The Popular Magazine/Volume 56/Number 5/The Detour
The Detour
By L. H. Robbins
Author of “Wild Fire,” “Lights Out,” Etc.
(A Complete Novel)
CHAPTER I.
The Detroiter.
The gentleman on the bench and the marble pillar behind the bench had this quality in common, that they both looked exceedingly solid.
There was the further likeness between them, that as the pillar upheld a part of the roof of the Michigan Central station at Detroit, so the gentleman upheld a considerable share of the moral and material welfare of the city in which that station stood.
When the industry, the integrity, and the prosperity of Detroit were mentioned at Board of Commerce dinners, some of the banqueters were sure to think of William Dallon, president of the Dallon Motor Car Company.
As he sat on the bench William Dallon seemed to be looking over the top-of-column headlines of an evening newspaper. Actually he was looking over the upper edge of the paper and watching a little crowd of travelers slowly collecting around train gate number seven. He saw the hands of the clock on the wall reach the hour of six. He saw the gate opened, and heard the heavy voice of the announcer calling:
“Number Forty-eight! Buffalo, Syracuse, Utica, Albany, AND New York! Pullman cars only! Aboard!”
The crowd trickled through the grille and down the incline to the train stairs. Still the gentleman watched the gate.
For some minutes a little old trampish-looking man lugging a large and dilapidated leather suit case had walked up and down past him, eying him from every point of view. Now this person sat down beside him and spoke:
“Ain't you William Dallon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My name's Bray—Felix Bray,” said the seedy-looking stranger. “I've wrote you letters. Maybe you never got 'em. About my motor.”
In the quick glance the gentleman turned upon him there was curiosity and a twinkle of humor.
“So you are Felix Bray, are you? Well! well! How is the world-beating motor coming, Mr. Bray?”
“It ain't coming at all, William Dallon. Nobody'll listen to me. I'm still peddling it around.” The little man laid a trembling hand on the worn suit case. “When I seen you setting here I thought maybe you'd give me a minute.”
“I can't give you more, so you'd better talk fast,” Dallon replied, with his eye on the clock.
“Talk fast! That's what they all say—and I ain't a talker. But I've got a motor here, William Dallon, that will kill your motor and every other gasoline motor on the market. You laugh to hear me say that. They all do. I'm only Bray, the poor old crank. They never give me a chance.”
“But you never give them a chance, either, Mr. Bray. You ask people to investigate your motor, and then you four-flush. You promise demonstrations that never come off.”
“And why?” cried the little man fiercely. “It ain't that I'm afraid of my motor. It's that I'm afraid of sharpers. I don't know who to trust. There's people in this town” He paused, for William Dallon had ceased to listen.
Across the station concourse came a noisy party of five young men. One of the five showed a handful of tickets to the gateman, and they passed through the gate in the wake of the earlier passengers.
William Dallon put aside his newspaper and took up a light hand bag from the floor.
“Bray,” he said, rising, “you can't interest me, I'm afraid. As you know, I've got inventions of my own that give me all the trouble I can handle. But don't you be downhearted.” He spoke encouragingly, as to a child. “You just keep trying and you'll land somewhere yet. Glad to've seen you—and good luck to you.”
He followed the five young men down the subway and up the stairs to the platform. When he had seen them board a Pullman ahead, he entered a drawing-room car just forward of the diner at the rear. There he locked himself in a stateroom, lit a cigar, and settled down in solitude.
In flannel pajamas, with wool bed socks on his feet, and with a handkerchief tied over his bald spot as a nightcap, he lay thinking as the train drove through the dark. Compared with the youngsters who had gone aboard ahead of him, William Dallon was an oldster, yet to-night was the first time in his life that the approach of old age had entered his consciousness. The cause of this novel feeling in him was one of those young men up forward.
“Dad, you don't understand,” the young man had said to him that day. “You're old-fashioned. You forget that this is not nineteen hundred; this is nineteen-twenty!” In conclusion, the young man had called his father a back number, if not a fossil.
“I wonder if I am,” William Dallon mused as he lay in his berth.
He thought back through the years to a certain summer morning in the new-born century. He saw himself climb into a queer little vehicle standing at the door of a plain little house in Sherman Street. He saw a smiling young wife and a chubby-cheeked boy waving good-by to him. It seemed only yesterday.
A decade and most of another had passed since the morning when Bill Dallon, machinist, rode away from Sherman Street to help inaugurate a mighty epoch in the industrial history of the world. Now that chubby-cheeked boy was taller than his dad. Now he ran with the swiftest and called his father a back number.
What a fateful day that day had been! Dallon saw again the young wife smiling; he heard again the jollyings of the neighbor men as they tarried, on the way to their day's work, to cheer him off.
“Won't it be a good idea, Bill,” asked one, “to take along a pair of shafts?”
“I'll come home under my own power, never you worry,” Bill Dallon bragged.
He remembered crossing the Campus Martius and striking west, out Michigan Avenue, the little motor coughing and banging under his feet, the pedestrians answering from the sidewalk with catcalls and jeers and laughter. In a few years those unbelievers would shout, “Get a horse!” But that witticism had not yet been invented.
Slowly as his one-cylinder horseless buggy traveled, it carried him into the country in only ten minutes or so, for Detroit was not such a great city then—it was a comfortable, overgrown town with the fields and pastures close in.
The cows in those pastures stopped grazing to stare at the strange contraption snorting past. Cyclists dismounted from their wheels and took the roadside to give Bill Dallon room, and they yelled abusive jests which he was too busy to answer, his “broomstick” tiller needing his whole attention. Wagoners slanged him when their teams reared and shied at sight of the amazing machine that ran without horse muscle.
By nightfall he made Battle Creek after an astonishing day's run of one hundred and nineteen miles. Even the century-riding bicyclists of the period could scarcely do better than that. Sunset next day found him at St. Joe, straightening a bent axle in the shop of a friendly blacksmith. That blacksmith, by the way, toils no longer at forge and bellows. He sells Dallon cars and has a summer home at Pawpaw Lake.
At Benton Harbor, on the third day, the captain of the Chicago steamer had to be reasoned with for half an hour before he would let Bill Dallon take the little car on board. No fires at sea for that fresh-water skipper!
Then in Chicago—William Dallon smiled when he recalled this incident—an indignant policeman arrested him and a choleric judge rebuked him for driving in Lincoln Park and frightening the carriage horses of the local aristocracy. Some of these aristocrats themselves possessed automobiles, though none of them had a car like Dallon's.
To-night it startled him a little to discover how many years had rolled by. He had been too busy to stop to reckon time.
On the day when he came home from Chicago in his noisy little naphtha knockabout, with enough orders to justify organizing a company and opening a factory, Detroit had about three hundred and fifty thousand in habitants. To-day it had more than a million, and people called it the fourth city in the land. On that day there may have been a few thousand automobiles in all America, many of them run by steam and electricity. Now it was boasted that Detroit manufactured a million and a quarter of gasoline cars a year, or eighty-five per cent of all the cars made on earth. And Bill Dallon was one of the half dozen men whose brains and enterprise had started the city to running in high.
The train slowed down, stopped. He turned off the electric light in his berth and raised the window shade. Outside were the midnight lights and shadows of Buffalo. One of the lights shone full upon a billboard bearing this legend in purple and white:
DALLON CARS
DALLON TRUCKS
“MADE GOOD TO MAKE GOOD.”
From Maine to Oregon those billboard signs by thousands told the story, and the story was a true one—true of the queer little rope-tired horseless buggy that “steered with a broomstick,” and equally true of any one of the four hundred cars turned out by his factory in the day just ended. Inventiveness, diligence, courage, patience, faith—all these had played their part in the working of the Dallon miracle; but the ingredient that counted most was honesty.
And now, because William Dallon declined to be led into an alluring reorganization scheme that promised ten millions for one, the cherub-cheeked boy called him a has-been.
“I guess not!” Bill Dallon growled.
Having settled the question of his antiquity to his mind's satisfaction, he pulled down the window shade, drew his improvised nightcap over his ears, and went to sleep.
When he awoke, the train was running along the Harlem River and the porter was thumping on his door.
CHAPTER II.
Pictures in the Fire.
The January wind blew as it can blew in any lakeside city, sending thin ribbons of snow stringing and singing across the icy pavement, hunting the sleet out of its hiding places and whisking it away, policemanlike, as if snow and sleet had no business in that select neighborhood. Lights from the windows of handsome homes shone out into the night, beacons of warmth and comfort. The man with the suit case clutched his coat collar about his throat as he plodded on, peering through the gloom.
Before a lordly house that required a quarter of a block of ground for its setting he came to a halt. From under the carriage porch the lamps of a limousine looked down the driveway at him. He moved aside out of their glare and saw a pair of young women in colorful array descend the steps and enter the car. The motor whirred, the car rolled into the boulevard and away.
In the library of that lordly home, when a few minutes had gone, a servant spoke to the master of the house, drowsing before the open fire. “Mr. Banniston, sir, there's a man at the door who keeps ringing the bell and won't go away. He says you will see him if I tell you his name. It's Bray.”
From the depths of his big leather chair the master of the house replied: “Let him in. Show him in here.”
To the eye Mr. Banniston was big and soft, like the chair in which he rested. His softness might not have been conceded by his fellows in the financial world of Griswold Street; but to-night, replete with dinner and basking in the warmth of the fire, he had relaxed to the point where a critic of manly beauty might have been tempted to call him flabby.
He turned his head toward the shivering caller.
“Pull up a chair, Bray. What's on your mind?”
Bent and shrunken and old, the newcomer drew a stool to a corner of the fireplace and sat down. He was shaking in a nervous chill.
“Sharp night out?” asked his host.
“Bitter. I ain't got no right outdoors a night like this. But I had to see you. I'm just about done up.”
“Done up? What's the matter?”
“I don't know. I'm sick—so sick I can't work any more.”
“You haven't got the flu, I hope?” queried Banniston in alarm.
“No, no, it ain't that. It's something wrong in here.” The little man touched his side. “Engine trouble, like. And my nerves are gone. I take nerve medicine reg'lar and I only get worse.”
He rubbed his cold hands until the knuckle bones stood out through the skin.
“So I came to see you, Mr. Banniston. I thought maybe you could give me a little better answer than last time.”
“About your motor, you mean. Well, Bray, to get the agony over I'll tell you, as I told you before, there's nothing doing. I've made you a fair proposition. I'll pay you five thousand dollars any time you get ready to take it. But as for organizing a company to manufacture your motor, and paying you twenty thousand for a minority interest, that's absurd, you know. If you care to sell me your model and your claims outright for five thousand spot cash, I'll pay you that price. I'll do this partly to show my sympathy for you and partly to be rid of you, but not because I want your engine. I don't believe in it. An interesting toy, that's all.”
“Toy!” cried Felix Bray, stung to indignation. “And you've seen it work!”
“Oh, now, don't let's have any pyrotechnics,” Banniston replied. “I've seen it work, you say. Well, yes, I have gone to your house and sat where you put me. I have watched your machine running on a work bench across the room. I have heard you explain what made it run—water disintegrating, or something like that—the old Keely motor rigamarole of thirty years ago. But have you ever let me lay my hands on it? Have you ever taken it apart and let me look inside? How do I know that it wasn't connected with a compressed-air tank in the cellar, the way Keely's was? You can't catch an old bird with chaff like that, Bray.”
The little inventor had forgotten his chill. His eyes blazed as he stood up before the rich man.
“Don't put me in a class with that faker,” he cried. “You twisted what I told you. I told you that Keely had the right idea and didn't know it. He claimed he could break up a drop of water into hydrogen and oxygen—exploding it, like—with sound waves from a bunch of tuning forks; and he claimed he used the explosion to drive his machine. It listened good, and a lot of suckers bit. But all he wanted was their money. The tuning fork part was a trick, and the motor was run with compressed air, as was found out after he died.”
Mr. Banniston stroked his bulbous nose and scowled. He had had to hear all this before.
“I told you,” Bray railed on, “that he could have made his idea work if he'd gone about it right. If he had turned his drop of water into gas first with an electric current instead of the tuning forks, the way I've discovered how to do—well, there wouldn't be a steam engine or a gasoline engine in the world to-day, except in the museums. There'd be nothing but Keely motors. And some day”—the irate little man raised his voice and his fist together—“some day there won't be nothing running the machinery of the world but this little hydromotor, this 'toy' of mine that you ask me to sell outright for five thousand dirty dollars!”
Banniston pulled himself up out of his chair and towered above his visitor.
“Bray, I let you in here to-night so you could get warm. Now you've gotten too warm to stay. Good-by.”
For a moment Bray glared. Then his wrath collapsed. He took up his suit case. His host followed him to the hall and saw the street door close.
When the master of the house returned to the library to resume his doze before the fire, he found Mrs. Banniston waiting for him. Mr. Banniston's wife was of the type called magnificent. Upon her black dinner gown hung quarts of jet beads, sparkling in the firelight.
“What was all the shouting?” she queried.
“Old Bray was here—the fellow with the freak machine he calls a hydromotor. I offered him five thousand cash for it and got a tongue lashing for my kindness.”
“If you have so much money to give away,” said Mrs. Banniston, “I wish you would put it where it would bring us some return. There is the Home for Indigent Gentlewomen, for example.”
“Mrs. Westbrook's pet charity?”
“Yes. For five thousand dollars she would wrap her skinny arms around my neck. As it is now, she can't remember my name.”
“Five thousand to Bray would bring better returns than that.”
“But if his invention is no good, why do you want it?”
“My dear, almost any piece of machinery nowadays is good for something. I have been thinking for quite a while of pulling off a bear raid on Amalgamated Motors. With Shigar and Copper handling the Wall Street end, I believe I can use Bray's mysterious motor to clean up millions. Again, if I prefer to let go of the machine at a reasonable profit of, say, a thousand per cent, I can sell it to some ambitious young capitalist who is cursed with more money than is good for him. There is enlightened selfishness in my philanthropy, you see.”
His wife was reminded of a piece of selfishness of another sort that had been perpetrated in her household that evening. Her son Harry had promised to escort her daughters to the theater and had failed to keep his engagement, as usual. The girls had had to go alone.
“I forgot to mention,” said Banniston. “Harry has gone to New York.”
“What takes him to New York?”
“Wally Dallon.”
“Oh!” There was understanding in her voice.
“Barney,” she said, “I wonder if it is safe to let Harry run around with Wally Dallon this way.”
“Safe for whom?” he asked.
“For Harry. It's done for a purpose, I know. But are you sure that Harry is strong-natured enough to keep his head—to resist—to”
“To push Wally off the walk and keep from stepping into the mud himself?” Mr. Banniston finished for her, and smiled in enjoyment of his metaphor. “Well, my dear, the Banniston family's plan of campaign calls for establishing a connection with the Dallon millions somehow, doesn't it?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“And we can't get next to Papa Dallon any way we try. I've talked the reorganization scheme to him till I'm hoarse, and still the ignorant old fool won't bite.”
Mrs. Banniston sighed until her jet beads gave off a shower of flashes. “Isn't it pathetic,” she said, “that people who know so little should have so much! They say William Dallon eats with his knife, and Mrs. Dallon drinks tea with her spoon in her cup. And yet” Another glittering sigh.
“Since I can't reach old Bill,” Mr. Banniston continued, “and since Mrs. Bill won't talk about anything but soap and servants and tomato pickles when you go to see her, and never returns your calls, it remains for us to try what we can do with their impetuous young son and heir. I hoped we could get him interested in one of the girls—but he won't look at 'em.”
“Hazel could attract him, I'm sure,” said Mrs. Banniston, with motherly spunk, “if it wasn't for that Marion Shelby. Homely little black-haired thing!”
“So you see, my dear, the duty of throwing a hook into gay young Wally devolves upon the menfolk of your family. Well, we are going about our work in the most time-honored and reliable he-male manner. I am doing my bit in Griswold Street. I have taken Walter up into a high mountain and shown him the world at his feet, and he is keen for the expansion project, though his father hates it. My propaganda may not bear fruit while Papa Dallon remains around, but the seed that I have sown has fallen in good ground. Meanwhile, your dutiful son Harry is helping Walter to have a grand good time in life. Some day, perhaps, we shall remind Walter of the good time we helped him have.”
“But I am afraid Harry is having a better time than Walter,” the anxious mother lamented. “The poor boy has gained thirty pounds since last September. His complexion is worse than when the draft board doctors rejected him, and he can hardly ever eat his breakfast. But Walter looks as trim and healthy as the marble athlete in the art museum. I saw him in Eliott-Taylor's yesterday with the Shelby girl; they made a striking pair, black though she is.”
“I wish Harry could have, had some of that army training,” Mr. Banniston observed. “He could stand this game better. As for his morals, trust your son, my dear, to be too infernally lazy to get into any trouble more serious than dyspepsia.”
Three miles away, Felix Bray plodded homeward through the January night, lugging his worn old suit case at his side, clutching his coat collar tight around his throat.
CHAPTER III.
At Grosse Point.
“Dallondale” was the name the Dallons had bestowed upon their great new graystone mansion at Grosse Point, although Dallons were more numerous than dales in that flat lakeside vicinity.
On an afternoon soon after William Dallon's departure for the East, a light sedan car entered the Dallondale gateway nearest to the city and stopped before the door. From the car a young woman ran lightly up the steps.
A “homely little black thing” Miss Marion Shelby may have seemed in the eyes of another Detroit woman. But as she turned to look across the wide and wintry lawn at the icy lake gleaming white in the sunlight, she fulfilled Mrs. Banniston's description in no particular.
One more thing to be said to the credit of Miss Shelby is that she practiced altruism to the despair of her father, Peter Shelby, president of the Midlakes Motors Corporation, who had to provide the funds for her altruistic uses, and to the delight of everybody else in Detroit, particularly those upon whom her altruism descended.
Admitted to Dallondale, she had scarcely asked for its mistress when a motherly voice called to her from somewhere above.
“Here I am, dear. Won't you come up?”
Motherly was Mrs. Dallon, like her voice. A little plump, too, as mothers of tall-grown sons should be. She took Marion's hands in hers and kissed the girl on both brown cheeks.
“Lay off your wraps, child, and sit down with me here by the window where we can watch the ice boats skimming around out there in the cold. I never get tired of seeing them.”
They sat down at a wide, bright window with the lake before their eyes.
“When you telephoned, dear, I thought your voice sounded anxious. Is anything wrong?”
“Then you haven't heard the gossip?” Marion replied.
“No. Why, child? Is it about Walter?”
“Yes, about Walter. They say—I don't know who says, but papa heard it—that something happened between Walter and his father in New York night before last—a quarrel over something Walter did.”
Impulsively the girl bent forward. “I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, Mother Dallon. I thought you would know the facts and we might talk them over together, and perhaps we could find a way to make things right. I have been afraid, too.”
“What else did your father hear, Marion?”
“That Mr. Dallon had publicly reprimanded Walter and disinherited him. But it may be only a story. There have been stories like it before.”
“My dear, this time the story may be true. On the day they went away they had a disagreement. I know that William felt very angry. When he learned, later in the day, that Walter intended to go east he packed a grip and followed him without telling me why.”
“And you haven't heard from them?”
“Not in four days. It is the first time either of them has ever been away from home without sending me a message every day.”
“We must believe that no news is good news,” said Marion. Her tone was not very hopeful. “You say they had a disagreement. Was it over the old subject?”
The woman nodded.
“But,” the girl persisted, “would Mr. Dallon disinherit him just because Walter wants to reorganize the Dallon Motor Car Company? Walter may be wrong in his idea, but surely it is only a mistake of judgment.”
