"Oh! by the way, there's a queer-looking Scot from the Clyde and
Motherwell works who's been hanging about for a couple of days to see
you, Sam. Says he must see you at all coats."
"I don't want to see anybody from Glasgow," snapped Statham. "Tell him
I'm not here, whoever he is."
"He's the old engineer, Macgregor," Rolfe said. "He mentioned to me
when I was in Glasgow the other day that he particularly wished to see
you, and that he was coming up on purpose. I told him it was a
wild-goose chase."
"Engineer? What does he do? Mind the engine--one of the men who
threaten to go on strike, I suppose," remarked old Sam.
"No," laughed Rolfe. "He's a little more than engineer. It is he who
has designed nearly every locomotive we've turned out."
"Oh! valuable man--eh? Then raise his salary, Rolfe, and send him back
to Glasgow to make a few more engines."
"He's waiting outside at the counter now, and won't go away," exclaimed
the secretary.
"Then go to him and say he shall have fifty pounds more a year. I can't
be bothered to see the fellow."
Rolfe rose and went to the outer office, where Macgregor stood
patiently. He had waited there for best part of two days and, with a
Scot's tenacity, refused to be put off by any of the clerks. He wanted
to see Mr Samuel Statham, "an' I mean to see 'im, mon," he told
everybody, his grey beard bristling fiercely as he spoke.
He was evidently a man with a grievance. Such men came to Old Broad
Street sometimes, and on rare occasions Mr Benjamin saw them. There
were hard cases of men ignorant of the ways of business as the City
to-day knows it, having been deliberately swindled out of their rights
by sharks, concessions filched from their rightful owners, and patents
artfully stolen and registered. But old Duncan Macgregor, with his
white beard, was of a different type--the type of honest, hard-working
plodder, out of whose brains the great Clyde and Motherwell works were
practically coining money daily.