Harold Edward Bindloss

“ Now, unless you could get money enough to start clear with, the concern is bound to cave in. Then somebody acting for the Combine would quietly buy it up."
He broke off for a moment and looked hard at Weston.
"Suppose those people let you feel their hand and then make you a rather higher offer? What are you going to do?"
"Disregard it," said Weston, quietly.
Stirling nodded in a manner which suggested that this was what he had expected.
"Well," he said, "I guess that's the course most likely to appeal to a man constituted as you seem to be. ”

“ 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. "They won't deliver stiff, wet spoil freely."
Stirling's nod was very expressive, in that it suggested that he had expected his companion to locate the cause of trouble.
"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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That storekeeper seems quite a smart man. The Hogarth people have, no doubt, made you an offer since then?"
"Four thousand dollars, all rights, and they'll meet expenses while I put in the assessment work and do all that's necessary to get title from the Crown. They were kind enough to say that it was rather a hazardous venture, but they wanted another workable reef to round up their mineral properties. The reason seemed a little vague."
Stirling smiled rather grimly. "They want everything they can get their hands on in the shape of a mineral property, as long as it costs them 'most nothing. ”

“ In a general way they've something to fall back on if they're men of position: the money they've settled on their wives, a name that would get them credit on the market, or friends who'd give them a lift if they came down with a bang. ”