He did not like Americans nor American methods, and he made his dislike apparent by sealing his lips.  Mitchell played upon his vanity at first, only to find the man wholly lacking in conceit.  Changing his method of attack, Mitchell built a fire under Mr. Dell.  He grilled everything British, the people, their social customs, their business methods, even English engineers, and he did it in a most annoying manner.  Mr. Dell began to perspire.  He worked doggedly on for a while, then he arose in defense of his country, whereupon Mitchell artfully shifted his attack to English steel-mills.  The other refuted his statements flatly.  At length the engineer was goaded to anger, he became disputative, indignant, loquacious.

When Louis Mitchell flung himself into the dark body of his cab, late that evening, and sank his legs knee-deep into those hateful blue-prints, he blessed that engineer, for Dell had told him all he wished to know, all he had tried so vainly to discover through other sources.  The average “overhead” in British mills was one hundred and thirty per cent., and Dell knew.

The young man laughed hysterically, triumphantly, but the sound was more like a tearful hiccough.  To-morrow at ten-thirty!  It was nearly over.  He would be ready.  As he lolled back inertly upon the cushions he mused dreamily that he had done well.  In less than two weeks, in a foreign country, and under strange conditions, without acquaintance or pull or help of any sort, he had learned the names of his competitive firms, the dates of their bids, and the market prices ruling on every piece of steel in the Krugersdorpf job when those bids were figured.  He had learned the rules governing English labor unions; he knew all about piece-work and time-work, fixed charges and shop costs, together with the ability of every plant figuring on the Robinson-Ray contract to turn out the work in the necessary time.  All this, and more, he had learned legitimately and without cost to his commercial honor.  Henceforth that South-African contract depended merely upon his own ability to add, subtract, and multiply correctly.  It was his just as surely as two and two make four—­for salesmanship is an exact science.

The girl would be very happy, he told himself.  He was glad that she could never know the strain it had been.

Again, through the slow, silent hours of that Wednesday night, Mitchell fought the fatigue of death, going over his figures carefully.  There were no errors in them.

Dawn was creeping in on him when he added a clean thirty-per-cent. profit for his firm, signed his bid, and prepared for bed.  But he found that he could not leave the thing.  After he had turned in he became assailed by sudden doubts and fears.  What if he had made a mistake after all?  What if some link in his chain were faulty?  What if some other bidder had made a mistake and underfigured?  Such thoughts made him tremble.  Now that it was all done, he feared that he had been overconfident, for could it really be possible that the greatest steel contract in years would come to him?  He grew dizzy at the picture of what it meant to him and to the girl.