Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford

CHAPTER III

MR. WALLINGFORD'S LAMB IS CAREFULLY INSPIRED WITH A FLASH OF CREATIVE GENIUS

The next morning, in spite of protests and warnings from his employer, Mr. Lamb resigned his position with the A. J. Dorman Company, and, jumping on a car, rode out to the far North Side, where he called at David Jasper's tumble-down frame house. On either side of this were three neat houses that David had built, one at a time, on land he had bought for a song in his younger days; but these were for renting purposes. David lived in the old one for exactly the same reason that he wore the frayed overcoat and slouch hat that had done him duty for many years – they made him as comfortable as new ones, and appearances fed no one nor kept anybody warm.

Wholesome Ella Jasper met the caller at the door with an inward cordiality entirely out of proportion to even a close friend of the family, but her greeting was commonplaceness itself.

"Father's just over to Kriegler's, getting his glass of beer and his lunch," she observed as he shook hands warmly with her. Sometimes she wished that he were not quite so meaninglessly cordial; that he could be either a bit more shy or a bit more bold in his greeting of her.

"I might have known that," he laughed, looking at his watch. "Half-past ten. I'll hurry right over there," and he was gone.

Ella stood in the doorway and looked after him until he had turned the corner of the house; then she sighed and went back to her baking. A moment later she was singing cheerfully.

It was a sort of morning lunch club of elderly men, all of the one lodge, the one building association, the one manner of life, which met over at Kriegler's, and "Eddy" was compelled to sit with them for nearly an hour of slow beer, while politics, municipal, state and national, was thoroughly thrashed out, before he could get his friend David to himself.

"Well, what brings you out so early, Eddy?" asked the old harness maker on the walk home. "Got a new gold-mining scheme again to put us all in the poorhouse?"

Eddy laughed.

"You don't remember of the kid-glove miner taking anybody's money away, do you?" he demanded. "I guess your old chum Eddy saw through the grindstone that time, eh?"

Mr. Jasper laughed and pounded him a sledge-hammer blow upon the shoulder. It was intended as a mere pat of approval.

"You're all right, Eddy. The only trouble with you is that you don't get married. You'll be an old bachelor before you know it."

"So you've said before," laughed Eddy, "but I can't find the girl that will have me."

"I'll speak to Ella for you."

The younger man laughed lightly again.

"She's my sister," he said gayly. "I wouldn't lose my sister for anything."

David frowned a little and shook his head to himself, but he said nothing more, though the wish was close to his heart. He thought he was tactful.

"No, I've got that new job," went on young Lamb. "Another man from Boston, too. I'm in charge of the complete office organization of a brand-new manufacturing business that's to start up here. Two hundred dollars a month to begin. How's that?"

"Fine," said David. "Enough to marry on. But it sounds too good. Is he a sharper, too?"

"He don't need to be. He seems to have plenty of money, and the article he's going to start manufacturing is so good that it will pay him better to be honest than to be crooked. I don't see where the man could go wrong. Why, look here!" and from his vest pocket he pulled an orange-headed tack. "Carpet tack – covered with any color you want – same color as your carpet so the tacks don't show – only cost a little bit more than the cheap ones. Don't you think it's a good thing?"

David stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and put on his spectacles to examine the trifle critically.

"Is that all he's going to make – just tacks?"

"Just tacks!" exclaimed the younger man. "Why, Dave, the Eureka Tack Company, that has a practical monopoly now of the tack business in this country, occupies a plant covering twenty acres. It employs thousands of men. It makes sixteen per cent. a year dividends, and has millions of dollars surplus in its treasury – undivided profits! Long freight trains leave its warehouses every day, loaded down with nothing but tacks; and that's all they make – just tacks! Why, think, Dave, of how many millions of tacks are pulled out of carpets and thrown away every spring!"

Mr. Jasper was still examining the tack from head to point with deep interest. Now he drew a long breath and handed it back.

"It's a big thing, even if it is little," he admitted. "Watch out for the man, though. Does he want any money?"

"Not a cent. Why, any money I've got he'd laugh at. I couldn't give him any. He's a rich man, and able to start his own factory. He's going to organize a quarter of a million stock company and keep the majority of the stock himself."

"It might be pretty good stock to buy, if you could get some of it," decided Dave after some slow pondering.

"I wish I could, but there is no chance. What stock he issues is only to be put out in twenty-five-thousand-dollar lots."

Again David Jasper sighed. Sixteen per cent. a year! He was thinking now of what a small margin of profit his houses left him after repairs and taxes were paid.

"It looks to me like you'd struck it rich, my boy. Well, you deserve it. You have worked hard and saved your money. You know, when I got married I had nothing but a set of harness tools and the girl, and we got along."