“It goes deeper than that,” Mrs. Dallon replied. “Walter has let shrewd people talk to him until he has come to think of his father as a slow old ignoramus. And that isn't all.”
She hesitated, the girl watching keenly, then left the rest of her thought unspoken.
“I know what you mean, Mother Dallon. You mean that Wally is in the influence of people who flatter him and pander to him and will certainly do him harm.”
“You are very young to have to know about such things, Marion.”
“But I have the right to know about them if—if he means what he says when he asks me to be”
“To be my daughter,” said Mrs. Dallon, with a sad little smile. “Yes, you have a right to know, and I think we should be frank with each other. I am his mother and want him to be happy; but I would not let him marry you unless I knew he was all that your husband should be.”
There followed an awkward silence, broken when the girl declared, with eyes flashing: “They may talk all they please, Mrs. Dallon, but I don't believe them.”
“You hear, then?”
“Oh, indeed, I do. My well-meaning friends have established a rapid-intelligence service between town and Bloomfield Hills. Sometimes I think the whole of Detroit is in league to save me from Walter Dallon. But I don't want to be saved—at least, I feel perfectly capable of saving myself, if any real need occurs.”
She looked capable, too, as she rose and stood beside the older woman's chair. There was more than mere beauty in her firm little chin.
“Mother Dallon, dear, whatever has happened in New York will make no difference between you and me, will it?”
“Of course not, honey. You will always seem a daughter to me.”
With a kiss and a squeeze the girl went to gather up her cloak and gloves.
“What I have said about any difference between you and me, Mother Dallon, applies to Walter also. That's why I came here to-day—to tell you that whatever has occurred will not affect—will not change anything, unless, of course, the facts in the case are too outrageous to be ignored.”
It was well for her blushes that the corner of the room from which she made this little speech was in shadow.
“That's my really truly message, Mother Dallon. There's no use pretending it's an afterthought, is there?”
CHAPTER IV.
Tempering the Lamb.
“Hello, mother!”
William Dallon's shout filled the house. Strange that he should have used the boy's name for her!
The answer that came down the stairs to him sounded closely like a sob.
He found her in her sun window.
“Now, what's the matter, mother? Has another cook quit?”
He kissed her in the rough and hearty fashion of a husband who has either no load at all upon his mind, or else a heavy one.
Included among the thousand things of which the citizens of Detroit liked to boast was the domestic life of the Dallons. “The same wife he had when he was a machinist in Sherman Street is still good enough for him,” they said. There were men not a thousand miles from the Windsor ferry who, when swift fortune smiled upon them, considered themselves promoted, so to speak, from one class of helpmeet to another. But not Bill Dallon.
“What's wrong, mother?” Dallon insisted. “Crying because I've come back to you?”
“You know why I'm crying—I've heard—about Wally.”
“Marion Shelby drove out as I drove in. She tell you?”
“Yes, William.”
“Seem cut up about it, did she?”
“She told me,” Mrs. Dallon replied, “that nothing you may have done to Walter will make any difference with her. But William, what have you done, and what has Wally done? And where is he?”
“Where he is I don't know, and I don't care a brass washer.”
“William!”
“Now, Sally, don't go judging a man till you hear the testimony.” He planted a chair beside hers and sat down. The ordeal had arrived.
“You ask me what he has done. He has played the fool, that's what.”
“But has he done anything bad or shameful?”
“Isn't it shameful to be a fool?”
“You know what I mean, William.”
“Yes, I know.” The father was ill at ease. “He hasn't exactly done anything that would make him ashamed to look us in the face. No, Sally. But he came so darn near it in New York the other night that he might as well have gone the limit.”
Mrs. Dallon gasped.
“Oh, it's that bunch he travels with,” her husband went on quickly. “I don't blame him entirely. In fact, I don't blame him very much. He's young and healthy, and he has had things awful easy, mother. He has had too many darned blessings for his good.”
“Who gave him those darned blessings, William?”
“Yes, Sally, if he has run too free in the last ten years, I suppose it comes back to us—to me. But at last I have done the one thing in my power that may straighten him up. Maybe I'm too late. If so—well, mother, I'm a failure in life, that's all.”
She saw a new look in his face. It was not the old look of impatience that he had worn so often in months then recent when his son crossed his will. There was heartache in his air to-day. But his face grew hard as his thought took a new turn.
“It's the Banniston crowd,” he continued. “I can see what they are after, though Walt can't. He won't open his eyes. He thinks Harry Banniston is a good fellow—a prince, he calls him. Gosh! The only kind of good fellow Harry is, if I'm any judge, is one to tie a half-ton steel casting to and heave off the D. and C. dock. And then he wouldn't sink. He'd float, like a sperm whale.”
“William Dallon! How can you talk so?”
Unabashed by the wifely rebuke, the father went on. “Behind Harry and setting him after Walt is Barney Banniston. That crook! And Walter sitting at his feet studying high finance when he ought to be at the factory with me, learning how to make honest motor cars!”
“Are you sure of what you say about Mr. Banniston?” asked Mrs. Dallon. A good and simple soul, she trusted every one.
“Sure I'm sure,” said Dallon. “Twenty years that spider has been at work in this town, spinning his web for flies like Walter. What was he before he came here? A mining-stock swindler. They ran him out of New York after his work got too coarse, and he came out here to look us over. He liked our looks and stayed. He liked Tom Wheelan's looks so well that he relieved him of his Dallon Motor Company holdings—good old Tom Wheelan, who was our first subscriber when we organized. They say it was a straight business deal, I know, and Wheelan's heirs have never been able to undo it in the courts. But it was theft.”
“You have warned Wally often enough, I'm sure,” Mrs. Dallon sighed.
“A boy would rather listen to a stranger than to his own father, any day,” said Dallon. “Those Bannistons are slick as cup grease. They've made him think they are the best friends he has. And he is loyal to them; I'll say that for him. Let him find out now how loyal they are to him.”
“Then you haven't actually turned him out? You haven't really disowned him, as Marion heard?”
“I've told him I have,” Dallon answered gruffly.
“It was a mean thing to have to do, Sally. But I brought it upon myself, letting him go so long. It was the only way left to put some chromium into that soft iron of his. It may harden him. I don't know.”
She went and stood beside him, taking his arm.
“Do you have to be so extreme with him? Can't you send for him now, after this last warning, and be content just to put him on probation? The Bible says something about tempering the wind to the shorn lamb, you know.”
“Does it? Well, Sally, here's where the lamb gets tempered before the shearing commences.”
She made a second effort.
“William, dear, I was thinking just now of the day when you went away for your long trip in the first little car. I can see it all again. I can see even the spare can of naphtha that you took along. It stood on the floor of the car, and you tied it with a piece of rope to keep it from tipping out.”
“I remember,” he confessed. “I haven't thought of much else these last four days.”
“Walter was five years old then. Do you remember how he ran to the corner after you? And when you had gone, and I couldn't hear the noise of the little car any more, I went indoors and said a prayer. I wasn't afraid you would fail; you were so full of plans and hopes and all. But I wondered if your dreams would take you away from me—and from him—as the little car took you away from us that morning.”
She paused. Her head touched his shoulder.
“They haven't taken you away from me, William. I thank the good Lord every day for that. But they have taken you away from the boy. Haven't they, now? And it isn't all his fault, is it?”
“No,” he answered. “It is nobody's fault but mine. I've been awful busy. I've been the busiest man in Detroit. I took pride in thinking I was building up something fine for the boy. I ought to have been building up the boy instead. But there's a chance yet, mother, if he has anything in him.”
“He is you over again, William, if you only knew it. You fret over his restless ways. Dear man, at his age you were just as restless as Wally. You couldn't sit down and let things drift, any more than he can. You had to be stirring. The only difference between you and him is that you had to hustle, while he”
“He will have to hustle now,” said Bill Dallon.
“And when he has made good”
“I'll put my arm around him, like this.” He drew her close. “But Walt mustn't know that. More important still, Banniston mustn't know it. You're not to tell any one, not even his best girl. Understand?”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Dallon softly. “But I wish—I wish I knew where he was.”
“So you could go and look after his socks, I suppose,” said her husband.
CHAPTER V.
The Unheroic Hero.
The cause of all this commotion stood at a wind-blown corner of Grand Circus Park. He had in his hand an alligator-skin traveling bag, and on his face the perplexed look of a stranger in a strange city.
The athletic club lifted its ornate roof invitingly a couple of squares away. Beneath it he would ordinarily have taken shelter. But the circumstances to-day were extraordinary. In the D. A. C. there would be curious stares to face. The best of friends will “rubber.”
A hundred miles out, two hours before, he had bought a green-tinted newspaper and read on the first page the story of his fall from grace. The headlines were frank.
“I AM DONE WITH YOU,”
WILLIAM DALLON TELLS SPEEDY SON
AND HEIR.
Walter Dallon Cast Adrift by Angry Father in
Sensational Scene in New York Hotel.
Joy Trip Ends in Smash.
Equally candid was the story that followed the headlines. It would give Detroit something to talk about for weeks. Its statement of fact could not be denied. There had been what the newspaper called an “orgy;” and the courts would doubtless decide, in event of a libel “suit, that “orgy” was a proper word enough.
Into the “orgy,” when the “revelry” ran highest, William Dallon had walked, with consequences disastrous to his “speedy son and heir.” The account was a true one, Walter had to admit. How true were the inferences that would surely be drawn from it was another matter. There in black and white were the indisputable facts, and all Detroit would know them by night.
A pair of pedestrians turned to gaze at him. He caught the tail end of a smile of amusement. Think not that the headstrong and high-stepping son of a multimillionaire can stand at a prominent corner without being recognized, even in a city of a million.
He fled for refuge to the Stuller, near at hand. In the book he wrote, “J. J. Doe.” Appreciative travelers have noted that hotel clerks of class make a practice of causing the newly arrived guests to feel at home by addressing him by name. “Yes, Mr. Wilkinson, I think we can accommodate you nicely,” says the hospitable hotel man; and Mr. Wilkinson, just in from Boston or Muskogee or Cheyenne, hearing his name spoken, feels grateful and begins instantly to like the city.
The clerk at the Stuller read the name on the register. As he reached for a room key he glanced oddly at the young man across the desk.
“Three-thirteen, Mr.—ah—Mr. Doe,” said he. “Front! Show Mr. Doe to Three-thirteen.”
Later the clerk drew the bookkeeper's attention to the signature. “J. J. Doe is Wally Dallon,” he muttered.
The bookkeeper was a punster, which may explain why he had not risen very high in his profession.
“No more dough for him,” said he. “J. J. Broke would be more like. How's he looking?”
“Sore as a carbuncle.”
“Well, he had it coming to him. Serves him right.”
Thus the bookkeeper and many other virtuous ones who had never been harmed by Walter Dallon pronounced judgment upon the young man that day; and not the mildest in condemnation was the young man himself.
He was just as sore as he looked to the hotel clerk. He was sore with the soreness of a boy who has collided with a swarm of hornets. Yet it was not entirely with himself that he was provoked. His father, he recalled, had given him no chance to explain things. There had been a party—not an “orgy” at all, but a party—in an upper room at the Annexley Hotel, where all live-wire Detroiters stay when they visit New York. It began as a stag party. By three o'clock, when Bill Dallon walked in, it had become a mixed party, the late guests having arrived after finishing their work at a near-by midnight roof entertainment.
But Dallon, senior, had no excuse for the conclusions which he had drawn from finding his son in that hectic company. He had purposely and deliberately misconstrued the affair in order to hand over the paternal knockout.
From his hotel window he looked out over the little park, with always a hundred or so of his fellow Detroiters in sight—shoppers, theatergoers, taxi men, messengers, all apparently occupied with business and contented with life. He could readily guess what every one of them would say about him. His name would be mentioned in the D. A. C. beyond the trees, in the Y. M. C. A. down Adams Avenue, in the Log Cabin cars scooting northward yonder with their crowded trailers. Beside thousands of radiators that evening his name would be spoken. And, confound it all! he didn't deserve the “panning” he would get. His father had put him in the pillory and made him a town joke. What kind of a father was that?
He stepped to the phone on his bedroom wall and presently was talking with Harry Banniston.
“Harry, this is Walt.”
“Hello, Walt!” The reply was indistinct, as if Harry had turned his head quickly to look over his shoulder.
“Can I see you, Harry?”
“Why—I guess so.” It was not like young Banniston to hesitate like this.
“If you'll be there a while, I'll run out.”
“Say, Walt, listen. I don't know that you'd better. this fool scandal, you know is”
“I see,” said Dallon, and very clearly he saw in the new light that broke upon him. “I see; you don't want to be compromised before the neighbors.”
Of the five young Detroiters who had figured in the New York episode, Dallon was the only one whose name the green-tinted paper had printed.
“Where are you now, Walt?”
“Room Three-thirteen at the Stuller.”
“Suppose I drop in there after supper.”
“Will you?”
“Sure! After dark. How are you?”
The question came as an afterthought. It sounded so insincere that Dallon let it go unanswered, and hung up as if he had not heard.
The prodigal thought it over. Being still charitably disposed in his judgment of his fellow creatures, he decided that Harry's desire to safeguard the respectability of the Banniston family was probably warranted by the facts in the case. Even so, he had to smile at this sudden regard on his friend's part for a good name.
Already a nebulous plan was forming in Dallon's mind. He had come back to Detroit an outcast from any interest of his father's. But the Bannistons were his good friends. Big, bluff, hearty Barney Banniston, the father of Harry, was never too busy to drop his work and talk with his son's chum about the stupendous opportunities that still remained in the city for a wise young man who had the imagination to perceive and the enterprise to seize them.
Walter planned his course of action. If his father remained stubborn, he would go to Barney Banniston, the man his father detested, and he would place himself in the great man's hands. Banniston would have good advice to give him; he was full of it. Banniston would find for his young friend one of those countless opportunities that he could see everywhere.
Walter looked at his watch. There might still be time to find Mr. Banniston at his desk in Griswold Street that day. Then he bethought him of the reluctant Harry. Perhaps, to save Harry possible embarrassment, he had better discuss things with the son before he talked with the father.
At this point in the history of our not very heroic hero it shall be adduced in his favor that his next thought was of his mother.
CHAPTER VI.
Detoured.
His car and driving togs were waiting at a garage in Washington Boulevard, close by. In the early winter twilight he joined the procession of homeward-bound motorists in Jefferson Avenue and so came to Dallondale, with its half mile of concrete wall and its gray stone towers.
Many of the houses in the neighborhood were closed at this time of year, their owners taking up winter quarters in the city or migrating to warmer climes than the cold shores of Lake St. Clair. Dallondale remained open the year round, for its mistress was not of the migratory kind. When she felt the need of tropical air and vegetation, there was always the steamy greenhouse on the side lawn, where ferns and palms and orchids throve luxuriantly and oranges came to the golden stage, if not to ripeness.
“Shall I have your car put up, Mr. Walter?” queried the man who opened the door.
“No, Burns. I'll be going right back.”
“Your father has just come home from New York, sir,” the servant gossiped, taking his coat.
“So?” the young man replied. “Where's my mother?”
She was on the stairs before he started up to seek her. Her first look told him that she knew what an abandoned wretch he was.
The mother sank upon a couch and drew her son down beside her. “You have come to see your father?” she asked hopefully.
“Be hanged to him!” her son answered.
“Walter! For shame!”
“Excuse my pirate language, mother. You see, I lead such a desperate life”
“Walter Dallon!”
He yielded to her maternal authority and laughed.
“No, mother, I've come just to see you.”
“But, Wally, I think he would listen to you, if you went to him in the proper spirit.”
“I don't want him to listen to me, though. He had his chance in New York and wouldn't, and now I've nothing to say to him.”
“Aren't you just trying to make yourself angry?”
“I don't need to try.”
“Walter, I want to ask you one question: Have you a better friend in the world than your father?”
“He takes a poor way of showing his friendship, mother. Have you read the stuff in the paper?”
“No.”
“Well, the rest of the town has, and the whole town thinks I'm a rotter. If he hadn't been so bullheaded—if he had given me half a show—but he didn't. No, mother, it's all off, and I'm glad it is. I can't tell you how—how relieved I feel. Let him go his way and I'll go mine. We never can get along together, never in a million years. So why should we try?”
The mother's clear eyes could see through these heroics. It was plain to her that his bravado concealed admiration and affection for his father, and more heartache than the young man cared to admit. Hopeful still, she renewed her attack.
“You speak of going your own way. Are you sure that you have a way of your own to go? He has worked dreadfully hard, Walter, to make his way smooth and easy for you. Can't you be content to follow after him?”
“But, mother, I didn't leave it of my own accord. He flagged me off the road and hung a 'Detour' sign in my face. It's his doings, not mine.”
A step sounded outside. William Dallon, comfortable in housecoat and slippers, stood at the door, holding a green-tinted newspaper in his hand and looking in at the pair on the couch.
“Oh, you here?” he growled. He would have turned away if the son had not sprung up and checked him with a tragic gesture.
“I'm here to say good-by. You don't object to that, I hope?”
“Not at all,” replied William Dallon in a tone that made his double meaning perfectly clear. This time he turned away without challenge.
“You see, mother?” said the young man helplessly. “It's no use! No use!”
“Let me hear from you every day, won't you, Wally?”
Her words consummated his dismissal. He kissed her and went away from Dallondale in his car, and was strongly impelled to drive down the lane to the shore, out upon the frozen lake, and on into the first large body of open water that appeared.
Conquering the impulse in time, he steered for the Stuller. Jefferson Avenue needed all its “Safety First” signs that evening.
In the library Mrs. Dallon discovered her husband in the act of burning the last sheets of a green-hued newspaper in the fireplace.
“What did the paper say about him?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing much,” he answered carelessly.
“Was it—like what he said it was?”
“I don't know what he said it was. But it was.”
“What will you do about it?” she asked. “Will you make them say it isn't so? Will you let people think he is worse than he is?”
“Sally, did you ever hear about the fellow who emptied the pillowful of feathers out of the third-story window?”
“No.”
“Well,” said William Dallon, “he never got 'em back.”
CHAPTER VII.
Lost Caste.
Whatever people said of the manner of Bernard Banniston's start on the road to fortune, they agreed that the home office of the Banniston interests, in Griswold Street, was one of the show places of Detroit, to be mentioned not far down the list below Belle Isle.
Here the Banniston Petroleum Wells development project, the Banniston California Vineyards Association, the Banniston Rio Grande Land and Irrigation concern, and several Banniston enterprises of less importance had their headquarters. Here also was lodged the real control of the Banniston-Olin Motor Company, manufacturers of the Olin car, sometimes called a roller skate.
Through the plate-glass windows of the Banniston interests much solid mahogany furniture might be seen. Through those same windows Walter Dalton was also visible on the morning after his lugubrious farewell at Grosse Point.
It had been his recent privilege and custom to drop in upon Mr. Banniston without ceremony. This morning he had thought it better to send in his card, and Mr. Banniston had sent out word asking him to sit down outside and wait. To sit and wait, even in the best of solid mahogany, was out of the young man's line. He preferred to stand before an oil painting on the wall and make believe to be interested in the handsome lake steamer there represented.
But he was not thinking of lake steamers. He was putting two thoughts together. One of these thoughts was that Mr. Banniston had asked him to wait. The other had to do with Harry Banniston's failure to drop in at the Stuller “after dark” on the previous evening. To these two disconcerting matters a third was now added.
