“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 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?”