Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/46

 either; but was not boastful, had the respect of all men who knew him well, and the affection of those who knew him intimately.

He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose, with the stubby fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully teasing a wisp of reddish brown hair, while his shrewd blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance of the top letter on a pile before him.

Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made up the Great Southwestern Railway System, in which Mitchell's little road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke.

"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer out there."

"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?"

"Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale. "Genius! He impresses you first as absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship is really superior, and later you get a suggestion of something back of him, something buried that might come out, you know."

"I used to think so," the General Freight Agent replied, with a tone which indicated loss of interest in the subject, but being tardily overtaken in his reading by a sense that he had not quite done justice to the big stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine char-