Out from the sanctuary came Hazel, Harry's sister, the elder of the Banniston daughters, tall, pale, lilylike. Her big eyes widened as he stepped toward her. Then with a quick “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Dallon,” in a high society voice, she hastened past him to the street door, gathering her fur wraps about her. Through the plate glass he watched her enter her electric car and saw her send a took at him—a look of cautious curiosity and maidenly derision.
An office girl spoke at his elbow. “Mr. Banniston is ready for you, sir.” Still polite to him was the Banniston office help, at any rate.
Big and bluff was Barney Banniston this morning, but not hearty. “Sit down, Dallon,” he said, and gave his attention to a document in his hand, which looked like a mortgage bond.
The silence that followed had reached the point of insult before the financier remembered his caller.
“Well, Dallon?”
The young man had expected some such uncomfortable beginning. But he had also expected a smile, and there was no smile that the naked eye could discern.
“I read what the paper said about you. Too bad, too bad! I suppose it's true?”
“The facts were exaggerated, sir. There may have been a gay hour or two and considerable noise, but the affair was no worse than some doings I've attended in the best homes in Detroit.”
“Is that an aspersion on our society life?”
“Not at all. What I mean to say is that the New York racket was nothing like the newspaper made out.”
“Yes, yes, no doubt,” said Banniston, scratching his nose. “I'm not asking you about that. I'm asking if it is true that your father has thrown you overboard.”
“I'm afraid it's true.”
“Too bad, too bad,” said Banniston again.
The air of the office was thick with the odor of sanctity.
“I've watched you a long while, Dallon; I've been worried about you, not only for your sake but also for my boy Harry's. More times than once I've been warned that you were a bad influence for him. But I thought you would straighten up. I tried to turn your interest to serious things. I talked to you about your responsibilities. I guess I wasted my breath.”
Mr. Banniston sighed as he thought of all his good breath gone for nothing.
“Is it definitely settled that you are not William Dalian's son any more? Isn't there a chance that the old gentleman is bluffing?”
If we may judge from the direction of his look, Mr. Banniston asked the question of a piece of mahogany office furniture on the other side of the room.
“My father never bluffs,” the young man answered. “He is not that kind.”
Banniston gave him a sharp glance to see if anything personal was meant. Then once more he fixed his eyes on the mahogany.
“You have had your last word from him?”
“Yes.”
“What about your mother? Has she no voice in the matter?”
“I said good-by to my mother last night.”
“Then it's final.” Mr. Banniston stroked his nose. “Well, now that you have to scratch for a living, what are you going to do? Where do you think of scratching?”
“I have no plans,” Dallon confessed. “I haven't a thing in sight. I thought that you might suggest something. We have talked, if you remember, about business opportunities here in Detroit.”
“There are always opportunities for men with capital,” returned Mr. Banniston judicially, “and for men with good reputations. But your case, of course, is different. You have no means, have you? Your father has never settled any great amount of money on you?”
Dallon shook his head.
“Then, too, you have rather lost caste, you know. You would be more of a liability than an asset to anybody who might take you on. The business world is a moral world, Walter, and the way of the transgressor is mighty hard in it, you'll find. Still, I'll keep you in mind. Have you ever taken a business course? Do you know bookkeeping or stenography or anything like that?”
The young man admitted that his education in those subjects had been neglected.
“Even so,” said Banniston, “I may be able to think of some way to use you. Suppose we leave it like this; suppose you drop in again in, say, a week.”
“In a week,” Dallon agreed.
As fast as a man can walk without incurring suspicion of having picked a pocket, Dallon went away from there. Raging in heart, he jaywalked through the traffic of the busy city center and set out at six miles an hour in the general direction of Toledo, Ohio.
In Lafayette Boulevard a brisk young man bolted out of the Board of Commerce Building and, looking neither first to the left nor then to the right, as the traffic signs of that swift city advise, collided with the hurrying Esau.
“I beg your pardon,” said the brisk young man, on the rebound. Then, recognizing his victim, he added, laughing: “Oh, it's you, Wally Dallon. Where you going? I'll walk along with you. You're the very chap I'm looking for.”
“How's Jimmy Laird?” asked Dallon. To that name, it seemed, the brisk young man answered. Dallon had known him at Ann Arbor as a student working his way. Since those days Laird had not ceased to work, and was now become a member of the Detroit bar and an ornament to his profession.
“I was actually on my way to hunt you down,” said Laird, taking Dallon's arm.
His look was serious and intense, with a boyish smile just underneath. When he turned his head to address his companion, the point of his chin reached quite out to the point of his shoulder.
“Walt, I want you to take on a troop of my Boy Scouts.”
“What!” Halting, Dallon stared at him.
“It will be the biggest thing that ever came into your life, Wally, old man; and you will be the biggest thing in theirs.”
“Good night!” Dallon exclaimed. “Me? Me lead a bunch of honest, clean-faced little boys?”
“Why not? Who is better fitted than you? You're an all-around sportsman. You fish and hunt, and you play all the games Spalding ever heard of. You sail a boat and drive a car, and I reckon you could swim from here to Duluth if you had to. You know the woods and woodcraft. You can tell a polecat from a catamount. You understand wild life”
“Yes; I know all about wild life,” Dallon groaned. “I think you must be loony, Jimmy Laird.”
“I don't get you,” Laird answered.
“Then you didn't read the Leader-Ledger last night.”
“When do I have time to read the papers? What do you mean, Wally?”
Dallon told him as they walked on. When they arrived, presently, in front of a stately old family mansion that had been converted into a club for busy people, Laird drew him inside and put him on a divan in a corner of the smoking room and made him tell the story over again. At the end he grasped the story-teller's hand.
“Then all the more, Dallon, I want you on that job.”
“Like hell you do!” Dallon responded.
“You will have to censor your language, of course,” said Laird critically.
CHAPTER VIII.
At the Factory.
Dallon's ambition to walk to Toledo before sundown had evaporated, giving place to one more worthy though, perhaps, less easy of attainment. Like the hero of the finest short story in the world, he said: “I will arise and go unto my father.” Further, he told himself, with a smile: “Overalls at last.”
From, his remark we may infer that the desirability of his going into the factory and learning the business was a subject not infrequently mentioned in the conversations of the Dallons, father and son.
A trolley car put him down, after a half hour's journey, in a region of the town which, twenty years before, had consisted chiefly of market gardens. There were markets to-day in place of the market gardens; there were the bustling stores and the thronging sidewalks of a thriving municipality; there was a vast district of new streets and comfortable homes. Around all these and beyond for miles the greater city spread; and in the heart of this new-grown community stood the Dallon factory.
Familiar to the young man's eyes were the four gigantic smokestacks of the power house, upholding their huge sign, in letters twenty feet high:
DALLON CARS
“MADE GOOD TO MAKE GOOD.”
Beside the power house was the administration building; behind that for half a mile the glass-walled structures where thousands of men labored at bench and anvil and furnace, at punch and press and drill, in stock room and tool room and paint room, making well a car that should make good. A regiment of these toilers poured out at the side gate and another regiment poured in as young Dallon stood looking.
Down a private street bewteen factory buildings was a row of brand-new touring cars, sixty or eighty of them, identical in design, their engines all running, their gleaming hoods wearing bright red tickets, the line ready to be driven away to market. That market was insatiable. It kept the factory running all day and all night. It kept the company supplied with orders a year in advance of delivery. It exhausted the capability of the railroads, so that thousands of Dallon cars went away under their own power to far distant sales points, even to Kansas City, to Birmingham, to Boston.
The lobby of the administration building was a busy place this day. A score of salesmen waited to see purchasing agents and heads of departments. A score of sightseers waited for a guide to lead them through the mechanical mazes and marvels of the shops. While waiting they had ample opportunity to inspect the shining Dallon sedan at one end of the long room and the sturdy Dallon three-ton truck at the other end. They had a chance also to witness a curious scene.
A well-dressed and high-powered young man had started up the broad stairs leading to the offices above. The clerk at the reception desk had sprung to intercept him.
“Mr. Dallon, please.”
Walter halted.
“Sorry, sir, but you're not to go up. That's the order.”
“Who gave you the order?”
“Mr. Wickersham.”
“Is my father here to-day?”
“I think so.”
While Dallon hesitated, reënforcements reached the clerk's side in the person of a uniformed watchman.
“Send my name up, will you?” said Walter.
On an ordinary carbon slip such as served for the visiting salesmen Walter Dallon's name was carried upstairs by a messenger, who returned in the course of time and whispered something to the desk clerk.
Said the clerk to Dallon: “Your father is engaged and can't be disturbed.” He tore up the pass on which he had written Dallon, junior's, name.
“Is that all the message?”
“That's all.”
“Then I'd like to see Mr. Wickersham.”
Up went the messenger again. Back he came to report that Mr. Wickersham would be down presently.
It was half an hour before Mr. Wickersham appeared. William Dallon's private secretary was a substantial-looking business man who bore a strong resemblance to the late Chester A. Arthur. He was accompanied by a sharp-eyed old gentleman with a brief bag in his hand, who squinted hard at Walter before passing out to a motor car waiting at the door.
“That was Perry Squires,” said the young man to Mr. Wickersham. “What's he doing here?”
Squires had been the Dallon attorney from the day of the organization of the Dallon company. For preparing the articles of incorporation he had reluctantly accepted ten shares of the stock. “He would much rather have had twenty-five dollars in cash,” William Dallon delighted to relate. To this day Perry Squires continued to practice law just as if those ten shares had not made him opulent.
“Why is my father seeing a lawyer?” Walter demanded.
“I am not at liberty to disclose your father's affairs, you know,” Wickersham replied. His tone was firm though not unfriendly. “What can I do for you, Walter?”
“I suppose dad has been making a new will,” said the young man, courageously enough. “I don't care about that; but I do want to see him a minute. Can't you”
The secretary shook his head. “I'll speak to him if you like; but I doubt if it will do you any good. His order this morning was positive. Perhaps I can take a message to him.”
“Thanks. I won't trouble you.”
“I don't need to tell you that I am sorry,” said Wickersham. “If I can ever serve you in any way compatible with my duty to your father, let me know.”
A commotion at the visitors' desk drew their attention. The clerk and the watchman were tusseling with a scrappy little man whose hair was long and whose eyes were wild.
Swiftly they took him by the arms and slid him across the lobby floor to the outer door, where they projected him bodily down the steps. In their train followed an office boy carrying a battered leather suit case, which he tossed out after the wild-eyed caller.
“Another crank, I presume,” Wickersham observed.
“This is no place for cranks and prodigal sons,” said Walter. “Good-by, sir.”
The watchman was still waving the wild-eyed person off the premises.
Along the walk by the power house went Dallon to avoid passing underneath his father's window. Two blocks up the street, where the private railway spurs of the Dallon company begin, he boarded a city-bound trolley car.
At the factory gate the long-haired crank came on board, lugging his old suit case, and sat down at Dallon's side.
CHAPTER IX.
The Crank.
He was a frowsy old codger. He needed a shave, and he needed to take lessons in the art of chewing tobacco inconspicuously. There was tobacco juice around the corners of his mouth, on his stubble-covered chin, and on the collarless shirt underneath his dusty coat.
“Danged capitalists!” he exploded.
“Who?” queried the young man at his side.
“Them Dallons. Old one a profiteer, young one a rake, while honest men starve.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Walter Dallon. “I hear the old gentleman is a pretty good citizen.”
The crank uttered a better bark than many a dog could render. “But I'll show him,” he added. “Him with his silly gas engine! I'll show him.”
Dallon saw that the man, for all his vehemence, was trembling in every muscle, as if ill.
“Throw me out, will he? I'll throw him out when my time comes. Turn around, young feller, and look back at them four whopping chimneys. Look at them acres of workshops. Then travel around this city and look at the other automobile factories—thirty in all, most of 'em bigger than Dallon's. I tell you I can close every one of 'em.”
There had been talk of anarchist activities in Detroit—not much, but enough to draw comments from men like William Dallon and Bernard Banniston. Within a few days a party of Reds had been rounded up and shipped East. It occurred to Walter that it might be well to gain the acquaintance of this long-haired hater of capitalists.
“A million and a half cars a year they make,” the fire eater went on, “and I can close 'em down like that.” He clapped his gnarly hands together. “Six hundred millions they've got invested in 'em. A hundred thousand men they hire. And I can break 'em to-morrow!”
“To-morrow?”
“Well, maybe not to-morrow. In ten years.”
He patted the big suit case that stood on end between has knees.
“It's in here,” he chuckled, while Dallon thought of bombs. “In here—the biggest thing in the world—twenty years of my life. Before Olds and Maxwell and Winton and those fellers started I was working on it, in Philadelphia. Before Bill Dallon and Henry Ford ever thought of a motor I was making mine. They got the jump on me. They used a fuel that cost ten cents then, twenty-five cents now. I wanted an engine that would run on—on”
He checked his wild speech and glanced at his companion in alarm.
“On what?” asked Dallon.
“Anyway, I've got it,” said the crank, ignoring the question. “I've finished my engine, and now they won't even look at it.”
“Who won't look at it?”
“The Dallons, the people like that. I write to 'em. I wrote to Bill Dallon. I said to him, 'I've got an engine that will make your car look like a pushcart. I'll let you manufacture it. I'll go shares with you. We will own it between us and put the other fellows out of business.' That's the letter I wrote him, and he didn't answer it. And when I met him and talked to him the other night in the railway station, he said he had troubles enough already.”
“Then you call at his factory and he throws you out, eh? I can sympathize with you,” said Walter. “I was thrown out of there just now, myself.”
“Are you an inventor, too?” the old fellow asked sharply.
“No. I was hunting for a job.”
“Your clothes don't look like you needed a job.”
“Perhaps not. You see, I wanted to learn the automobile industry.”
“Don't waste your time, young feller. There won't be any such industry after ten years—not like it is now, anyhow. The only cars on the market will have my engines in 'em. There won't be a gas engine between here and Halifax. I'll even kill the electrics.”
The long-haired man fell silent. When the trolley had turned into Gratiot Avenue, Dallon spoke.
“What's the idea in your engine?”
“You'd like to know, wouldn't you? They all would.”
“How much backing do you need?”
“I don't ask for much,” the inventor replied, “and I think that's where I make my mistake. If I had twenty thousand dollars to open a little shop somewhere and turn out just one complete full-size car”
He made it clear that he was not satisfied with his engine yet. It needed a year or so of road testing to be perfect.
“You are more of an artist than a business man,” said Dallon. “What you want to do is to think large. Ask for twenty million, jump right into production, and let the public do your testing for you.”
He said it to please the old fellow. Then, too, he may have echoed the instruction he had lately absorbed at the feet of the large-thinking Barney Banniston. He was to have an instance of Mr. Banniston's large-mindedness sooner than he expected.
“Maybe if I asked for twenty millions they would listen to me, that's true,” said the inventor. “But five thousand is the best offer I've had—and that feller wants me to sell outright. Think of working all your life for five thousand dollars, inventing a thing worth billions to somebody else!”
His excitement following his fracas with the watchman at the factory had subsided by now. His tone had become merely plaintive, his look pathetic.
A flash of memory came to the young man at his side, whose interest up to this point had been little more than idle. To talk of the disappointments of this old eccentric had kept his mind off troubles of his own.
“You don't happen to be Felix Bray, do you?”
“Why? How do you know?”
“I've heard about you,” said Dallon. “Also I can tell you the name of the lavish philanthropist who wants to buy your invention for five thousand dollars. It's Barney Banniston.”
Bray's look of surprise was verification enough.
One of Banniston's recent confidences came to Dallon's mind. It was on a day when the big, bluff, hearty financier was discussing the golden opportunities that lay-all around.
“For example,” he said, “I know where, for fifty thousand dollars, I can get absolute control of a new sort of automobile engine that may send gasoline engines tumbling down to nothing. Mind you, Walter, I don't say it will; but it may; and the man who puts up the fifty thousand to-day may find himself the owner of a regular Klondike to-morrow. You may feel like looking into it some time. If so, let me know.”
Said Dallon to Felix Bray, as their trolley car reached the city hall: “Are you sure you heard Mr. Banniston right? Wasn't it fifty thousand he offered you, instead of five?”
“Don't I tell you,” Bray returned, “that all I asked him for was twenty?”
Here was a new light on Dallon's great and good friend of Griswold Street. For five thousand he had tried to buy an invention which he was willing to sell to his admiring young disciple for ten times that amount. Truly there were golden opportunities around—for opportunity brokers, at least.
“Has Banniston seen your engine in action, Mr. Bray?”
“Twice he seen it run.”
“You convinced him, then?”
“Didn't he want it? Don't he still want it?”
“Has he renewed his offer lately?”
“Just this week. It's a standing one. But I don't know,” said Bray, “why I'm telling you all this, or how you come to know so much. Are you a reporter?”
“No, I'm not,” Dallon answered. “You don't have much use for reporters, do you?” He was remembering many half-forgotten things about Bray now.
“They stand in with the automobile makers,” Bray answered bitterly. “Being my name is Bray, they call my engine a donkey engine. But I'll have a horse laugh on them before I get through. You just keep your ears open.”
Mumbling his discontent, he rose presently to leave the car. When he had stepped down to the street he frowned to see the young man drop off beside him.
“I think I'll stick along and find out some more about your engine,” Dallon explained. “I may want to invest some money in it.”
“You?” cried Bray. “Why, you're looking for a job.”
“I told you I wanted to learn the automobile industry. If that industry is going to be revolutionized in ten years I'd better do my studying under a revolutionist. See?”
Suspicion gleamed from Bray's eyes. “I guess you're a spy working for them Dallons,” he said, and turned away.
But Dallon kept at his side. They were somewhere between Navin Field and the river, in a neighborhood of small factories, railway tracks, and old-fashioned dwellings.
“That bag looks heavy; it pulls your shoulder down,” said Dallon. “Let me tote it for you.”
For answer, the inventor turned aside through a rickety gate into the mean yard of a mean little house flanked closely with other little houses of like pattern. Fumbling in his pocket for a key, he opened the door and entered, then slammed the door in his unwelcome companion's face.
CHAPTER X.
The Shelbys.
To have doors slammed in his face was becoming an old story to Dallon. First it was his father's door, then Banniston's, next the factory door, and now the queer inventor's. There remained one more to try. He had saved it until the last, as a small boy saves his hardest example in arithmetic.
With the feeling of driving to his own funeral, he put his car out Woodward Avenue late in the afternoon, past the humming Ford plant and Palmer Park and the Fair Grounds, past miles of streets of new homes and miles of other streets boasting water and gas and sewers and parked driveways, and lacking only the houses that would follow in a year or so.
When the flat country had given place to a region of hills and woods and glinting lakes, he swung aside into a private driveway that wound through acres of birches and evergreens, bringing him to the door that had been most in his mind since his ignominious return to Michigan.
He needed resolution to mount the steps and press the bell button, and courage to stand waiting in the reception hall. Then Marion Shelby appeared and he could resume respiration, for though her face was grave, her hand was held out in welcome.
She led him to a glass-inclosed veranda where a log fire blazing in an outside fireplace supplied a very good imitation of summer weather.
“I heard you were in town,” she began, when they were seated in front of the fender. “Hazel Banniston phoned me this afternoon.”
“What did she report?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Usually,” he explained, “when she turns those deer's eyes of hers in my direction, I wish she would use her dimmer. But when we met this morning she could hardly see me. She was not interested.”
“She was interested enough to phone me, at least.”
“What did she say?”
“Does it matter what Hazel Banniston says?”
“Not a particle. It's what you say that counts.”
“Excuse a little ruthlessness,” Marion returned; “but what I might say didn't count enough to keep you out of trouble, did it?”