"Look here, Dave," laughed his younger friend, whose thirty years were unbelievable in that he still looked so much like a boy, "some of these days I will hunt up a girl and get married, just to make you keep still about it, and if I have any trouble I'll throw it up to you as long as you live. But what do you think of this chance of mine? That's what I came out for – to get your opinion on it."

"Well," drawled Dave, cautious now that the final judgment was to be pronounced, "you want to remember that you're giving up a good job that has got better and better every year and that will most likely get still better every year; but, if you can start at two hundred a month, and are sure you're going to get it, and the man don't want any money, and he isn't a sharper, why, it looks like it was too good to miss."

"That's what I think," rejoined Mr. Lamb enthusiastically. "Well, I must go now. I want to see Mr. Lewis and John Nolting and one or two of the others, and get their advice," and he swung jubilantly on a car.

It was a pleasant figment this, Eddy Lamb's plan of consulting his older friends. He always went to them most scrupulously to get their advice, and afterward did as he pleased. He was too near the soil, however – only one generation away – to make many mistakes in the matter of caution, and so far he had swung his little financial ventures with such great success that he had begun to be conceited.

He found Mr. Wallingford at the hotel, but not waiting for him by any means. Mr. Wallingford was very busy with correspondence which, since part of it was to his wife and to "Blackie" Daw, was entirely too personal to be trusted to a public stenographer, and he frowningly placed his caller near the window with some new samples of tacks he had made that morning; then, for fifteen minutes, he silently wrote straight on, a course which allowed Mr. Lamb the opportunity to reflect that he was, after all, not entitled to have worn that air of affable familiarity with which he had come into the room. In closing his letter to Mr. Daw the writer added a postscript: "The Lamb is here, and I am now sharpening the shears."

His letters finished and a swift boy called to despatch them, Mr. Wallingford drew a chair soberly to the opposite side of the little table at which he had seated Mr. Lamb. Like every great captain of finance, he turned his back to the window so that his features were in shadow, while the wide-set, open eyes of Mr. Lamb, under their good, broad brow, blinked into the full light of day, which revealed for minute study every wrinkle of expression in his features.

"I forgot to warn you of one thing last night, and I hope you have not talked too much," Mr. Wallingford began with great seriousness. "I reposed such confidence in you that I did not think of caution, a confidence that was justified, for from such inquiries as I have made this morning I am perfectly satisfied with your record – and, by the way, Mr. Lamb, while we are upon this subject, here is a list of references to some of whom I must insist that you write, for my own satisfaction if not for yours. But now to the main point. The thing I omitted to warn you about is this," and here he sank his voice to a quite confidential tone: "I have not yet applied for letters patent upon this device."

"You have not?" exclaimed Mr. Lamb in surprise. The revelation rather altered his estimate of Mr. Wallingford's great business ability.

"No," confessed the latter. "You can see how much I trust you, to tell you this, because, if you did not know, you would naturally suppose that the patent was at least under way, and I would be in no danger whatever; but I am not yet satisfied on one point, and I want the device perfect before I make application. It has worried me quite a bit. You see, the heads of these tacks are too smooth to retain the cloth. It is very difficult to glue cloth to a smooth metal surface, and if we send out our tacks in such condition that a hammer will pound the cloth tops off, it will ruin our business the first season. I have experimented with every sort of glue I can get, and have pounded thousands of tacks into boards, but the cloth covering still comes off in such large percentage that I am afraid to go ahead. Of course, the thing can be solved – it is merely a question of time – but there is no time now to be lost."

From out the drawer of the table he drew a board into which had been driven some dozens of tacks. From at least twenty-five per cent. of them the cloth covering had been knocked off.

"I see," observed the Lamb, and he examined the board thoughtfully; then he looked out of the window at the passing traffic in the street.

Mr. Wallingford tilted back his chair and lit a fat, black cigar, the barest twinkle of a smile playing about his eyes. He laid a mate to the cigar in front of the bookkeeper, but the latter paid no attention whatever to it. He was perfectly absorbed, and the twinkles around the large man's eyes deepened.

"I say!" suddenly exclaimed Mr. Lamb, turning from the window to the capitalist and throwing open his coat impatiently, as if to get away from anything that encumbered his free expression, "why wouldn't it do to roughen the heads of the tacks?"

His eyes fairly gleamed with the enthusiasm of creation. He had found the answer to one of those difficult problems like: "What bright genius can supply the missing letters to make up the name of this great American martyr, who was also a President and freed the slaves? L-NC-LN. $100.00 in GOLD to be divided among the four million successful solvers! Send no money until afterwards!"

Mr. Wallingford brought down the legs of his chair with a thump.

"By George!" he ejaculated. "I'm glad I found you. You're a man of remarkable resource, and I must be a dumbhead. Here I have been puzzling and puzzling with this problem, and it never occurred to me to roughen those tacks!"

