I were to tell you that I am smoking a great deal too much?” he said, with a quizzical smile that was on the verge of turning into a grin.