“I'm sorry if any of that trouble has reached you,” he answered simply, and bent forward with the tongs to mend the fire. Perhaps it was the warmth of the blaze that brought out the moisture and the color on his neck.
“At any rate,” the ruthless young woman went on, after watching him broil for a minute, “I had the satisfaction of reminding Hazel that the Fatted Calf was as deep in the disreputable affair as the Prodigal Son, according to the stories that papa heard. Is it so? It seemed to be news to her.”
Dallon put down the tongs and sat back with a grateful heart. Marion had spoken a good word for him. A good fellow was Marion.
“Is it so?” she repeated. “Was Harry in it?”
“I can't discuss Harry's sins,” he said. “My own are paramount. I've come to hear your verdict.”
“Before I utter judgment I shall have to hear the testimony, you know.”
“But you have read what the paper said; and your father has heard things.”
“That was the prosecution. Now for the defense.”
Marion settled herself with the air of a judge to listen to the accused in his own behalf.
He told her humbly and contritely, with such remorse in his aspect as the facts in the case demanded. When the testimony was in and the defense had rested, she reserved her decision. She would need a little time by herself to look up the law. Meanwhile, she perceived heir father's car coming up the drive. Perhaps the prisoner at the bar would have a talk with him.
“I'll talk to him fast enough,” Dallon answered. “The question is, will he talk to me?”
“Try him,” said Marion.
The big blue Midlakes limousine let a tall and eminent-looking gentleman out at the door. Marion met him with a daughterly embrace and drew him to the veranda.
“Well, well, here's Walter!”
There had been three great Peter Shelbys in the history of Detroit. The first built the family fortune on a foundation of good Michigan lumber. The second improved that fortune by wise investments in real estate; the outlying farms that he bought were now populous residence districts. The third Peter Shelby, warming his hands at the fire, was the greatest of the line.
Like William Dallon, he had entered the automobile game early. As president of the Midlakes company he introduced mudguards to a bespattered motoring world. His was the first horseless carriage that employed a steering wheel in place of a broomstick and a horn instead of a bell. W. D. Todd, the inventor of the Midlakes car, had now gone to a better world, leaving his family well fixed in this, but the Midlakes car, under Peter Shelby's zealous management, went rolling in wherever fine people demanded luxury in travel. William Dallon's car was for modest folk; the Midlakes car was only for people who paid a surtax to the internal revenue collector.
Some one asked Peter Shelby once: “Why do you spend your life in an automobile factory?” Peter's reply was often quoted.
“To build up something so everlastingly good that it will supply thousands of high-grade workmen with perpetual jobs and make prosperity for thousands of households. I suppose I might spend my days at Bloomfield Hills, raising fancy roses or batting a rubber pill around a pasture; but I like this better.”
People declared that he never sold a car until he himself had tried it out. His workmen talked in thousandths of inches.
“Well, Walter, you're in trouble, I hear.” Peter Shelby said it with a smile. “I'm sorry—sorry for you and your father both. The thing to do now is to pitch in and show him that you can swallow your medicine and recover and make good. Is that the way you feel about it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Want a job?”
“What doing? I don't know very much.”
“Neither did I, at the start. That first year in Mack Avenue when the only factory the Midlakes company had was a tent, I didn't know a monkey wrench from a man hole. W. D. Todd could tell you, if he were alive, that I thought a gasket was a tank for the gasoline.”
To-day this born millionaire who had gone into the game solely for the love of working was classed as one of the world's great automobile engineers. In the mechanical problems of a national government burdened with war he had been a final expert.
“Have you done any looking around?” he queried.
“I asked a man for a job this morning,” said Dallon. “He didn't seem enthusiastic.”
“Was it Barney Banniston? I thought so. I heard him bragging about it at the club.”
“I like his nerve!” the young man exclaimed.
“His nerve is good,” Mr. Shelby admitted. “I wonder, Walter, that you ever got so thick there.”
Gloomily Dallon opined that he was plenty thin there now.
“Are you sure of that? From the drift of his remarks at the club I gathered that he had taken you on—that, figuratively speaking, he had rescued you from the gutter and intended to see that you had a fair chance in life.”
“He's a liar, sir. He told me to come again in a week, that was all. If I thought he was trying to rub it in on my father like”
“That's how it struck me,” said Shelby. “Take my advice and get yourself a job at smuggling booze over from Canada in an ice boat, or something respectable like that, before you tie up with your father's enemy.”
“I've never heard him called that before,” said Dallon, “except by dad himself.”
“You haven't done your listening in the right lane, perhaps. The whole city knows of his plan to save his toppling Olin interests by leaning them up against the Dallon interests.”
“I knew that he had a scheme to merge the two companies and use them as the foundation for a billion-dollar consolidation like Amalgamated Motors,” said Walter, “and I was for it strong.”
“You were for letting him burn your paws,” said Shelby grimly. “But now, of course, that pretty plan is punctured—at considerable cost, I'm afraid, to the happiness of certain people at Grosse Point, eh, Walter?”
At this painful stage Marion interrupted the conversation to order her father upstairs to dress for dinner. She herself had changed from an outing suit to something so silky and dainty that her young man's eyes danced at sight of her.
“You will stay, won't you?” she asked him when her father had left.
“That depends on the verdict.”
“Do you know,” she replied soberly, “that after the testimony is in, there is usually a fervid argument to the court? And do you know that you have not argued your case at all? Don't you care which way the verdict goes?”
“I am a poor hand at special pleading,” he told her. “But will this do?”
An old gardener came trundling a wheel-barrow across the lawn in the twilight. He bad been wrapping straw around some of the Shelby rosebushes, for the bitter half of the winter was near at hand. He saw the scene on the glassed veranda and sighed to be young again.
“Does that prove anything to you, judge?” asked Dallon, as the wordless argument ended.
“It proves,” Marion replied, smoothing out a rumpled sleeve, “that you are a rough and mussy bear. But I suppose I must be kind to bears if I am to be a consistent altruist. So come indoors, Mr. Bear, and be fed.”
CHAPTER XI.
The Whims of Fortune.
It pleased Peter Shelby, at the dinner table, to discourse on a subject dear to the hearts of most Detroiters. That subject was the luck of the automobile game. His daughter and Dallon listened as attentively as is becoming in young people when their elders indulge in reminiscence, although they both had heard his stories many times.
“An Eastern banker was asking me to-day,” said Mr. Shelby, “how this town came to be the automobile center of the universe. I told him it was because, down in his country one day, a certain man got homesick for Lansing, Michigan.”
With much enjoyment Mr. Shelby explained the paradox, relating how the inventor of the first practical gasoline motor car journeyed from Lansing to New York in search of capital; how he met there a man of wealth who promised to raise the needed funds; how the financier sent the inventor across the river to Newark, New Jersey, to pick out a site for the factory; how the inventor chose a suitable plot of ground and roved around Newark for ten days thereafter, getting acquainted with the lay of the land while waiting for his backer to make good the promise; how, despairing at last of his backer's ability to land the money, and yearning for his home town out West, he journeyed back toward Lansing as far as Detroit, and in the railway station in that city met a Detroiter with money to venture, who heard his tale of disappointed hopes and said to him: “You stay right here.”
“And R. E. Olds stayed here,” Mr. Shelby concluded, “long enough to establish Detroit as the metropolis of motordom. Out of his factory, Walter, went your father and W. D. Todd and a dozen other men, to invent cars and start factories of their own. To-day this city employs more men in her automobile factories than the total adult male population of the city that might have been the motor capital—and Newark is no village, either.”
He had stories, too, of priceless inventions gone begging there in Detroit, in the city that should best have known their value; and of men who would brood to their dying day over the chance they missed to grubstake a certain earnest young mechanician whose company now did a business of one million dollars a day, whose factory now produced one-half of all the motor cars made in America.
“The human race, even the Detroit sector of it,” said Mr. Shelby, philosophical over his coffee, “is by nature conservative, which is a pleasant word for lazy-minded. Start something in Griswold Street even in this swift age—something that may be worth a billion to-morrow—and nine men out of ten will tell you it won't work and it can't be done. Take aëroplanes, now” and off he went for another flight.
When he came down, Walter Dallon was waiting for him with a question.
Had Mr. Shelby ever looked into a motor said to have been invented by a queer old character around town named Felix Bray?
“I have seen the motor,” Shelby replied. “But seeing Bray's motor and looking into it are two different things. I doubt if anybody has ever looked into it except Bray himself.”
Dallon narrated his trolley-car adventure with the long-haired little crank. When the account ended in the incident of the slamming of Bray's house door, Shelby chuckled.
“Before America entered the World War,” said he, “in the days when those of us who had been called in to help were overlooking no patent or suggestion in mechanics that might become of use to the government, we went to Bray and coaxed him into agreeing to demonstrate his motor.
“For five years he had tried to interest people without showing his goods. Nobody will listen to a man who won't lay his cards on the table, so Bray had become a joke. He was afraid of bankers and lawyers, afraid of every man who came near him and of every man he approached. I found out at Washington that he had never patented his idea, being afraid of the government. And he was still afraid of the government in 1916, as we were to discover.
“We arranged for him to give his exhibition in a room in a machine shop down by the river—a place of his own selecting. At the appointed time we arrived. We found the windows of the room curtained with tar paper. The only light came from an electric bulb above a table. On the table stood Bray's model. The part of it that we were allowed to see looked like a simple four-cylinder gasoline motor. The rest of it was inclosed in a wooden box.
“Bray was there and as fidgety as a cat on a hot griddle. He gave us orders that we were to sit around the sides of the room and remain seated. If we tried to examine the motor at close range he would call the show off. That was the way the notorious Keely mystified the scientists in Philadelphia years ago. But such methods didn't go down with us; we were Missourian, and we told Bray so.
“Well, he balked as hard as we, and the séance ended before it began. When we saw him last he was standing guard over the boxed part of his motor like a tax dodger over his income. And that,” said Mr. Shelby, “is the nearest that any one has ever come to looking into Bray's motor, so far as I know. Either the machine is a fake that can't stand daylight, or else its inventor is a fool.”
Dallon recalled Bray's confidences. “I can tell you one man who has looked into it,” said he. “Unless Bray lies, Bernard Banniston has seen its wheels go round and has made him a standing offer of five thousand dollars for it.”
Peter Shelby showed surprise.
“He must see possibilities in the thing,” Dallon remarked.
“Financial possibilities, at least,” returned Mr. Shelby thoughtfully. “People are dazzled by the fortunes made in the auto industry. He could start a company to manufacture Bray's motor, open subscription books and clean up millions. Whether the motor is any good or not, it would be good enough to pull in the bank savings of thousands of suckers.”
Peter Shelby pushed back his chair and cast a contemplative glance toward his humidor. Then spoke Marion, whose voice had not been heard in this exchange of worldly wisdom:
“If this invention is such a dangerous thing to leave lying around, shouldn't somebody get control of it to keep it out of certain people's hands?”
“That,” replied her father, smiling, “would be altruism.”
CHAPTER XII.
The Dallon Name.
“Oh, Wally!”
Young Dallon, entering the breakfast room at the Stuller, heard his name called by a familiar voice. Across the hotel lobby came the Fatted Calf, otherwise Harry Banniston, with a glad smile on his round face.
Dallon stiffened a little and waited.
“I couldn't remember the number of your room,” said Harry, “so I asked at the desk. They swore you were not stopping here, but I told 'em I knew better, and here you are.”
“Had breakfast?”
“Yes, but I'll sit down with you.”
They found a table for two at a window overlooking the park. While Dallon ordered food, the companion of his recent pleasures lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the waiter's head. If Harry's smoke rings had been piston rings, he would have been able to retire at the age of twenty-five with an independent fortune.
“The governor says you went to see him yesterday.”
“I did. But why haven't you come to see me?”
“Laid up—bad cold—all shot to pieces,” Harry answered sadly.
“You ought to brace up, Harry. Really you ought. If you would follow my example and lead a moral and absteminous life you wouldn't have colds and things.”
“I'm sorry I didn't get here that night. But I'm here now. As I say, you went to see my esteemed parent. And I guess he was kind of cool toward you, eh?”
“He made me think of the Washington Boulevard Ice Tower,” Dallon admitted.
“That was all a mistake, Walt, old chap. The fact is, the governor believed some gossip he heard, and thought you had been leading me astray. But I had a heart-to-heart talk with him last night and made him see things in a new light.”
“That's kind of you, Harry; that's mighty handsome and charitable.”
“Don't be sarcastic, Wally; don't be sore—though I don't blame you a lot. The governor had no call to rub it in on you, when you”
“When you are as deep in the mud as I am in the mire,” Dallon finished for him. “I thought something of the sort myself.”
“But that's all past and, I hope, forgotten,” young Banniston persisted. “I've made him see that it is up to us to stand by you, now that you need friends. I have fixed things all right for you, and all that you need do is go to him again. He wants to see you at ten this morning. Will you go?”
“Beggars can't be choosers,” Dallon replied.
“Fine!” exclaimed Harry, rising to leave. “And don't lay up a grudge against him. He's a rough customer at times, but his heart's as kind as a woman's. I'll hunt you up later in the day and see how you have made out with him.”
At ten o'clock Dallon stood again in the outer office of the Banniston interests. This time he was admitted without delay; this time Bernard Banniston was all smiles and cordiality, and he shook his caller's hand for fully half a minute. Having thawed so suddenly, he may have been a bit sloppy.
“Harry found you, then?”
“As you see.”
“I wish I had talked with him before you came to me yesterday. He says you are more sinned against than sinning. He thinks your father has handed you a pretty raw deal. Under those circumstances, I guess we had better wipe off the slate and start fresh. Have a chair, Walter. Take this one.”
He placed the best of his solid mahogany for the mistreated young man and settled down behind his desk. No mortgage bond distracted his attention this morning.
“My boy, I think I have discovered a way to use you.”
“I don't understand stenography, remember.”
“Hal ha! ha!” Like a good fellow Mr. Banniston took the dig. “That's one on me,” he acknowledged. “But let us forget yesterday. You won't need to know hooks and crooks in the job I have in mind for you.”
Dallon felt especially grateful to be able to sidestep the crooks.
“You won't need to do anything much except to dress well—which you always do—and to look the part of a successful man of affairs. You may also have to sign checks occasionally, appear at public banquets, and mingle generally with the top notchers. And your duties won't be so exacting that you can't run away for frequent vacations to Daytona, to Santa Barbara, to almost any gay spot where your fancy may lead you, always excepting gay New York. I don't recommend New York for you, Walter.”
At the young man's quick scowl he laughed with great enjoyment.
“That's the time I landed on you, my boy. Now the score is even and we won't jolly each other any more. Let's be serious.”
He bent forward with his stout elbow on the desk blotter, his plump fingers supporting his wide and well-filled forehead.
“Seriously, I can see a chance for you to amount to a great deal in this city, and in the country generally as well, with no other assets that you have already at hand.”
“Amounting to something is my main concern just now,” Dallon replied.
“Here is your situation at present,” said Banniston. “Your father has disinherited you—legally, I understand—new will and everything. I hear that you tried to see him at the factory yesterday and couldn't get past the office boy. He is done with you. Let's look the fact squarely in the teeth.”
“It has teeth, all right,” the young man observed, while Mr. Banniston took a breath for his next point.
“The money he had piled up for you will go elsewhere—to charities and colleges and such—and you won't be able to touch a cent of it. He has started to give it away already. Yesterday, for instance, he handed the Near East Relief people a check for one hundred thousand.”
“I hadn't heard of that,” said Dallon.
“You'll find it in the papers. It emphasizes what I am getting at, that you can't hope for anything from him in the money way. But, my boy, you have something else of his that he can never withhold from you.”
“What is that?”
“The name of Dallon and all the sound business reputation that goes with it.”
“At last,” thought Walter.
“He can keep you out of his money, but not out of his name; and that name can be made worth millions to you if you are willing to be advised and guided.”
Dallon's air was gratefully attentive.
“Now let me say a word about myself,” Banniston pursued. “I speak to you in strict confidence, as I would to my own son. A few years ago I was foolish enough to put a good deal of money into the Olin Motor Company. In that investment I was led like a sheep to the slaughter. The Olin car was a poor car, to start with”
“So I've heard,” Dallon remarked, with a straight face. His patron hurried on.
“It was a poor car at the start. It infringed certain patents, which made a reconstruction of the engine necessary. We have fooled along with the thing for years and never got satisfactory results. We have had trouble with our labor, and difficulty in getting the proper grades of steel and other material. All this while the car has suffered in reputation until it is now on the ragged edge of being a failure, although it has made a lot of money for us.”
Dallon thought of the growing custom of calling the car the “All-in” car. He wished that his father could listen in on Banniston's lamentation.
“Well, Walter, I'm going to pull out of the Olin company and make a new beginning. This is strictly under your hat. I have my hands on a new engine operating on an entirely new principle in mechanics. I have spent a couple of hundred thousands toward perfecting it. In two years, maybe in a year, it will be ready to put on the market. In ten years it will send the Olin motor, the Dallon motor, and all the rest of them to the scrap heap. That's why I am willing to pocket my Olin losses and step out of that fiasco. I have a new thing that will go beyond anybody's craziest dreams, and I want you to come in and help me manufacture it.”
“It sounds good, and I certainly seem to be in luck,” Dallon replied. “But what do I contribute?”
“Your name.”
“You mean my father's name, I think.”
“I expected you to say that, and I honor you for saying it,” Banniston returned. “But let's put sentiment aside and be coldly practical. Since your father has publicly disowned you, you owe him nothing. Henceforth you've got to stand on your own feet and make your own way, and your first obligation is to yourself. Isn't that so?”
“I suppose it is.”
“Your name is your own, and nobody will depute your right to use it for all it is worth. You are lucky, of course, in inheriting it, just as another man would be lucky in coming into a vast property. But you have as much right to capitalize your luck as the other chap. You will show less common sense than I give you credit for having if you don't.”
“This is a pretty heavy proposition, Mr. Banniston. I'll have to think it over.”
“Take all the time you want, my boy, so long as you bear these two points in mind: First, you are lending your name to a legitimate and useful enterprise; and, second, if our invention makes good, you will keep the name of Dallon brightly shining in the world long after your father's gasoline cars have gone the way of the old high-wheel bicycle and the stagecoach. I rather think your father will be proud to own you yet. I rather think so, indeed.”
Mr. Banniston breathed hard in his zeal for the unjustly treated son of old Bill Dallon.
“Just how will you use my name?” the young man inquired. “You can't call the new company the Dallon Motor Car Company.”
“We'll call it Dallon Motors, or the Dallon-Detroit Corporation, or any one of a thousand names I can think of. Your father may howl, but that's all the good it will do him. Your name is Dallon, isn't it?”
“What about the new engine we are going to make? Who invented it? What's the principle?”
“Come and see me to-morrow, Walter, my boy. When you have made your decision, then I'll tell you more. Perhaps we shall have the model here to look at together, and maybe we will talk salaries and such minor details.”
“Thanks very much. Let me ask you one question more. Suppose this new motor is all that you believe it is. What will it do to the present order in the automobile industry?”
“The gasoline car,” Banniston replied impressively, “will have to go where the horse car went. The survival of the fittest, my boy, the survival of the fittest.”
Still Dallon lingered. “There is an inventor in town named Bray. Is it his motor you have in mind?”
“Bray, you say? Bray? Never heard of him.”
From the sidewalk Dallon looked back through the plate glass. In the middle of the outer office stood Bernard Banniston, scratching his nose in profound and puzzled thought.
Of a sudden the great man wheeled about and ran to the door.
“Walter!”
But his recent visitor did not look back.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Option.
