Chapter 12

A HARD BARGAIN.

Tyrrel took a hansom, and tore round in hot haste to Erasmus Walker's
house. He sent in his card. The famous engineer was happily at home.
Tyrrel, all on fire, found himself ushered into the great man's study.
Mr. Walker sat writing at a luxurious desk in a most luxurious room--
writing, as if for dear life, in breathless haste and eagerness. He
simply paused for a second in the midst of a sentence, and looked up
impatiently at the intruder on his desperate hurry. Then he motioned
Tyrrel into a chair with an imperious wave of his ivory penholder.
After that, he went on writing for some moments in solemn silence.
Only the sound of his steel nib, traveling fast as it could go over
the foolscap sheet, broke for several seconds the embarrassing
stillness.

Walter Tyrrel, therefore, had ample time meanwhile to consider his
host and to take in his peculiarities before Walker had come to the
end of his paragraph. The great engineer was a big-built, bull-necked,
bullet-headed sort of person, with the self-satisfied air of monetary
success, but with that ominous hardness about the corners of the mouth
which constantly betrays the lucky man of business. His abundant long
hair was iron-gray and wiry--Erasmus Walker had seldom time to waste
in getting it cut--his eyes were small and shrewd; his hand was firm,
and gripped the pen in its grasp like a ponderous crowbar. His
writing, Tyrrel could see, was thick, black, and decisive. Altogether
the kind of man on whose brow it was written in legible characters
that it's dogged as does it. The delicately organized Cornishman felt
an instinctive dislike at once for this great coarse mountain of a
bullying Teuton. Yet for Cleer's sake he knew he mustn't rub him the
wrong way. He must put up with Erasmus Walker and all his faults, and
try to approach him by the most accessible side--if indeed any side
were accessible at all, save the waistcoat pocket.

At last, however, the engineer paused a moment in his headlong course
through sentence after sentence, held his pen half irresolute over a
new blank sheet, and turning round to Tyrrel, without one word of
apology, said, in a quick, decisive voice, "This is business, I
suppose, business? for if not, I've no time. I'm very pressed this
morning. Very pressed, indeed. Very pressed and occupied."

"Yes, it is business," Tyrrel answered, promptly, taking his cue with
Celtic quickness. "Business that may be worth a good deal of money."
Erasmus Walker pricked up his ears at that welcome sound, and let the
pen drop quietly into the rack by his side. "Only I'm afraid I must
ask for a quarter of an hour or so of your valuable time. You will not
find it thrown away. You