He searched through every possible trade journal, through reading rooms and libraries, for the price of I-beams, channels, Z-bars, and the like; but nowhere could he even find mention of them.  His failure left him puzzled and panic-stricken; he could not understand it.  If only he had more time, he reflected, time in which to learn the usages and the customs of this country.  But time was what he had not.  He was tired, very tired from his sleepless nights and hours of daylight strain—­and meanwhile the days were rushing past.

While engaged in these side labors, he had, of course, been working on his draftsmen friends, and more assiduously even than upon his blue-prints.  On Tuesday night, with but one more day of grace ahead of him, he gave a dinner to all of them, disregarding the fact that his bank-roll had become frightfully emaciated.

For several days after that little party blue-printing in the Robinson-Ray office was a lost art.  When his guests had dined and had settled back into their chairs, Mitchell decided to risk all upon one throw.  He rose, at the head of the table, and told them who he was.  He utterly destroyed their illusions regarding him and his position with Comer & Mathison, he bared his heart to those stoop-shouldered, shabby young men from Threadneedle Street and came right down to the nine hundred and twenty dollars and the girl.  He told them what this Krugersdorpf job meant to him and to her, and to the four twenty-dollar bills in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Those Englishmen listened silently.  Nobody laughed.  Perhaps it was the sort of thing they had dreamed of doing some day, perhaps there were other girls in other tiny furnished flats, other hearts wrapped up in similar struggles for advancement.  They were good mathematicians, it seemed, for they did not have to ask Mitchell how the nine hundred and twenty was doing, or to inquire regarding the health of the other eighty.  One of them, a near-sighted fellow with thick lenses, arose with the grave assertion that he had taken the floor for the purpose of correcting a popular fallacy; Englishmen and Yankees, he declared, were not cousins, they were brothers, and their interests ever had been and ever would be identical.  He said, too, that England wanted to do business with America, and as for this particular contract, not only did the British nation as a whole desire America to secure it, but the chaps who bent over the boards at No. 42-1/2 Threadneedle Street were plugging for her tooth and nail.  His hollow-chested companions yelled their approval of this statement, whereupon Mitchell again arose, alternately flushing and paling, and apologized for what had happened in 1776.  He acknowledged himself ashamed of the 1812 affair, moreover, and sympathized with his guests over their present trouble with the Boers.  When he had finished they voted him the best host and the best little cyanide tank-builder known to them—­and then everybody tried to tell him something at once.