"In what line?" inquired Dunlop. "Are you miners—-or machinists?"
"When we want to be really kind to ourselves," smiled Tom, "we call ourselves engineers."
"Mining engineers?" demanded Mr. Dunlop, gazing at the two youths in astonishment.
"No, sir. Neither Hazelton nor myself ever handled a mine yet," Tom answered. "But we have done a lot of railroad work."
"Railroad work isn't mine digging," objected Mr. Dunlop.
"I'm aware of that, sir," Tom agreed. "Yet boring is largely excavation work; so is tunneling. We've had charge of considerable excavating in our services to railroads."
"Very likely," nodded Dunlop, reflectively. But how about the assays for gold and silver? Sometimes, when searching for drifts and runs of the metal we may need a dozen assays in a single week."
"We have the furnace with us, sir; the assay balance and all the tools and chemicals that are used in an ordinary assay."
"You have?" asked Mr. Dunlop. "Then you must have come prepared to go into this line of work."
"We thought it more than likely that we'd amuse ourselves along that line of work for a while," Tom explained truthfully. "Yet mining attracts us. We'd stay here and go into the thing in earnest if we could make good enough terms with you."