So self-deluded was Banniston as to believe that his preposterous suggestion would find a ready listener in the outcast son of William Dallon. As to the large-thinking speculator's real intention—whether the proposed new Dallon corporation was to engage in honest business or was to perpetuate a swindle on the innocent public—the young man had yet to learn.
Dallon admitted that his own motives in going to see Banniston that morning and in calling at Felix Bray's house three times that afternoon were complex and not at all clear.
It is characteristic of our easy-going hero that he blamed no one but himself for his fall from his father's good graces. But the snubbing he had received from the Bannistons, father, daughter, and son, followed so soon by the insult of Banniston's outrageous proposal, may have stung him into a desire for retaliation. Stronger still was his desire to avenge his father for Banniston's boast of having rescued William Dallon's son from the gutter.
Then, too, he may have been impelled somewhat by curiosity regarding the fitful and evasive Felix Bray, as well as by the memory of a certain altruistic remark made by a brown-eyed girl at Bloomfield Hills.
Thrice that day Dallon knocked at Felix Bray's door without response. After nightfall he went for a fourth try, but deferred his errand long enough to hunt up Jim Laird. He found that rising young attorney installing a new scout master over a troop of khaki-clad boys in the basement of the John R. Street Baptist Church.
“You've come to enlist. Bully for you!” said Jim Laird. “It's the grandest work in the Hey! Schmittel, cut that out!”
The concluding half of his remark was addressed to a scout who had turned a bench over on top of three of his comrades.
“I want you to draw up a legal paper for me,” Dallon explained. “'For blank dollars, cash in hand, I, Blank Blank, do hereby contract, and so forth, not to sell any share or shares in my invention hereinafter described, unless to Walter Dallon, Esquire, and this agreement is to hold good for blank days from date, so help me Moses.' Something like that—and make it air-tight.”
Said Laird: “I guess I know what you mean by your illegal phraseology. You want an option.”
On a sheet of church stationery he wrote out the form desired, which, he declared, would be upheld as binding by all the courts between Detroit and Washington. Then Dallon drove across town toward Navin Field and the dingy neighborhood where Felix Bray dwelt.
Half a square from Bray's house he left his car and proceeded on foot, considering this precaution justified by Bray's well-known fear of people who could afford to ride in automobiles.
The air was cold, the hour nine; the street was silent. When within a few paces of the inventor's house he saw the door open and a thin stream of light shine out upon the steps. In the doorway stood two figures, one little and bent, the other large and burly.
“Barney Banniston!” thought Dallon, and looked up the street and down. His own car was the only one in sight. Banniston, then, had come to the house on foot, which was an action out of keeping with his luxurious habits.
While the pair stood talking at the door he walked past, looking round only when he heard the door close. He saw Banniston making heavy and rapid headway toward the nearest trolley line. When the coast was cleared he went back to the house and knocked.
Perhaps Felix Bray thought it was his first caller returning, for he opened the door readily. Before he could close it the second caller was inside and striving in the narrow and half-lighted hall to quiet his sudden noisy burst of anger.
“Get out of here! Get out of my house!” screamed the frowsy little inventor, alternately shaking his fists in Dallon's face and snatching for the doorknob. But Dallon planted his back against the door and stayed.
“You're that spy again,” said Bray.
The resolutely friendly caller handed over a card from his pocketbook. Bray held it up to the light of a gas jet in the room just off the hall, squinted at it with watery eyes, then stared at its owner.
“You're Bill Dallon's son!”
“I am. That is to say, I was. Yesterday you called me a reprobate, but that's all right. Yesterday you tried to see my father and were put out of the factory, so it's natural that you don't love the Dallons. Do you know that I was put out at almost the same moment? We came out together. That ought to make us friends, don't you think?”
From somewhere in the darkness at the top of the hall stairs a querulous voice called:
“What's the trouble down there?”
“It's all right, Hennessy. Go on back to bed,” Bray answered. With a fretful gesture he beckoned Dallon to enter the room, explaining, as he closed the hall door: “That's my lodger. He works hard and needs his rest. We better do our talking in here.” There was a new note, a note of gentleness, in his words.
The room was in character with its unkempt occupant. An unmade bed occupied a corner. A table with a spotted cloth and many dirty dishes stood in the middle of a carpetless floor that was littered with clothing, shoes, saucepans, and books. There were two chairs, only one of which had a back.
“I take back what I called you yesterday,” said Bray, twisting the card in shaking fingers. His voice had become peppery again. “But I still call you a spy. You came here for your father.”
Dallon helped himself to the chair without a back. “You may as well sit down, Mr. Bray, because we are going to talk this thing out before I go.”
Bray slid warily into the other chair and looked on in resentful wonder while Dallon filled his pipe.
“Will you smoke a cigar, Mr. Bray?”
“I don't smoke.”
“Then I'll not, either,” and the visitor returned his pipe to his pocket. “Now, Mr. Bray, you have something to sell, haven't you? Yet when a possible customer comes along, you call him a spy and try to mash the gizzard out of him in the door. Is it any wonder you never find a market?”
“I don't trust the sons of motor-car makers,” Bray snarled.
“That's right; they're a bad lot,” Dallon agreed. “Luckily for me, your description doesn't apply in my case. I've had the grand bounce from my father. I'm out of the Dallon company and as much alone in the world as you are. You'll find it all in the Leader-Ledger of night before last. So you can safely trust me, Mr. Bray, as far as you like.”
“I've read about you,” Bray conceded.
“But I don't ask you to take my word for anything. They say money talks. Will you listen to money?”
“Let's hear some of it,” Bray suggested.
Dallon's pocketbook came out.
“How much of an interest in your motor are you willing to sell for twenty thousand dollars?”
“Forty-nine shares out of a hundred,” the inventor answered promptly.
“Make it fifty-one.”
“Do you take me for a sucker?”
“Will you sell me forty-nine shares within sixty days?”
“Not till I know you better,” said Bray.
“Will you sell me an option on those shares for that length of time and agree to hang on to the others yourself while we get acquainted and I figure out a plan for going ahead?”
“I won't give an option for sixty days,” Bray answered. “I might for thirty. How much will you pay?”
“How much do you want?”
Bray considered. Dallon could see that he was painfully excited, though struggling to appear indifferent.
“Would you pay a hundred dollars?” The question came faintly.
“You see,” said Dallon, “you are a poor business man, though you may be a great inventor. You need a side partner with nerve, like me. I was ready to offer you five hundred.”
Bray's jaw dropped.
“But I'll split the difference with you and say three hundred,” the young business man added. “Will you take it?”
“And maybe then you will put up the twenty thousand, and we can manufacture a road car?”
“You'll have to show me first, Mr. Bray. If the engine works, I'll come across. If there's any promise in it, I shall know where to raise more money still. What do you say?”
Now occurred a strange thing. Bray bent forward from his chair and fell with head and arms upon the table. Dallon thought of a paralytic stroke and sprang to the man's side, to discover that Bray was sobbing heartbrokenly.
“Brace up, man, brace up,” he said, resting a hand on the old fellow's heaving shoulder.
When Bray looked up at last, his face was still twitching, but the wildness had gone out of his eyes.
“Maybe you're only stringing me, like the others.”
“Does this look like it?” Dallon tossed down upon the table three new treasury notes.
Bray took them up, looked at them, studied the letter C that constituted the chief theme in their decoration.
“My Lord! how bad I need 'em!” he cried. “And that bloated bamboozler that just went out of here”—he shook his fist toward the street—“he was for letting me stay broke and sick and hungry till he had the machine locked up in his safe! Not even a five-dollar bill when I asked him for it, though he said he was buying because he was sorry for me.”
“Who is this liberal person you mention?”
“Barney Banniston. He was here to-night just before you. You must have passed him. He came and made me his offer again. He said it was the last time. I says to him if I could go on working odd hours in the machine shops for money to keep soul and body together, I'd tell him to get out. But I'm sick, Mr. Dalian. My hands won't hold the tools any more. I'm at the place where I've got to have help or—or maybe die.”
Dallon dropped another bill on the table. Bray brushed it aside.
“I told him I would let him have my final answer at his office to-morrow afternoon. He knew it meant surrender. But when I said I could use five dollars to-night he gave me the laugh. He said I would go somewhere and jag up and get my nerve back, and then the deal would be off. 'I guess you'll live till to-morrow at three o'clock,' he says. 'After that you can go to Battle Creek and stop at the swellest hotel and fill up on breakfast food,' he says, 'and take various fancy kinds of baths and own the world. I strongly recommend the baths,' he says. 'Half a dozen or so will do you a heap of good.' Drat him! He thought I didn't know what he meant.”
“Then no money passed between you?”
“Not a nickel.”
“All you did was promise to give him your final answer to-morrow?”
“That's all.”
“Will you sign this?” asked Dallon, and laid down the option form Laird had written.
“What has the John R. Street Baptist Church got to do with it?” Bray demanded.
“It makes the document more solemn.”
With his pocket pen Dallon began to fill in the blank spaces.
“If you want sixty days” Bray hinted.
“Sixty days it is. I'm new in business, remember. To organize our company may take longer than I think. Now for a description of the motor.”
There they struck the snag that had wrecked Bray's prospects times without number in his pathetic career. His jealousy and suspicion returned in full force.
“I'll be telling you my secret for three hundred dollars,” he objected.
Men like Peter Shelby and William Dallon would have abandoned the deal instantly. But Walter said: “Never mind. Just give me the patent numbers.”
It was as Peter Shelby had found out in Washington four years before. Felix Bray had never taken out patents.
“Without them you are left at the mercy of any common thief. You certainly need a business manager,” said Dallon, and was content to describe the invention as “The Bray Hydromotor, the sole model of which is now in the possession of Felix Bray.”
Word by word, then, they read the agreement through, and Bray wrote his signature. “We ought to have a witness,” Dallon suggested. The inventor stepped into the hall and lifted his voice. “Hennessy! Come down a minute.”
Down the stairs came a tottery old man, barefoot and wearing only a pair of shabby trousers and a red flannel undershirt. Having blinked at the light and made his mark on the paper, he went back upstairs.
“I doubt if he's awake,” Dallon remarked.
“He works pretty hard,” said Bray. “He works at the roundhouse. If it wasn't for him and what he pays me for his room I'd 'a' give up long ago.”
“You look as if you needed sleep yourself,” said Dallon, “so I won't keep you any longer. When do you want me to see the motor?”
Felix Bray's face darkened with the old caution.
“There's no hurry,” the other hastened to add. “Wait till we get better acquainted, eh? To-morrow, if it's a pleasant day and you feel able, I'll take you for a buzz to Ann Arbor and back. Eighty miles of fresh air will do you more good than medicine.”
When he had passed the rickety gate, Bray called him back. In the open doorway they stood, as Bray and Banniston had stood an hour earlier.
“I think you mean to be honest with me, young feller; and so I've got to be honest with you. To-night, before you came, when Banniston was here, he—he made me show him the secret. He knows what makes the motor go. I think I ought to tell you.”
The young man on the doorstep was quick to sense that the little old inventor held some disclosure still in reserve. And it was so.
“Listen,” Bray went on, putting his face close to Dallon's and speaking in a husky whisper. “He made me show him the secret. He knows what makes the motor go. But what he knows won't do him no good while I've got the model. We will fool him, you and me. Yes!”
“Then see that you take good care of the model,” Dallon replied, and went away smiling. To him the evening had been only an adventure in comedy. If he had succeeded in accomplishing any annoyance to Bernard Banniston he would feel well rewarded for his outlay.
From the Stuller that night he mailed the option agreement to Marion Shelby at Bloomfield Hills as a present to that young woman and a token of his respect for her altruism.
CHAPTER XIV.
A Golden Dream.
Never had Detroit looked more golden to Bernard Banniston than it seemed next morning. Golden sunlight flooded the streets, especially those thronged with thousands of city toilers, most of whom bore signs of having accounts at the savings banks. Golden rays glinted from the windows of the towering skyscrapers. There was a golden gleam even in Mr. Banniston's eyes as he arrived at his office half an hour ahead of his usual time.
To his office girl he gave three rapid commands. “If young Walter Dallon comes in, say to him that I have gone to Chicago. Get busy on the phone and find my son Harry, and tell him I want to see him. Kales will be here in a minute. Pass him in.”
Scarcely had he closed himself in his sanctum when a thin and hungry-looking person in shiny black, with a thin and oily black mustache under his beaklike nose, entered from the street.
“He is waiting for you, Mr. Kales,” she said, and felt glad when the crow's gaze removed itself from her fresh morning cheeks.
By the time Mr. Kales came out of the inner office, Harry Banniston had arrived, bilious in complexion as ever, and ill at ease in manner.
“Here is where you get yours, Mr. Sport,” thought the office girl, as Harry braved his father's presence.
But the sounds that came out to her ears in the succeeding half hour were not those of paternal reproof. They were sounds of jubilation, in which Mr. Banniston's voice carried the air.
Now, since the best of office girls are only human, and since Mr. Banniston's rosy-cheeked secretary had to look up several addresses in a filing cabinet that stood convenient to Mr. Banniston's door, it was only natural that she should overhear a fragment or two of the excited conversation going on behind that door.
“Water for motor power! My gosh! Harry, think of it!”
“And you never knew till last night?”
“I never dreamed of such a thing. I always thought he was a faker. We can understand now why he is so cagy. He has to be. The thing's so simple, the very first hint would set other people to working along the same line. I could almost build a hydromotor of my own after what I saw last night.”
“Water for motor power sounds like a pipe,” Harry observed. “Burn water? It can't be done. Why, look here, governor, water is only burned hydrogen. You might as well talk of burning cinders.”
“Don't be so educated,” his sire came back. “What's the matter with extracting the hydrogen out of the water and burning it over again as fuel in your engine cylinders, the same as you burn gasoline vapor?”
“Is that what Bray does?”
“Nothing less.”
“My grief!” cried the Fatted Calf. “Think of all the fuel flowing past Detroit!”
“Think of the rivers, the lakes, the oceans of it—an explosion in every drop! And the Banniston Hydromotor Corporation holding exclusive patents on the only motor in the world that can use it! Think of the Standard Oil Company on its knees, and Amalgamated Motors on its face in the dust, and the little independents like Peter Shelby and Bill Dallon begging for mercy!”
Judging from the sounds that came out to the office girl, Mr. Banniston was romping the floor in his exultation.
“So you have changed the name of your company since yesterday,” said Harry. “It isn't Dallon Motors any more. Where does Wally come in?”
“He goes out before he comes in. To hell with him!”
“But you promised him a job.”
“Did I? Rot! I shall tell him that I made him my proposition yesterday to test his honesty, and he fell for it and, therefore, I am through with him. Or why can't you go to him as his friend and warn him not to come around here any more? Tip him off that there never was any such invention as I described to him. Jump on him, talk to him like a Dutch uncle, and ask him why in the name of common sense he was such an easy mark.”
“It's a wise son that knows his own father,” Harry quoted. “Do you think I'm going to walk into a beating that belongs to you? Tell him yourself.”
Again when the office girl consulted the filing cabinet she heard further exchange of thought on the other side of the mahogany partition.
“But the motor isn't yours yet, governor.”
“It will be, after three o'clock.”
“He can change his mind between now and then. He may find a better offer. He can get cold feet and disappear. Is it good business to leave him loose all this while?”
“It is the best kind of good business,” Banniston, senior, answered. “It is pure psychology. By the middle of this afternoon he will be glad to come down to twenty-five hundred. I've got him where I want him. I had his house watched last night from midnight on, and Kales has his eagle eye glued to it now. Bray was sick last night, so he won't swim far. If I pull in the line too fast I'll lose my fish. I gave him too hard a yank last time, not knowing what a goldfish he was, and it set me back six months.”
All of these speeches and others of like nature the office girl jotted down at leisure moments through the day. Her notes are now in the possession of a person not unconnected with the United States government, who was then in Detroit investigating certain schemes to defraud distant investors by mail.
It came to her attention also that twice in the day the crowlike person named Kales reported to Mr. Banniston by telephone, saying that Bray was at home and keeping indoors.
About two o'clock in the afternoon another message arrived. She took it herself, her employer having gone out to lunch, and delivered it to him when he returned. Bray had received a caller, a young man driving a Dallon roadster. But the young man had departed alone in his car within a minute.
Banniston pondered the message and thoughtfully observed the time of day. “Ring for a taxi,” he commanded.
“One moment, sir. Here's Mr. Kales again,” said the girl.
Her master took the instrument.
“The guy in the roadster has come back,” announced Kales. “He's in the house now. It's Bill Dallon's son. He's got a doctor-looking guy with him.”
Mr. Banniston dropped the receiver and rushed into the street, where the office girl saw him commandeer a passing taxicab.
Within the hour he returned, looking dark and ominous.
“Has a little old runt named Bray come in since I left?”
“No, sir.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
Banniston snapped his watch with an alarming pop and walked to the plate-glass window, through which he regarded Griswold Street scowlingly. Somehow the street had lost its golden tinge since morning.
CHAPTER XV.
Base Ingratitude.
A challenge from the daughter of a man like Peter Shelby to a round of golf at Bloomfield Hills is not one to be ignored. Such a challenge had reached young Dallon in the morning mail. But he excused himself by telephone and went to keep his promise to Felix Bray.
“He's sick,” was Hennessy's greeting.
The scanty sunlight that penetrated the dust on the front-room windowpanes showed the bed still unmade and the table and the floor still littered with the odds and ends of an untidy bachelor's housekeeping. In the chair with the back sat Felix Bray, partly dressed, his looks bearing out Hennessy's brief statement.
“Hello, partner; where do you feel bad?” spoke the newcomer breezily.
“Here,” Bray replied, lifting his left hand feebly to his side. “And I keel over when I try to stand up.”
“He is better than he was this morning,” Hennessy volunteered. “I stayed home from the roundhouse to look after him.”
“And that's why I'm better,” said Bray gratefully.
“Has he had a doctor?”
“I tell him he ought to have one. But he won't. He's all for doctoring himself with stuff he buys at the drug store.”
“Well,” said Dallon, “I'll go and fetch somebody to look him over. I'll be back, Hennessy, before you can get that bed made.”
He was, in fact, and Hennessy stood holding a bed quilt while the physician examined the patient and listened to his heart.
“You've got a knock in there, my friend,” the doctor told Bray, putting away the stethescope. “You're in bad shape generally. Worst of all, you're undernourished. What do you eat?”
“All I need,” said Bray.
“'Tis a dom lie,” spoke Hennessy. “He don't eat but once a day, and then he makes out on what was left from the day before.”
In the hall the doctor gave his judgment to Dallon.
“Angina pectoris or intercostal neuralgia. He can't do well in a hole like this.”
“Can he stand a trip in my car to Mount Clemens?” Dallon asked. “I know people in a sanitarium there. If he needs to be free from disturbance there are reasons why he ought to leave town.”
“If you drive carefully and get him there before another attack comes on, I don't think the ride will harm him.”
The sick man, when the proposal was laid before him, shook his head. “I should be leaving Hennessy alone,” said he.
“You do what the doctor tells ye,” cried Hennessy. “Don't worry about me. I ain't anybody to consider. Away with you!”
Bray drew his lodger near and whispered with him, then Hennessy went into the back room and brought out the battered leather suit case.
“He says if he can take his invintion along with him he will go.”
They made the patient comfortable among robes and coats in Dallon's roadster, and they buttoned on the side curtains to keep the wind out. At the first corner away from the house Dallon uttered an exclamation as a taxicab tore past.
Through the glass of the cab he had recognized its passenger. Bray had not seen. If the passenger had been Beelzebub himself, the worn-out inventor was too ill to have cared.
