“Not me, just yet,” said Maxwell, with a curt disregard for his English. “I’m going over to the shack for a little while.”
“What for?” questioned the sleepy one, with half-absent interest.
“To try and get Benson on the wire and have him post guards in that tunnel. There is no reason on earth for it, but between you and Ford you’ve got me nervous on this choking proposition. Good-night, old man. Breakfast with me in the morning, and afterward I’ll take you out and steer you up against some of the real-estate robbers and get them to find you an office.”
On the following day the superintendent was as good as his word in the office-finding matter, and by noon the Government soil-tester was comfortably established in a couple of rooms on the second floor of the Kinzie Building, in the same corridor with Mr. Robert Stillings, the local attorney for the railroad company.
The two-room suite gave him an office—which he said was about as necessary as an auxiliary tail to a cat—and a second room in the rear which he speedily transformed into a working laboratory, using the young man named Tarbell, who still figured on the railroad pay-rolls as a “relief operator,” for his errand-boy and man-of-all-work in securing the needed furnishings and equipment.
Later in the day Maxwell brought his brother-in-law, “Billy” Starbuck, around to the new office, introducing him as a mine owner and a gentleman of easy leisure, and one who knew every square acre of soil, arable or otherwise, in the entire Timanyoni.
“Billy has nothing on earth to do, and, like me, he is a temporary widower,” Maxwell explained. “We married sisters, and his wife has gone with mine and the Fairbairns to dabble in the salt sea waves at Norman Towers. Make use of him as you can, only don’t take his word for the gentleness of the horse you’re going to ride. He is an absolutely truthful man on any other subject, but he never misses a chance to play a bucking bronc’ against a tenderfoot.”
Sprague foregathered at once with the clean-cut, rather shabbily clothed young mine owner whose principal affectations were his worn khaki suit, a cowboy Stetson tilted carelessly to the back of his head, and a vocabulary of cow-camp slang which happened to be no measure of his knowledge of grammatical English. Before he left the newly established laboratory in the Kinzie Building, Starbuck had engaged to go with the expert on a soil-collecting trip through the Park, the trip to begin early in the morning of the following day, and to continue indefinitely; or until the chief soil-hunter should be sufficiently saddle-sore to wish to cut it short.
“I like that brother-in-law of yours a whole heap, Dick,” was Sprague’s verdict when he met the superintendent at dinner in the Topaz café that evening. “He is a man with a history, isn’t he?”
The queer look which Sprague seemed to be able to evoke at will in his table-mate crept into Maxwell’s eyes.