Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/235

 to be at breakfast with him in the morning. No allusions were made to the quarrel of the night before, but the pair were ostentatiously considerate and tender toward each other.

George drove off with the notion that the atmosphere had cleared; that he had successfully turned another corner in his marital experience; that he had asserted his independence sufficiently and that his wife would not again heckle him for failure to figure at a social function when business beckoned him violently in another direction.

And business was beckoning violently now. Knot by knot, he actually had the craft gaining speed again. The biggest impulse to this came from Hilary.

Hilary was a tall, pale man with a pinched face and a bulging brow surmounted by a tuft of thin, brown hair. Taciturn and secretive, working alone and almost unnoticed in a corner of the engineering shop, Hilary had been the man to whom Milton Morris was accustomed to take the knottiest of his practical problems. And now, like a flash out of darkness, this taciturn, secretive, competent chap shuffled in to Chilton's desk one day with a design for a new car that instantly commended itself to the vice-president's discerning eye. George Judson saw the points even more quickly than Chilton.

"You've got it, man! You've got our next car right there in your hand!" he declared with a