On the smooth Shore Drive in Grosse Point Dallon slowed speed to send a long look toward Dallondale. He fancied he could see his mother at her favorite window.
A run of half an hour, with the frozen lake always at their right, brought them into the quaint and quiet town of Mount Clemens and up to the entrance of an imposing-looking and old-fashioned sanitarium in the midst of a private park.
Sanitarium executives are of two kinds; those who look at the patient in cold calculation, figuring where they can operate upon him or upon his pocketbook, or upon both; and those who greet him with a warm and reassuring smile, as one who has come to be a guest at a house party.
Doctor Fuller belonged in the second class. Between him and Dallon there had been a strong mutual regard since a day, before the war, when they upset from the same canoe in an icy Canadian river.
After ten minutes of Doctor Fuller's cheery talk there was no mistrust or hesitation left in Bray. To this good effect a remark of Dallon's contributed. “My partner will rest easier in his mind,” said Dallon, “if he is allowed to keep his suit case under his bed.”
“We can arrange that,” replied Fuller.
Leaving the sick man in a comfortable private room, with good nursing promised, Dallon sped back toward the city down Gratiot Avenue to execute a last commission for his protégé.
“Tell Hennessy I'm all right,” Felix Bray had said.
In front of Bray's house, as Dallon drove up in the twilight of the winter day, stood another car—a car too princely for that plebeian neighborhood. Dallon knew its owner even before he saw the double B on the door panel.
Hennessy, looking frightened, admitted him. From the room off the little hall the big bluff cause of Hennessy's fright glowered at the newcomer.
“So, Walter,” said Bernard Banniston severely, “you're a double-crosser, are you? I might have known it.”
“A what?” replied Dallon.
“I guess you understand. Where have you taken Bray?”
“What do you mean—a double-crosser? Let's clear up that point first.”
“This Irishman tells me that you came here last night and bought an invention of Bray's. Is that so?”
“In a way, yes; I bought a sixty-day option on his hydromotor. What's the harm? I still fail to see where I have double-crossed anybody, much less you, sir. You told me only yesterday morning that you never had heard of Bray. Perhaps you'll explain.”
“Didn't you know I was dickering for the machine?”
“I heard that you had made Bray an offer for it. But he seems to have liked my offer better.”
“You knew I was after it, yet you played the sneak. If that's the way you treat the only friend you've got in the world, I'm glad I've found you out in time.”
“But, listen, Mr. Banniston,” said Dallon innocently. “If this invention is the wonderful new motor that you and I are going to manufacture together, we still have it, haven't we? And if it isn't, why, then, you are not out anything. In fact, you're in five thousand dollars. You told Bray it was no good, he says. You told him it was a mere toy.”
“So it is—a toy, a curiosity for a museum, that's all. You thought I was buying it as a speculation. You saw a chance, you thought, to corner it and charge me your own price for it. Well, you're a deluded ass. I've had enough of you. I'm through. When you were down and out and the whole town was against you, I gave you a chance to come back, and you couldn't stay straight long enough to take it. Your own people knew you better than I did. I was a fool to try to be kind to you. I'm never a fool twice in the same place.”
With all his rapid thinking, Mr. Banniston could not help being a bit incoherent. Breathing hard through his bulbous nose and glaring at the object of his scorn, he strode to the door, while the tottery old lodger ducked out of his path in the manner of a hapless pedestrian crossing a busy street in the rush hour.
“You're stung, young man—stung! I shall watch with great interest to see you get rich out of your—your plaything.”
“It was only for a plaything that I put my money into it,” said Dallon. “I'm having a fine time with it so far. Shall I tell you why I bought the option?”
“Why?”
“The other day I went to you expecting a little help and advice, thinking you were my friend. You wiped your feet on me. Well, all right; I have no hard feelings about that. But before the day was over you were bragging around town that Bill Dallon's son had come crawling to you for a job.”
Barney Banniston forgot, in his surprise, to look angry.
“It was a piece of pure luck that gave me a line on your standing offer to Bray,” continued Bill Dallon's son. “I think you wanted Bray's motor. I think it is the invention you had in mind when you sent for me to have another talk. Why you wanted it I can't understand, if it is no good, as you say—unless you had a scheme to use it in swindling a lot of poor suckers out of their money, at the same time using my name, or, rather, my father's name, to make your game look respectable.”
The big man's face went as red as a Jacqueminot rose—which it resembled in no other particular.
“I guess Bill Dallon is square with you now, Mr. Banniston, though he doesn't know it.”
“You—you—I won't talk to you!” the financier spluttered. The street door closed with a bang. From outside came the whir of a starter and the clank of gear shifting. Hennessy gaped at the young man in wonder.
“I had a message for you, Mr. Hennessy. Your friend sends word that he is in good hands and you are not to worry about him. I will drop around every day or so and find out how you're coming along; and when Bray is better, you are to run up to Mount Clemens with me and see him.”
“'Tis a kind heart you have, young gintleman,” the grateful Hennessy responded. “Now, listen while I tell you something for your own good. Don't be believing what that noisy, big man says about the motor. A hundred times I've seen it work—and Bray, the poor divil, a-scared to show it to anybody else. Don't ever believe it's any silly toy, Mr. Dallon.”
The new partner in the ownership of the silly toy winked solemnly, whereat Hennessy became suddenly filled with an old man's petulance.
“Believe anything you like, then,” said he, “and don't blame me for your state of ign'rance.”
He was still feeling grieved when the unbeliever drove away.
CHAPTER XVI.
The Slander.
Within a few days a rumor went abroad throughout Detroit, spreading with the vivacity of quicksilver spilled on a polished hardwood floor. In comparison with it the dispatch from New York exposing the wickedness of Walter Dallon and the ire of William Dallon shrank to the insignificance of a police item.
How the rumor started would be hard to say. Paul Shelby, brother of Marion, heard it first in the athletic club from Higby Cass, heir apparent to vast soda interests.
“Blake Richardson told me he heard Harry Banniston say it to a crowd in the billiard room,” Cass reported. “Blake warned him it was libel. We thought you ought to know, you having a sort of family interest in Dallon.”
“Thanks for the tip,” replied Paul Shelby.
“By the way, when you see Dallon, ask him to hunt me up, will you? Tell him I've been looking for him all week.”
“I will,” Shelby replied, understanding what Cass meant. Cass had jobs at his disposal in the big soda plant down the river.
Failing to discover Dallon's libeler at the club, Shelby phoned the Banniston home and got him there.
“What's this tale you're circulating about, Wally Dallon?” he demanded.
“Me circulating it?” the Fatted Calf answered. “My dear fellow, it's all over town.”
“Is it fair to repeat it behind his back?”
“I spoke only to friends of his as a friend of his,” Harry retorted. “What I said was that if the story is a lie, Wally ought to come out and face it down. But where is he? Do you know?”
“No, I don't.”
“Nobody does,” said Harry. “My private opinion is that he has skipped out. I've hunted for him high and low.”
Paul Shelby was reminded of the traveler who said: “Egypt is full of fleas. I've been there.” To be hunted high and low by Harry Banniston might account for any man's disappearance.
When Paul tried to tell the rumor to his father at Bloomfield Hills that evening he learned that Peter Shelby had already heard it in the city from numerous informants.
“Of course it's a lie,” young Shelby declared. “Why, he gave the option to Marion as a present. I'd like to have a talk with him about it. But where to reach him?”
“Marion will know,” said Peter Shelby, and called to his daughter.
She came into the den where her father and her brother were defending her young man's good name.
“You haven't played my nocturne for me to-night,” said Peter Shelby. Paul drew her to him with a brotherly hand.
“What's the matter, sister? Why so solemncholy?”
“I've been eavesdropping on you,” she answered. “Besides, I met Molly Harris at the Westbrooks to-day, and she told me just what you've been saying. And I don't know where to reach Walter. He was staying at the Stuller, in Room Three-thirteen, under a stage name. But when I called his room on the phone just now I got a perfectly strange man who sounded like a drummer for a sausage factory.”
“Why the stage name?” asked her father.
“So people wouldn't stare at him.”
“He had better stick to it,” Mr. Shelby averred. “With this new story out on him, the sightseers will follow him around in mobs.”
Paul inquired, “Who was it that told you about him at the Westbrooks'?”
“Molly Harris.”
“Is Molly a friend of the Bannistons'?”
“Indeed she is not. But she is a friend of Kate Herndie's, and Kate is a friend of Olga Slane's, and Olga Slane and Hazel Banniston are thicker than thieves.”
A maid appeared at the door. Would Miss Marion talk with Mr. Walter Dallon on the telephone?
“Will I!” Miss Marion left the cigar smoke whirling. Her laughter came back to the den from the telephone in the library. When she returned she was beaming.
“Walter has a job,” she announced. “He makes six dollars a day and wears overalls. He has been at it three days, and has only one thumb and three fingers in good condition and is proud of his wounds He says the foreman praised him twice to-day in rapid succession.”
“Two people can live on six dollars a day, all right,” her brother assured her. “But there won't be much left over for altruism.”
“What is he doing, and where is he doing it?” her father queried.
“He is operating an electric screw driver,” Marion boasted. “He won't say where.”
“Have you taken him on at the plant, dad?” asked Paul. Mr. Shelby shook his head.
“We are to guard his secret,” said the happy young woman. “He is afraid if it gets to his foreman's ears that he is a sporting character, the foreman will fire him. The foreman has lent him a copy of the Christian Herald to read and invited him to church next Sunday.”
“Then he isn't in the Midlakes plant. My foremen all read the Christian Advocate,” Peter Shelby chuckled. “Did he mention the new talk that's going the rounds about him?”
“No. I'm sure he hasn't heard it.”
“Let's hope he won't hear it while his hands are in bad shape,” said Shelby, junior. “A man needs two sound fists to answer a rumor like that.”
The new slander found its way into the acres of shops where the Dallon cars were manufactured. Workmen who had grown gray in the service of Bill Dallon spat in disgust when they heard it. Among them was Dave Cumnock, foreman of the engine-assembling department. In a lull in the day's work Mr. Cumnock expressed his opinion to a group of older men.
“If it is the truth, then it is an offense to every man of us that has worked alongside William Dallon to build up the good repute of the Dallon name. But maybe it isn't true. I shouldna go repeating it and adding to the old man's burden.”
A young man in overalls, lingering near the group—a new hand on the electric screw driver—overheard the discussion and wondered what it was all about.
In at least one other place the rumor was discounted. In the smoky roundhouse of the Wabash Railroad it found a challenger in the person of a tottery old wiper of engines, who called upon the saints to witness that it was a lie. Hennessy spoke from first-hand knowledge; but nobody interviews roundhouse helpers regarding the high-financial sins of the sons of automobile manufacturers.
In some quarters the rumor found a better reception. The respectable newspapers let it alone, but the virtuous Evening Leader-Ledger took it as the text for an editorial broadside against the selfishness of spoiled young men—mentioning no names, be sure, but making the identity of the spoiled young man in question clear enough to most readers residing between Hamtramck Township and River Rouge. “Shame on him!” said the righteous editors.
William Dallon missed hearing the juicy story in the city, thanks to the considerateness of his friends. But at home he read the editorial and guessed what was meant; and after he had burned the green newspaper in the fireplace he called up his secretary.
“Wickersham, what the dickens is the Evening Verdegris driving at in their 'Spare the Rod' editorial? I suppose they mean my son. But what is behind it all?”
The secretary had not held his place in his employer's confidence by side-stepping when unpleasant truth had to be told. Your soft-soaper only greases the skids by which he will sooner or later be shot into outer darkness.
This, briefly, was the tale that William Dallon heard: His son, having been sacked, and desiring to be revenged, had somehow secured control of a fake motor which the half-witted Felix Bray had peddled around town for years. With this his sole asset, he had approached bankers in Griswold Street, proposing to organize a stock company that should bear the Dallon name and trade upon the Dallon reputation. The stock was to be sold to widows and orphans in distant parts. Only the sterling honesty of the bankers approached by him had prevented him from launching his infamous plot. Becoming alarmed at last by certain things that were said to him, the young man had left town. Bray also had disappeared.
William Dallon rose from the telephone and went seeking his helpmeet. He found her in her favorite rocking-chair, between her sewing stand and a basket of mending.
“When did you hear from Walter last?” he asked.
“This evening. Why, William?”
“Where is he?”
“You are the fifth person to ask me that question to-day,” said Mrs. Dallon. “First it was Mrs. Banniston. She paid me a lovely call this morning and was very solicitous about him. She said her husband had a fine position for Walter if they could find him. Then Marion Shelby phoned, and afterward her brother Paul, and they both wanted to know where he was. And all afternoon Walter's friend, Doctor Fuller, has been calling up from Mount Clemens.”
“What does Fuller want of him?”
Mrs. Dallon's eyes sparkled with motherly pride and triumph.
“It seems that our boy has been playing the good Samaritan,” she made answer. “He has been taking care of a poor old sick man he ran across—a man named Bray. He found him in need and took him to Doctor Fuller's sanitarium, and now”
“Say that name again,” William Dallon broke in.
“Bray—why, William, what's the matter?”
He had suddenly swung around on his heel and gone to the window, there to stare out into the night.
“What is it, William? Do you see something?”
One night, looking from that window, they had seen a lake vessel afire. This night it was something else that William Dallon saw, and the sight left him sick at heart.
CHAPTER XVII.
Father and Son.
On the day when “J. J. Doe” checked out at the Stuller and drove away with his hand luggage and his leather trunk, a young man with similar baggage registered at the Travelers, an old-fashioned and less important hotel near the University, writing himself down as “W. D. Allen.”
Within twenty-four hours he had established a routine of living. At seven in the morning he went away, returning after five in the evening. Upon his return he entered a telephone booth in the lobby and remained therein for ten minutes. After dinner he stayed in his room, his light burning late.
The only person in the hotel whose curiosity he aroused at first was the matronly chambermaid on his floor, who wondered at the row of new books on mechanical engineering that stood upon his dresser, also at the bottles of liniment that cluttered his washstand.
But one evening after his telephoning he left the hotel hurriedly and did not reappear until the silent hour of three in the morning. With him he brought a large and badly worn leather suit case that proved to be heavy when the night clerk took it across the desk, at his request, and deposited it in the hotel vault.
From the let-down in law and order that followed the World War, Detroit suffered in common with most cities. Holdups and burglaries were so numerous that newspapers spoke of the “crime wave” and scolded the police.
When W. D. Allen left the hotel next morning he was accompanied, without his knowledge, by a quiet-moving person who kept him in sight until he passed in at the workmen's gate at the Dallon factory.
Later in the day the quiet-moving person made his report in Farmer Street. W. D. Allen was employed in the engine-assembling department of the Dallon Motor Car Company. His reference, given to the company at the time of his employment, was James Laird, of Mathison, Wilkinson, Hurley, Kester & Laird, attorneys. When interviewed, Mr. Laird spoke in high praise of the young man under observation and guaranteed to the police that he was no burglar. The detective bureau was busy enough to be glad to take Jimmy Laird's word for it.
In this history we need make no mystery of the errand that kept “W. D. Allen” out so late on the night in question. His visit over the telephone with his mother that evening had brought him unexpected news.
“Doctor Fuller has called me three times to-day from Mount Clemens,” said Mrs. Dallon. “He wants me to tell you that a Mr. Bray, one of his patients, is dying.”
“Poor old Bray!” her son exclaimed, in quick regret. “I've neglected him. I'll run out there to-night.”
“Who is Mr. Bray, Walter?”
“Just a poverty-stricken old codger I've taken an interest in,” he answered.
After midnight he stood looking down with Doctor Fuller at the bed where Felix Bray lay dead. The old man seemed to sleep. The fear, the pain, the disappointment were gone from his face. His fight was done.
“I had no idea he was so near the end,” said Dallon, when the ordeal was over.
“There was no chance to save him,” the physician replied. “The best we could do was to 'make his last days as easy as we could. He has been under morphia most of the time since you left him here, and he has suffered, at that. It was only this morning that his mind cleared up and he asked for you. We tried to reach you and couldn't. He must have known that his time was short, for he insisted upon seeing you. At last he called for pen and paper and made a will.”
“I wish I had known how bad off he was,” said Dallon, awed by the quiet face on the pillow. “I've been so busy all week, I almost forgot him.”
“He thought a heap of you,” the physician replied, and placed a paper in Dallon's hands:
I, Felix Bray, being of sound mind, make this will. I give all my belongings to my next friend, Michael Hennessy, except only my motor known as the Bray Hydromotor. This invention and all rights to its use, with all plans, specifications, and models, I give to Walter Dallon, of Detroit, provided said Dallon will agree upon his word of honor to pay to Michael Hennessy the sum of twenty thousand dollars within six months of the time when the Hydromotor is proved to have a market value. And I appoint said Walter Dallon my sole executor without bond.
Three signatures followed, those of Bray, the doctor, and the nurse.
“Perhaps a lawyer could tear it apart,” said Fuller, “but I think it will hold. What shall be done with the property he brought here with him?”
The “property” consisted of the leather suit case, which had lain under the inventor's bed during his week in the sanitarium, and a package of papers in a pocket-worn envelope. Dallon undertook the custodianship and, when the doctor asked for directions regarding the burial, said: “Give the old chap a first-class send-off and send me the bill.” They agreed that the funeral should be held on the following Sunday.
With the suit case beside his feet, Dallon drove slowly back to the city through the night, taking the Shore Road in order that he might pass Dallondale. As the car rolled along the smooth and deserted highway he meditated upon the uncertainties of earthly fortune.
Within only a few years his father's position in life had been that which Felix Bray had just relinquished—the position of a man with a consuming idea in which other people found it hard to believe. In another environment, yes, even in Detroit, William Dallon might have led such a weary, hopeless, futile life as Bray's, if the luck of the game had not been kind to him.
“Poor chap,” thought the son of William Dallon.
He was thinking not of the old inventor whose death he had witnessed, but of his father. In his eyes, since his earliest recollection, his father had always been a man of affairs, established and successful. Bray had unwittingly given him a glimpse of a side of his father's life which he had never considered—a glimpse of a plucky American tackling the game against odds and alone.
The pale roof and the dark shadows of the Dallon palace loomed in his view under the winter stars. Late as the hour was, there was a light in his father's room. At the upper gate he checked the pace of the car and on the impulse of half a second he drove into the grounds. At a distance from the house he stepped the engine and blanketed the hood.
His latchkey was still on the ring. Softly he unlocked the great door and went in. His hand found the wall button and made the hall light. From the wall above the stair landing a life-size portrait of his father looked down at him, done by a famous artist imported from Boston especially for the task. The artist had made a noble-looking figure of the man in the picture; but then, thought Walter, he had a fine model.
He reached the head of the stairs and saw his father's door ajar. From the lighted room the rustle of a book page came to his ears. He knew what it meant. When burdened with cares and unable to sleep, William Dallon sat up and read.
Now another sound issued from the room.
“Come on in.”
It was his father's voice, raised the least degree above a conversational tone.
“Come on in. Why do you stand out there?”
For a moment the prowler wondered to whom his father might be speaking. Comprehending at last, he went in.
“Close the door,” said William Dallon, showing no surprise. Wrapped in a bath robe, he sat in an easy-chair under a reading light with the encyclopedia volume open on his knees. Over the top of his spectacles he conned the intruder coolly.
“I thought it was you,” said he. “I knew it was one of our cars, anyway. What do you want?”
“Seeing your windows limited as I passed,” replied the son, undaunted by the not very encouraging beginning, “I ran in.”
“What are you doing on the road at this time of night?”
