drawing-board.

"Are you quite sure Mr. Winton won't mind?" she asked.

"Mind? He'd give a month's pay to be here to show them himself. He is
peacock vain of his one small accomplishment, Winton is--bores me to
death with it sometimes."

"Really?" was the mocking rejoinder, and they began to look at the
sketches.

They were heads, most of them, impressionistic studies in pencil or
pastel, with now and then a pen-and-ink bearing evidence of more
painstaking after-work. They were made on bits of map paper, the backs
of old letters, and not a few on leaves torn from an engineer's
note-book.

"They don't count for much in an artistic way," said Adams, with the
brutal frankness of a friendly critic, "but they will serve to show
you that I wasn't all kinds of an embroiderer when I was telling you
about Winton's proclivities the other day."

"I shouldn't apologize for that, if I were you," she retorted. "It is
well past apology, don't you think?" And then: "What is this one?"

They had come to the last of the sketches, which was a rude map. It
was penciled on the leaf of a memorandum, and Adams recognized it as
the outline Winton had made and used in explaining the right-of-way
entanglement.