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.