There was a note in the question that brought a retort in kind.
“May I remind you that I don't answer to you for my conduct any more?”
“You left off doing that years ago,” retorted the father. “This is still my house, however. What are you doing in it?”
The young man had thought of sitting down with his sire in a homelike and familiar manner. He thought again and remained standing.
“I came in,” he said, “to tell you that I am sorry for the things that have happened—sorry, I mean, for being a killjoy in your life. I owe you better treatment. But you will only think I am trying to pull your leg, so I may as well save my breath. Good night to you.”
“Yesterday I might have been glad to hear you,” Mr. Dallon replied. “But to-night I have discovered things. I guess you are quite right about the leg-pulling. I guess that's the calling you were cut out for, Walter.”
He tried not to raise his voice; but sarcastic accusation cannot very well be uttered in a modulated undertone.
“I'd be glad to be put wise to what you're driving at,” Walter answered. “Whose leg am I pulling?”
“At first I didn't believe it of you,” said William Dallon. “Even if you were a fool, I gave you credit for being an honest one. And you have as good a right to the name of Dallon as I have. I don't deny that. But when you propose to exploit the business reputation of the Dallon Motor Car Company you're a common thief.”'
“Who says I propose such a thing? Dad, it's a black lie.”
Disregarding the son's savage earnestness, the father went on scornfully.
“I'm not worried over your pretty scheme. Understand that. In the first place, nobody will have the gall to go in with you,, and in the second place, I'll fight you off the earth if you try it. What I worry about is that a son of mine, bearing a name without a shadow of shame, should suggest such a low-down piece of I dont know a vile enough name to call it!”
“Will you listen to me tell you that I'm not guilty?”
“That's what I said about you—at first. When they hinted that you had bought a crazy machine from a loon named Bray and planned to bleed the public with it, I said it couldn't be true. But I discover to-night that you are actually in some kind of deal with Bray. Otherwise, why has Bray called this house by phone all day, trying to reach you? Why is he lying low at your expense in Mount Clemens? And why have you snaked away and hidden from the sight of your friends? I guess the story is straight goods, after all.”
“Who tells it?” Walter cried.
Well enough he knew that such a fabrication could have only one source. Why Banniston had put it out he could not imagine.
“I don't know who started it,” his father answered. “But it must be common talk, for Wickersham heard it and there's a piece about it in the paper to-night. Everybody knows it, apparently, yet you stand here and claim it's news to you.”
“I claim nothing of the sort.”
“Oh! then you know something about it, after all. Who set it going? Come on! Talk!”
“All I care to say is that it's a lie.”
“Who's the liar, then? Who is the banker who says you approached him?”
To confess unfilial conduct is an easy matter. To acknowledge miserable judgment in the choosing of one's friends is harder, especially when one's father's eyes have an expectant and tigerish “I-told-you-so” gleam in them.
“Is it a certain friend of yours who has me slated for the Old Folk's Home?”
Still the young man stood silent.
“Evidently his friendship for you ain't as strong as his devotion to truth and his passion for honest dealing. How about it?”
The son boiled over at last.
“Since you are so keen to believe the lie, you may go to—you may go on believing it and be—and be convinced!”
“Punch out the hall light as you leave,” said his father.
When the outer door had closed and the buzz of the motor died away, William Dallon put aside his encyclopedia and stood up.
In the cleared space in the middle of the room he went through a series of curious motions, while the cord of his bath robe twitched and wriggled on the rug behind him like a very lively serpent.
First he planted his left foot well in front of his right. Next he raised his left arm before his face and drew back the other arm, both fists clenched. Then he shot his right fist with terrific force at a point in the air and followed with his left, continuing with a furious burst of swings, jabs, upper cuts, and slaughterhouse wallops until he had beaten the point in air to an imaginary pulp and had no breath left, except enough to say:
“Take that, you big danged tarantula!”
Unseen by him, his wife observed these gymnastics from the door of her bedroom.
“William, man, what in the name of goodness!”
He faced her, looking sheepish.
“Sally,” said he, still puffing, “if you were a man and a father—and you'd been thinking your son was as crooked as a crank shaft—and you suddenly discovered that there was a chance—that he was as square as a die—I reckon you'd take a little exercise, too.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
The “Camel” Tank.
Felix Bray's funeral was in keeping with his life. Two mourners and two only followed the body from the sanitarium chapel to its next-to-fast resting place, the receiving vault of the wintry cemetery at the edge of Mount Clemens. Hat in hand, Hennessy saw the iron doors close. On the way back to the city in Dallon's car he spoke no word, but from his moving lips Dallon knew that he was praying that the soul of his friend might be at peace.
The Sunday afternoon crowds were flocking around the theaters as Bray's mourners drove through the heart of the city toward Hennessy's smoky neighborhood. In the car now was the leather suit case, reclaimed from the safe at the Travelers' Hotel.
Dallon had no interest this day in legacies and inventions. He was concerned with other matters—his latest clash with his father, the editorial in the newspaper, and a talk he had held on the telephone with Peter Shelby, who assured him in kindly candor that the world believed him to be going up and down Griswold Street with a perpetual-motion machine, seeking whom he might devour. He had resolved to go to the Bannistons for an accounting. Why had they circulated the outrageous story? Was it meant to be a back-fire to protect them against things he might tell on Barney B., or was it a piece of sheer spite? For the life of him he could not see why his double-hearted friends had spread the libel or what they had gained by it.
But a trust had been placed in his hands—a trust for Hennessy. That business, he reflected, would have to come before the pleasure of bearding liars.
In the work room of the little house they opened the suit case. Dallon's sensation in the next few moments was that of the come-on who examines the parcel left in his care by the confiding stranger and finds it to contain a gilded paving brick. For Bray's suit case held little except a queer-shaped brass tank.
The body of the tank was oval in cross-section, and filled the leather case from end to end. What gave the object its odd look was a pair of domelike protuberances that grew out of its upper surface, one near either end, leaving room in the case only for a small cardboard box that lay between them.
Dallon thumped the tank and got back a dull, dead sound, not the brassy ring he expected. He looked at the two bulging domes.
“We call this the 'camel' tank for short,” said Hennessy, “on account of the humps.”
“But a tank is all it is. Where's the motor?”
Hennessy stepped to a cupboard and opened the doors, and Dallon saw the diminutive model that Peter Shelby had described to him—the model that had stood in sight on the table at Bray's “demonstration” four years before. At first glance it resembled an ordinary four-cylinder internal-explosion engine.
“He made it himself, every part but the plugs,” Hennessy declared.
The spark plugs were of a common commercial kind and looked uncouth and overgrown in the heads of the four little cylinders. Dallon observed also that the carburetor was something new in its line.
“But wait,” spoke Hennessy, “wait till you see what makes this engine go. Did you ever hear of a gas engine that ran on water, like a pro-hy-bitionist?”
He set the camel tank in a rack on the floor so that it was held firmly in place, its domes pointing upward. From corners of the room he brought two steel spheres, bigger than basket balls, two small electric air pumps, and odd lengths of steel tubing with neat brass connecting joints at the ends. Then with hands that worked slowly but assuredly he began the process of assembling this miscellany.
“You seem to understand it,” Dallon remarked, his interest quickened by the confident air of the old Irishman.
“Don't I tell you I've seen him run it a hundred times?” Hennessy replied. “I know all about it except one thing, and that is what makes it go. Be dommed if I could ever see that.”
The air pumps, it seemed, fitted into holes in the tops of the domes, and were to be connected by means of steel tubes with the steel spheres.
“I will go no further in that direction now,” said Hennessy. “But I can tell you that there is nothing more to do but to join up these here round tanks with this here dooflicker at the side of the motor”—he indicated the carburetor.
“We come now to the heart of the matter. Will you hand me the two little doodads in the pasteboard box?”
The “two little doodads” proved to be plugs that screwed into openings in the ends of the camel tank. The inner face of each plug was studded with tiny points of brightly shining silvery metal. On the outer face of each was a screw clamp for a wire.
“Handle with care,” said Hennessy. “He was a whole year saving the money to buy the material for them two bits of jewelry. Platinum, they are.”
“Electrodes,” thought Dallon.
“Now, if you will look under his workbench you will find his storage batthry,” Hennessy commanded. “We will connect up the doodads with the batthry, and then our job of plumbing will be done.”
The battery produced apd the connections made, he sat down on a stool and rested from his labors.
“I will tell you what he used to do,” he said. “Do you see this cap?” He touched a filling plug at the top of the camel tank.
“Yes, I see.”
“Well, he would take that off and pour in a spoonful of the acid in the blue bottle on the shelf yonder. Then he would put in a funnel and run the tank full of water and screw the cap on again. Next he would switch on the batthry and give her a little time, then he would turn the crank a couple of spins, and off the motor would go as smooth as a lady's gold watch, till the water in the ginerator was used up. I never could see why he called it the 'gin-erator' when it consumed water; but that was the name he give it.”
Dallon took down the blue bottle from the shelf and held the glass stopper to his nose.
“Oil of vitriol,” said he. “How long would his brass tank last with this stuff eating the insides out of it?”
“I've heard him say it had lead insides,” Hennessy replied. “There is also what he calls a die-phragm in it, which he used to say is to keep the operator from dying a sudden death. He didn't have a die-phragm in the tank that blew up on him.”
“Was he blown up?”
“He was that, sir, and the house with him, and seven months in the hospital he was. It happened before he came to Detroit.”
Dallon tried to recall the details of a chemical experiment of his school days, a simple experiment designed to show the composition of water. As he remembered it, the water was acidified, then subjected to the action of an electric current, with the result that oxygen bubbles collected above one electrode and hydrogen bubbles above the other. But that process was a slow one.
“How long,” he asked, “could Bray run the motor on one filling of the tank?”
“I've known it to run an hour at a stretch.”
No more the lodger could tell, except pathetic tales of the weary months in which Bray, toiling at night, had struggled with his problems.
“It was the two little doodads that gave him the most bother,” said Hennessy.
Evening had come when Dallon went away from the house.
“This stuff can stay here, if you don't mind looking after it,” he told the old man. “I'll be back to-morrow.”
Within a block he had forgotten the motor and let his thoughts return to the more personal and pressing matter of the bone that he had to pick with Barney Banniston. At the hotel he was to forget that vexatious subject also, for Paul Shelby awaited him, having come to perform a bit of altruism at his sister's behest.
“I am commissioned to drag you to Bloomfield Hills for supper,” said Paul. “Dad and Marion think you need to be cheered up.”
In his Midlakes roadster they left the city and its troubles behind. Not all its troubles, either, for Dallon discovered that he had in his pocket the envelope, bulky and worn, containing the private papers of Felix Bray.
“They may amuse Peter Shelby,” he thought.
He himself had lost all curiosity regarding Bray's secret. “A job of plumbing,” Michael Hennessy had called it, and a job of plumbing it was. Life thenceforth for our young man looked too serious to contain time for absurdities.
CHAPTER XIX.
Inside the Family.
Bray's death, occurring on Friday night, was mentioned by the Mount Clemens correspondents in their Saturday morning grist to the Detroit papers. The suburban editor of the News saw in the three-line item a city story. The city editor passed the note along to a rewrite man, who, with the aid of clippings from a filing envelope in the “morgue,” produced a quarter-column sketch of Felix Bray's career in Detroit.
Bernard Banniston gripped the newspaper with tense hands as he recognized the significance of the lines under his eye. When he had devoured the article the second time he left his leather chair and went softly upstairs to his son's room. He found the young man in front of a mirror, doctoring a boil on his chin.
“Bray is dead,” said Banniston. “While we hunted him here in town he was lying up at a sanitarium in Mount Clemens.”
“So that's where Wally Dallon hid him, is it? Too bad, governor. Another bright dream fades away. But, then, you're good at dreaming. You can easily dream another.”
“I wish you would quit admiring your beauty in that glass and pay attention to me,” said the father.
Thoughtfully he closed the door.
“The bright dream you mention is brighter than ever. Old Bray is dead, but his secret has not died with him. It is still in the world for anybody who can corner it. By rights it is mine. I offered him good money for it, and my offer was practically accepted. The deal went so far that he told me the central idea of the invention, which is more than he ever told anybody else. I've been defrauded.”
Accustomed to fooling himself as he fooled others, Barney Banniston had lashed himself into full belief that he had been injured. Those who observed him in the week just ended say that he seemed to have aged ten years. His flaccid urbanity had given place to an air of exasperation, and all about him suffered, including his office girl in Griswold Street, to whose daily reports to the postmaster general's secret-service agent in Detroit we are indebted for much of our information.
“It's my invention now,” he stormed on. “I know so much about it that I could go into court and prove that Bray and I were working together on it. I can produce witnesses to testify that I have hinted at something of the sort for months.”
“But Wally Dallon holds an option on the thing,” Harry objected.
“How do I know he does? Let him produce his option and we'll fight over it. I'll show him up for a sneak who stole my project after I confided it to him. But dash the option! We can handle this affair without publicity, if we have any brains at all.”
For some minutes Mr. Banniston expounded his brainy plan while his son listened doubtingly. At the end Harry offered two criticisms.
“It's criminal, governor, therefore dangerous. Besides, what about the patents?”
“Bray never took out patents, I tell you. The thing will belong to whoever gets to Washington with it first. As to the crime we shall commit, aren't we only recovering what is really our own? Of course, as you say, there may be a little personal danger. I suppose I shouldn't have asked you. I should have asked Hazel.”
“Oh, I'll tackle it,” said Harry sulkily, and soon left the house. Returning in a little while, he found his father glooming before the fireplace.
“I called the sanitarium. I told the doctor I was a friend of Bray's and asked if there was anything I could do. He said everything had been attended to, and the funeral set for noon to-morrow. I told him I owed Bray a little money for some work Bray did for me, and he referred me to Wally Dallon.”
“Did you tell the doctor who you were?”
“Yes; I said I was Paul Shelby.”
“Probably the model is there at the sanitarium,” Banniston mused, aloud. “It isn't in Bray's house, I know. The engine is there, but not the generator.”
“How do you know that, governor?”
“Do you think I've been asleep all this week?”
“If you have a burglar on your staff,” said Harry, “I wish you'd assign him to this job and let me out.”
“Unfortunately, my burglar has been nabbed by the police. Poor Kales! I sent him out to Grosse Point day before yesterday to nose around among the Dallon help and try to locate Walter, and the detectives took him in. They think he did the Grand River jewelry job of last week. Likely he did. Anyway, Harry, I think we had better keep our next move inside the family.”
The young man's mournful look showed how well he liked a life of danger.
“I don't see what your hurry is, governor. Wally can't do a thing with his stolen goods, now that you've attended to his credit so thoroughly. He couldn't sell even a tin whistle in this town, much less a new motor. You've got him where you want him.”
“Be not slothful in business, my son,” replied Barnard Banniston. “You can at least do this. You can happen to be in Mount Clemens at noon to-morrow, in time for the funeral. Likely young Dallon will be there, too, and you will have a chance to track him home and put a chalk mark on his door, wherever that may be. Perhaps you can make some inquiries that will help us. Most important of all, you may catch sight of an old leather suit case which is not at present in Bray's house. Tell me where that suit case is, Harry, my boy, and I'll give you a month at Palm Beach.”
Thus the feet of reluctant youth were led along the path of filial duty.
CHAPTER XX.
Hennessy Jumps.
Michael Hennessy had spent his Sunday evening in putting in order the scanty possessions of his late friend and landlord. They were now his, but all told they added little to his wealth. An unbroken package of chewing tobacco that he found on a shelf gave him more satisfaction than anything else in his inheritance.
There came a knock at the front door. A stout young man in an automobile cap and a bear-skin coat thrust himself in as the door opened. The visor of his cap was pulled down over his eyes, the collar of his coat was turned up, so that little of his face except a boil was visible. But his voice was reassuring.
“I'm a friend of Walter Dallon's.”
“Are ye, now?” said Hennessy.
“He is having a meeting at his hotel to-night—about the motor, you know. I've come in my car to get it.”
“The motor?”
“Bray's motor, you understand. We want to have a look at the business end of it—the double-humped tank. Dallon can't very well leave his friends, so I'm here in his place. He sends his card so you'll know it's all right.”
“I suppose if he wants it, he wants it,” replied the old man, holding the card close to his eyes. “He says to let Mr. Shelby have what he asks for. Are you Mr. Shelby?”
“Yes—Paul Shelby. If I had a card of my own I could prove it to you, couldn't I? But I'm afraid I haven't. No, sir, my card case is empty.”
“I guess it is all right,” said Hennessy, “but I should not like a mistake to be made, for Mr. Dallon is a kind young gintleman.”
“Kind as a woman,” agreed the caller. “Never makes a show of his kindness, either. It was only by accident to-night that we found out what he did for poor old Bray.”
Passing Hennessy, the stranger entered the front room and looked quickly left and right.
“I'll bet you miss your friend, eh? You and he kept house here alone? Just the two of you?”
Farther he went and reached the workroom.
“Here's the tank with the humps, sure enough,” said he. “This is the part Dallon wants.”
“Hands off,” Hennessy warned him. “Let us have everything clear and understood first. Where might the young gintleman be, now?”
“At the Travelers' Hotel. Didn't I explain? He's rather in a hurry, you know. If you'll just cast off these attachments and let me have it”
“Be dommed if I will let ye have it,” Hennessy made answer. “If the young gintleman wants the tank, I will take it to him meself.”
“There's no use putting yourself to all that trouble, no use at all. I have my car outside and”
“Then I'll ride with ye. I want to see him, annyhow, about another matter.” Hennessy thought of the broken window lock.
The stranger smote his driving gloves together impatiently. “You'll have to come back alone, you know. I shall have to stay with Dallon and the others.”
“Well, and the Baker Street cars run every so often, now, don't they?”
The caller having no reply to meet this suggestion, the old man began to dismantle the machine. He glanced up to see his guest scowling at a very good-looking gold watch.
“If ye don't want to wait,” said Hennessy, “then go ahead to Mr. Dallon and say to him that I will be bringing the tank along in half an hour.”
“Oh, I'll wait. But shake it up, please.”
The motorist lit a cigarette and paced the front-room floor. He had time to do a good many turns and consume two additional cigarettes before the old man's task was finished.
“I will now go upstairs for me hat and coat,” said Hennessy. “Then I'll be with you.”
Hopefully the other reached for the leather suit case.
“I said I would take it to him meself”—and Hennessy lugged the heavy case up the stairs.
When he came down again he found the front door wide open. In the street he saw his guest spring into a roadster and heard the roar of the starter.
“'Tis in a great hurry ye are, bedad,” said the old fellow, appearing at the side of the car as the engine began to hum.
The person at the wheel growled a disgusted oath as his passenger climbed in beside him.
“I might think ye was trying to run away without me,” Hennessy remarked. To this criticism of manners the driver made no response, but sent his car away with a jerk.
By back streets they reached Michigan Avenue. At Washington Boulevard they they swung abruptly left.
“This is not the way to Mr. Dallon's hotel,” Hennessy protested. “That's up by the college.”
No reply came from the depths of the fur coat.
Before the passenger knew, they had passed Grand Circus Park and were pushing northward in Woodward Avenue at an amazing rate of speed, even for that swift thoroughfare.
“Where are ye going now, I want to know?” Hennessy cried.
“Shut your face,” was the answer, “or I'll hit you a crack with this.”
In the young man's hand on the wheel Hennessy saw a wrench with ugly jaws.
It took him a mile to gather his old wits together. Then he felt for and found the door latch. “By and by we shall come to a trolley car crowd and have to slow up,” he thought.
