"Good old Hernando!" Welkie opened the box. Balfe took one, Welkie took one; they lit up.
"Ah-h--" Welkie woofed a great gob of smoke toward the veranda roof. "Andie, you won't have to make any chemical analysis of the ashes of these cigars to prove they're good. There is an artist--Hernando--and more! I used to drop in to see him after a hot day. He would let me roll out a cigar for myself in one of his precious moulds, and we'd sit and talk of a heap of things. 'Some day, Hernando,' I'd say, 'along will come some people and offer you such a price for your name that I reckon you won't be able to resist.' 'No, no, my friend,' he would say. 'For my nam' there shall be only my cigar. I shall mak' the good, fine cigar--until I shall die. And for the sam'--one pr-r-ice.' How'd you come to run into him, Andie?"
"I'd heard about him and you. I suspected, too, that he could verify a few things about the Construction Company."
"He did. And so they have been after you again?"
They smoked on. Again Balfe half turned in his chair. "I haven't seen you, Greg, since the President sent for you from Washington that time. How did you find him?"
"Fine. And I tell you, Andie, it heartened me to think that a man with all he's got to tend to would stop to spend an hour with an obscure engineer."
"You're not too obscure, Greg. What did he have to say?"
"Oh-h--said he wanted me to do a piece of special work, and he wanted me because several people, in whose judgment he had confidence, said I was the man for the job. You were one of 'em, Andie, he told me, and I'm thanking you for it."
"I'm not sure that you ought to thank me, Greg. With that big company you would be wealthy in a few years, but the trouble is, Greg, when I'm on the job I'm as bad as you, only in a different and more selfish way. I know only one road then, and once I set out I'd brush aside anything for the one thing, Greg."
"You don't think that your feeling for the lad and your work could ever clash?"
"I don't know, Greg. I hope not." He relit his neglected cigar. "But what else did the President have to say?"
"He said it was a bit of emergency work he wanted me for, that only the remnant of a small appropriation was available for it, and that if I took it I would be pitiably paid; but that he wished me to do it, because some day, and that not too far away, it might have to stand the test not of friends, but of enemies. Also he said--let me see----"