Harry would take off his coat, remove his cravat, roll up his shirt-sleeves, give his curly hair the right touch before the glass, get out his book on engineering, his boxes of instruments, his drawing paper, his profile paper, open the book of logarithms, mix his India ink, sharpen his pencils, light a cigar, and sit down at the table to “lay out a line,” with the most grave notion that he was mastering the details of engineering.  He would spend half a day in these preparations without ever working out a problem or having the faintest conception of the use of lines or logarithms.  And when he had finished, he had the most cheerful confidence that he had done a good day’s work.

It made no difference, however, whether Harry was in his room in a hotel or in a tent, Philip soon found, he was just the same.  In camp he would get himself, up in the most elaborate toilet at his command, polish his long boots to the top, lay out his work before him, and spend an hour or longer, if anybody was looking at him, humming airs, knitting his brows, and “working” at engineering; and if a crowd of gaping rustics were looking on all the while it was perfectly satisfactory to him.

“You see,” he says to Philip one morning at the hotel when he was thus engaged, “I want to get the theory of this thing, so that I can have a check on the engineers.”

“I thought you were going to be an engineer yourself,” queried Philip.

“Not many times, if the court knows herself.  There’s better game.  Brown and Schaick have, or will have, the control for the whole line of the Salt Lick Pacific Extension, forty thousand dollars a mile over the prairie, with extra for hard-pan—­and it’ll be pretty much all hardpan I can tell you; besides every alternate section of land on this line.  There’s millions in the job.  I’m to have the sub-contract for the first fifty miles, and you can bet it’s a soft thing.”

“I’ll tell you what you do, Philip,” continued Larry, in a burst of generosity, “if I don’t get you into my contract, you’ll be with the engineers, and you jest stick a stake at the first ground marked for a depot, buy the land of the farmer before he knows where the depot will be, and we’ll turn a hundred or so on that.  I’ll advance the money for the payments, and you can sell the lots.  Schaick is going to let me have ten thousand just for a flyer in such operations.”

“But that’s a good deal of money.”

“Wait till you are used to handling money.  I didn’t come out here for a bagatelle.  My uncle wanted me to stay East and go in on the Mobile custom house, work up the Washington end of it; he said there was a fortune in it for a smart young fellow, but I preferred to take the chances out here.  Did I tell you I had an offer from Bobbett and Fanshaw to go into their office as confidential clerk on a salary of ten thousand?”

“Why didn’t you take it ?” asked Philip, to whom a salary of two thousand would have seemed wealth, before he started on this journey.