The luck was the other way. Traffic on that cold Sunday night was light, and they had no occasion for slacking pace.
They overtook trolley cars, but all were moving. Twice Hennessy gasped for breath and crossed himself as they missed collisions with other motorists at street intersections.
The shops of the avenue gave place to a district of homes, then came shops again as the car bored through the main street of Highland Park.
“Will ye answer me a civil question?” spoke Hennessy, when the Ford plant had dropped behind.
The driver kept silent as he crouched over the wheel. At the rate of speed they traveled, he had enough to do to hold his car in the roadway.
At the left lay Palmer Park. When that was past, Hennessy formed a great resolve.
His right hand pressed back the door catch, his left grasped the suit-case handle. Far ahead, where the road stretched away toward the wintry country, the car lights picked out two slim boyish figures trudging townward with packs on their backs.
When the car had come up to them, Hennessy stepped down upon the running board and jumped.
At a not very late hour that evening Paul Shelby left Bloomfield Hills for the city, with Dallon on the other side and Marion snug between them.
For two reasons Dallon's visit at the Shelby home had been brief. First, Mr. Shelby, after spending an hour examining Bray's papers, had exhibited a degree of excitement unusual in him.
“I'd like to have a look at those platinum electrodes,” he declared. “Where are they?” When he heard the truth he became more excited still. “The very platinum in them is worth too much to leave them lying around like that,” said he. “You'd better drive in with Walter, Paul, and bring them out here for safe-keeping.”
The other reason why Dallon went back to the city early was, to his way of thinking, a more important one. He had to get in a good night's sleep in order to show up at the Dallon Motor Car Company's factory at eight o'clock sharp in the morning to operate an electric screw driver.
At the city line young Shelby uttered a cry and grasped the brake lever. His lights showed a car standing dark in the road. Beside it two tall lads in boy-scout uniforms, with packs on their shoulders, held up their hands to warn the approaching machine.
“Some one has had an accident,” said Marion.
Beside the dark car her brother stopped. One of the scouts hopped upon the running-board.
“Can you take a man to the hospital?”
“Sure. What's the matter?”
“He jumped out of that car,” said the scout, “while it was running forty miles an hour. My pal and I, we were hiking home from the Stevens' farm and we saw him fall. The car stopped—you can smell the burned rubber yet—and the fellow driving it got out and came back. When he saw us he ran back to the car and tried to start it up, and it went dead on him. Something broke; you could hear it half a mile. The last we saw of him, he was beating it over the Fair Ground fence. A heavy-set guy he was, in a fur overcoat.”
“It's an Olin car,” said Paul Shelby, leaning out to look.
But Marion was more concerned about the man who had jumped. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Down the road fifty yards,” replied the scout. He pointed the way as Shelby drove slowly to the spot where the second scout bent over a dark figure on the ground.
The rays of Shelby's searchlight fell upon the upturned face of Hennessy.
“Are you hurt, old fellow?” Dallon had knelt beside him.
“'Tis the young gintleman! The saints be praised!” Hennessy answered feebly yet fervently. “No, thank ye, sir, I am not bad hurt at all. Am I not an old railroader that has dropped off moving trains all me life? I'd have lit right-side up with care, and no trouble to anybody, only for me baggage.”
He felt around over the ground until his hand found the suit case.
“You sent for it, Mr. Dallon, and I was bringing it to you. Here it is.”
CHAPTER XXI.
Short But Sweet.
The winter drew to its close. Work-weary people began to send longing thoughts up the river to Belle Isle and the Flats and down the river to Sugar Island and Bob Lo. There was the good smell of fresh paint around the idle excursion steamers, tied at their piers.
It was not often that William Dallon's secretary had occasion to enter the big shops behind the administration building. But one day he passed through the engine-assembling department. At the door he turned around.
“Morning, Mr. Wickersham,” spoke the foreman.
“Morning, Cumnock.”
They had to shout to make themselves heard above the rattle of the machinery.
“That's a good-looking workman there on the screw driver,” said the secretary.
The workman held in his hand what looked like a length of garden hose suspended from the ceiling. Deftly, as the clanking conveyor drew an engine body past his station, he jabbed the end of the implement at the cold iron mass, touching it here and there, reaching over to touch it again, walking beside it to give it a parting jab as it trundled by to the next worker in the long line. With every jab of his machine a screw went as tight into the iron as if it had been welded there. Mechanics in distant parts would groan when they came to take those screws out.
“He is a hustler,” said the foreman. “Nobody on that job before could ever keep up with the procession. But there is no slacking in this lad.”
“What's his name?” asked Wickersham.
“Allen. A moral lad he is, too. He is doing a grand work in my church on Friday nights with a gang of young hoodlums that nobody else could ever handle. He is making good citizens of them.”
“Allen, you say?”
“Yes, sir. We have had him about three months.”
Strange it seemed for the president's secretary to show such interest. But the foreman had greater cause to wonder when the president himself came, half an hour later, and from the doorway fixed his sharp eyes on the workman in question.
What Wickersham said to William Dallon, and what William Dallon said to his secretary are things not known to this historian. But a circumstance that occurred in the staid old Detroit club around two o'clock on the afternoon of that day is common knowledge.
At the hour when that urbane institution was filled with leaders of the Detroit business world, William Dallon and Bernard Banniston were seen to meet, and this exchange of words was heard:
“Oh, Dallon.”
“Well?”
“Pardon the familiarity—friendly interest you know. Do you hear anything from Walter nowadays? Is he”
“I never do. What do you hear from your son Harry? Does he like Havana? I understand he intends to make a long stay there.”
Certainly there was nothing in the words themselves to cause Bernard Banniston to square off in a pugilistic attitude and thrust his pudgy fist at Mr. Dallon's face. It must have been Mr. Dallon's tone or manner, therefore, that stirred him up.
And Mr. Dallon's manner continued to be anything but conciliatory. He planted his left foot well in front of his right. He raised his left arm before his face and drew back the other arm, both fists clenched. Then he shot his right fist with terrific force at the end of Mr. Banniston's bulbous nose and followed with his left.
Scandalized clubmen lifted Mr. Banniston up from the floor and dusted his clothes while other startled gentlemen rushed Mr. Dallon out of sight. When last reported, Mr. Dallon was talking somewhat noisily about tarantulas.
CHAPTER XXII.
Mr. Shelby's Party.
The old gardener at the Shelby place in Bloomfield Hills beheld an unusual sight as he came up the hill toward the house on the evening of the April day when he set out the pansy plants.
He saw the driveway lined with many handsome cars, and he saw more cars standing on the lawn—a circumstance that gave him pain, for the sod was too soft for parking purposes so early in the spring.
“It might be a wedding,” he thought, then remembered that Miss Marion had promised him never to be married unless in June, when his roses were out in bloom. “If it is a dinner party,” he reflected, “it is the first one we have had since Mrs. Shelby took sick and died, poor lady.”
A dinner party it was that filled the mansion with guests that evening, but it was not an affair for the society columns. The invitations had gone out by word of mouth from Peter Shelby, and the guests had arrived in business garb.
If the old gardener had not been thinking of poor Mrs. Shelby, whose love for his flowers was quite as tender as Miss Marion's, he might have observed that the cars represented most of the automobile factories in Detroit. There were cars, too, a little dusty and mud-spattered but quite as handsome as the others, from Jackson and Toledo and Lansing and Flint.
Now it is unnecessary to say that great men of the business world do not motor to Detroit from those distant places nor travel by train from such far-away cities as Indianapolis and Cleveland for merely festal purposes.
At Peter Shelby's direction the dinner was Hooverian. His guests were glad to have it so, especially Amos Rathbun, of the Mocar company, who suffered from dyspepsia.
From the dining room the assembly moved into the library and settled down on divans and window seats, and the air of the big room took on quickly a rich Key West blue, while Amos Rathbun began to cough violently. Rathbun did not smoke. Neither did the prim and dapper little gentleman who sat beside him. The prim little gentleman was Samuel Tibbles, whose address in lower Broadway, New York City, is a household word throughout the oil-burning world.
But William Dallon smoked. In the corner just behind them, where he sat partly in shadow, he had consumed half of his cigar before the others got theirs fairly going; and he had more cigars in his pocket. It did Amos Rathbun no good to turn around and glower at him.
“Gentlemen,” spoke Peter Shelby, tall and dignified and smiling, “at the urgent suggestion of a few of you, I have asked all of you to come here to-night, principally to hear a story. It is a long story, so I will sit down to it.”
He placed a chair in the middle of the room, beside a long table covered with a tarpaulin, and sat down at ease.
“I read a speech the other day,” said he, “delivered by a banker somewhere. He said if I recall his precise words, that 'Civilization must slow down soon, because so many things have been invented that only a few are left to invent in the future.' I have forgotten that banker's name. Forgetting it is a good thing, perhaps, for his reputation as a prophet. After what I have seen in the last few weeks, I should hate like the devil to be quoted to the same effect.”
In businesslike diction, then, Mr. Shelby told his audience the story of Felix Bray, of his extravagant claims, of his fears, of his demonstrations that never came off, and of his death. Silently and thoughtfully the others listened until he reached his conclusion.
“I said it could not be done. I said it looked too much like a perpetual-motion proposition—a dream of getting something for nothing—a lifting oneself by the boot-straps. But I should like you gentlemen to see what we have since discovered.”
He rose and beckoned. At the signal two men appeared and began to remove the table covering.
“Two of my safest workmen from the Midlakes plant,” he explained. “Some of you seem to know that there have been mysterious doings here lately. Well, it's true. Even with armed guards around the house at night we haven't been able to keep our mystery from leaking out.”
William Dallon put a question point-blank. “Shelby,” said he, with mischief in his eye, “why isn't Barney Banniston here?”
“Banniston was invited,” the host replied, “but had to decline at the last moment on account of a sore throat.”
“A sore nose, you mean,” some one suggested, whereupon Mr. Dallon modestly concealed himself in a cloud, after the manner of the marine creature called the squid.
The hydromotor stood revealed, its generator and engine joined, its other parts properly assembled. Shelby pointed out changes that his workmen had made in the original model. The hydrogen pressure tank had been increased to twice the volume of the oxygen tank. New and delicate pressure pumps had been installed in place of the clumsier pumps that Bray had used. New batteries had been provided, and the first “camel” tank supplanted with a larger container built along similar lines. Otherwise the motor remained as the old inventor had left it.
When Shelby would have taken time to show the working of the valves that regulated the flow of gases from the pressure tanks to the carburetor, he was checked by a general and impatient demand to “start her up.”
“To demonstrate that there is no hocus-pocus, we will first do a little table lifting,” he said, in the manner of a showman. His helpers raised the table clear of the rug. “There is no deception whatsoever, gentlemen. There are no concealed wires, as you can make sure for yourselves. There is no compressed-air pipe running up the inside of a table leg. What we do is entirely open and aboveboard. We pour in the water, we turn the crank, and off she goes.”
Off she went before their eyes, as they crowded close around to see. The cylinder valves clicked softly. From the muffler came a pur as gentle and regular as that from the finest product of the Midlakes factory. A workman's hand pressed the throttle lever down, and the table quivered under the in creased action. Amos Rathbun, who had put his nose close to the exhaust, declared in great disgust:
“From the smell, you'd think it was a steam radiator.”
“Speaking of radiators reminds me,” said Shelby, “that we shall have to improve Bray's cooling system. The heat of these explosions is tremendous. There are many other problems to solve, but none greater than we had before us twenty years ago. The greatest of all has been solved for us by the man who died last winter—who literally starved to death to work it out.”
He touched the electrodes in the ends of the dome-crowned tank.
“These two plugs introduce rapid electrolysis to the world. With a twelve-volt battery behind them they will produce enough gas in one hour to drive the motor for three hours. The battery is recharged as in a gasoline car, and the depreciation is slight. What the hydromotor promises to do for the motorist is to eliminate his fuel expense and save him two or four or five dollars each hundred miles.
“You all are men of imagination, so I don't need to harp on what this discovery opens up. I believe that we have found the engine of the future—the engine that burns hydrogen, the perfect fuel, and prepares the fuel for itself from a source almost as common and free as the air.”
Up spoke a keen-eyed gentleman from Jefferson Avenue.
“Won't an ordinary motor burn hydrogen?”
“No more than an old-fashioned wood stove will burn hard coal,” Shelby answered. “That is the pity of it. For hydrogen explosions our cylinders will have to be reduced in bore and stroke and the quality of steel altered, and new cooling and oiling systems will have to be devised. It means complete new engines.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
A Piece of Altruism.
One by one the guests returned to their places and sat down to think. Some of them looked skeptical, but in the main they were a sober-faced company when Shelby stopped the motor and waited to hear discussion.
From Amos Rathbun came the first comment.
“My gosh! It will ruin us all!”
“Not so bad as that,” spoke McCurdy, of Cleveland. “But it will mean junking a large part of the machinery in our shops, throwing thousands of men out of jobs for months and upsetting our plans for years to come. I am assuming,” he added, “that Shelby will let us in on it for a price, just as our association shared the Selden patents with him years ago.”
“It will throw the whole industry out of gear,” said the man from Indianapolis. “Who will buy gasoline cars, and who will go ahead making such cars, knowing that the hydrogen car is just around the corner?”
“Why borrow trouble?” queried the man from Toledo. “How long will it take to put that machine in shape for practical use? Maybe twenty years.”
“How long,” Shelby replied, “did it take your company to perfect the first Yocum motor and launch it on the market? Six months from the day the plans were drawn.”
“May I be permitted to enter my lamentation at this juncture?”
It was the dapper little Samuel Tibbles who asked the question. Be sure that no ordinary alarm would have brought him so far away from his office with the famous address in lower Broadway. He stood up to speak.
“You gentlemen represent the automobile industry and the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of people engaged in it. Let me say a word for the hundreds of thousands of good folk who derive their prosperity from the drilling of oil wells, the refining of petroleum, the production and distribution and sale of gasoline. With this invention loose in the world, your army can make shift to keep going. But what about mine? What about the fellow at the red pump by the roadside? What about the hundreds of millions of capital invested in red pumps, in tank cars and wagons and trucks, in gasoline production plants? Will you ask us to scrap all that? We should be worse off than the brewers.”
He sat down and immediately stood up again.
“I am prepared,” he said, “in the interests of humanity, to pay any price in reason for this invention and the patents that cover it. My object is obvious.”
“The interests of humanity are not in danger,” Mr. Shelby answered, smiling. “Gentlemen, I did not call you here to throw a scare into you. Neither am I to be blamed for the scare that has been thrown into you in recent days. I know what you have heard. You have been told that the Midlakes company had a new motor that would kill every gasoline motor in the world. You have been led to suspect that some of us had it in our power and in our hearts to ruin you all.”
He held out his hand. In to the light came Walter Dallon from the adjoining room where he and Marion had watched and listened.
“This young man,” said Shelby, “is Felix Bray's heir and the sole owner of the hydromotor. I may add that he thinks so little of his treasure that he persists in trying to make a present of it to a young woman whom you met at dinner to-night.”
“Who the dickens is he?” piped Amos Rathbun.
“My son,” barked William Dallon, so sharply that Rathbun jumped.
“Some misapprehension has gone out regarding this young man and his ambitions,” Mr. Shelby informed the gathering. “Perhaps this will be as good a place as any to set him right in the eyes of the industry in which he expects to spend the rest of his life. Walter, make us a speech.”
Young Dallon put his hands into his pockets and began, with a grin.
“I suppose the hydromotor would be a good thing for the public,” the young man went on. “In time it would build up a great industry on the wreckage of the present one. But it would certainly disturb the present industry for years, and it would raise the dickens with the red pump by the roadside in favor of the old oaken bucket that hangs in the well, as a gentleman here to-night has hinted.”
Samuel Tibbles looked cheerful for the first time since his arrival from New York.
“As I figure it out,” Dallon, junior, went on, “the Bray hydromotor has been invented before the human race needs it. I don't mean to say that, either. I mean, before the human race is ready for it. When I try to think of the changes it will make in the mechanical world and the losses it will cause wherever money is sunk in machinery of a thousand and one kinds, I get dizzy. The question is too big for me. I want a congress of the world's best scientists and economists to decide how and when the hydromotor can be introduced so that it will never do harm to a soul on earth.
“I want to be an altruist in this matter and think of the other fellow. So I am going to put the motor in cold storage until the wise men have had their say; and I expect to keep it in abeyance at least until the petroleum wells run dry, or”—he looked at Mr. Tibbles—“until the oil interests are no longer able to hold down the price of gas to a figure that a poor man can afford to pay. I guess that's all I have to say, gentlemen, except thank you.”
As he moved toward Marion's side again, some one caught him by the sleeve. Father and son faced each other for the first time since the night of Felix Bray's death.
“If the young man is through, may I have the floor?” asked the father.
“Help yourself,” said Peter Shelby, his eyes twinkling.
“This young man who has just talked to you,” said William Dallon, still holding Walter by the sleeve, “is the son that I disowned. What do you think of a father whose life hasn't got room in it for a son who can make a speech like that? What do you think of a man whose head is so full of machinery and markets and mud that he can't remember that he was once young himself? I know what your answer is, though you're too polite to say it. You think that father is a dang fool. Well, I think so, too.”
Here the son attempted to be heard.
“Keep quiet,” his father told him. “You were going to claim that the fault was yours. That's not true. When it comes to the blame, I've got monopolistic rights. I want to say to you gentlemen, about this son of mine, that I sent him on a detour a while ago, and now I wish he would come back into the turnpike again. I disowned him. Well, I'll be proud to own him any time he wants me to ask his forgiveness.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
Conclusions.
Somewhere in Detroit the Bray hydromotor awaits its time, and safe in the United States patent office at Washington are the records that will protect not only its owners but also the world at large. Men of wisdom and learning are already taking counsel and laying plans to insure that the economic revolution which it will bring in its train shall cause no privation—for the hydromotor idea, unless properly guided, will mean a revolution in industry as destructive as the political revolution that has lately swept Russia.
Pending the arrival of the great time for tapping the almost limitless source of fuel which nature through billions of years has stored up in the seas, the clouds, and the wellsprings of this earth, our friends in Detroit go on living their lives as if nothing unusual had occurred. Peter Shelby, in fact, has drifted back to the state of doubt in which we found him on the day when he first discussed Bray's invention with young Dallon, and he says, as of old: “Walter, I still maintain the thing can't be done.”
“You forget the electrodes,” says Walter.
There is no happier woman in southeastern Michigan these days than Mrs. William Dallon, as she sits at her sun window looking out over the lake, unless we count Mrs. Walter Dallon, whose wedding at Bloomfield Hills recently was well reported in the newspapers. Certainly there is no happier man than William Dallon, unless possibly it is his son.
Bill Dallon whistles at his work for the first time in a good many years, and always the tune is the one that he whistled to keep up his spirits on the day when he started for Chicago in the one-cylinder horseless buggy that “steered with a broomstick.”
Walter Dallon has been transferred from the electric screw driver in the engine-assembling shop to the assistant manager's desk in the raw materials' department, where he is acquiring a large amount of knowledge that will be useful to him in carrying on the manufacture of cars and trucks “made good to make good” when the distant time comes for his father to grow old and retire.
Michael Hennessy goes frequently, on pleasant Sundays, to Mount Clemens and visits a grave there. On weekdays Hennessy still works at the roundhouse—not because he needs to, with twenty thousand dollars distributed among a score of savings banks, but because, as he says: “A man is happier doing something useful than when he is loafing. He feels more like a gintleman, bedad!”
If a moral is needed to end our tale, let Hennessy's words supply it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1947, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 77 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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