It was now Mr. Lamb's turn to find the fat, black cigar, to light it, to lean back comfortably and to contemplate Mr. Wallingford with triumphantly smiling eyes. The latter gentleman, however, was in no contemplative mood. He was a man all of energy. He had two bellboys at the door in another minute. One he sent for a quart of wine and the other to the hardware store with a list of necessities, which were breathlessly bought and delivered: a small table-vise, a heavy hammer, two or three patterns of flat files and several papers of tacks. Already in one corner of Mr. Wallingford's room stood a rough serving table which he had been using as a work bench, and Mr. Lamb could not but reflect how everything needed came quickly to this man's bidding, as if he had possessed the magic lamp of Aladdin. He was forced to admire, too, the dexterity with which this genius screwed the small vise to the table, placed in its jaws a row of tacks, and, pressing upon them the flat side of one of the files, pounded this vigorously until, upon lifting it up, the fine, indented pattern was found repeated in the hard heads of the tacks. The master magician went through this operation until he had a whole paper of them with roughened heads; then, glowing with fervid enthusiasm which was quickly communicated to his helper, he set Mr. Lamb to gluing bits of cloth upon these heads, to be trimmed later with delicate scissors, an extra pair of which Mr. Wallingford sent out to get. When the tacks were all set aside to dry the coworkers addressed themselves to the contents of the ice pail; but, as the host was pulling the cork from the bottle, and while both of them were perspiring and glowing with anticipated triumph in the experiment, Mr. Wallingford's face grew suddenly troubled.

"By George, Eddy" – and Mr. Lamb beamed over this early adoption of his familiar first name – "if this experiment succeeds it makes you part inventor with me!"

Eddy sat down to gasp.

CHAPTER IV

J. RUFUS ACCEPTS A TEMPORARY ACCOMMODATION AND BUYS AN AUTOMOBILE

The experiment was a success. Immediately after lunch they secured a fresh pine board and pounded all the tacks into it. Not one top came off. The fact, however, that Mr. Lamb was part inventor, made a vast difference in the proposition.

"Now, we'll talk cold business on this," said Mr. Wallingford. "Of course, the main idea is mine, but the patent must be applied for by both as joint inventors. Under the circumstances, I should say that about one fourth of the value of the patent, which we shall sell to the company for at least sixty thousand dollars, would be pretty good for your few minutes of thought, eh?"

Mr. Lamb, his head swimming, agreed with him thoroughly.

"Very well, then, we'll go right out to a lawyer and have a contract drawn up; then we'll go to a patent attorney and get the thing under way at once. Do you know of a good lawyer?"

Mr. Lamb did. There was a young one, thoroughly good, who belonged to Mr. Lamb's lodge, and they went over to see him. There is no expressing the angle at which Mr. Lamb held his head as he passed out through the lobby of the best hotel in his city. If his well-to-do townsmen having business there wished to take notice of him, well and good; if they did not, well and good also. He needed nothing of them.

It was with the same shoulder-squared self-gratification that he ushered his affluent friend into Carwin's office. Carwin was in. Unfortunately, he was always in. Practice had not yet begun for him, but Lamb was bringing fortune in his hand and was correspondingly elated. He intended to make Carwin the lawyer for the corporation. Mr. Carwin drew up for them articles of agreement, in which it was set forth, with many a whereas and wherein, that the said party of the first part and the said party of the second part were joint inventors of a herein described new and improved carpet tack, the full and total benefits of which were to accrue to the said parties of the first part and the second part, and to their heirs and assigns forever and ever, in the proportion of one fourth to the said party of the first part and three fourths to the said party of the second part.

Mr. Carwin, as he saw them walk out with the precious agreement, duly signed, attested and sealed, was too timid to hint about his fee, and Mr. Lamb could scarcely be so indelicate as to call attention to the trifle, even though he knew that Mr. Carwin was gasping for it at that present moment. The latter had hidden his shoes carefully under his desk throughout the consultation, and had kept tucking his cuffs back out of sight during the entire time. There were reasons, however, why Mr. Wallingford did not pay the fee. In spite of the fact that everything was charged at his hotel, it did take some cash for the bare necessities of existence, and, in the past three days, he had spent over fifty dollars in mere incidentals, aside from his living expenses.

Mr. Lamb did not know a patent lawyer, but he had seen the sign of one, and he knew where to go right to him. The patent lawyer demanded a preliminary fee of twenty-five dollars. Mr. Lamb was sorry that Mr. Christopher had made such an unfortunate "break," for he felt that the man would get no more of Mr. Wallingford's business. The latter drew out a roll of bills, however, paid the man on the spot and took his receipt.

"Will a ten-dollar bill help hurry matters any?" he asked.

"It might," admitted the patent lawyer with a cheerful smile.

His office was in a ramshackle old building that had no elevator, and they had been compelled to climb two flights of stairs to reach it. Mr. Wallingford handed him the ten dollars.

"Have the drawings and the application ready by to-morrow. If the thing can be expedited we shall want you to go on to Washington with the papers."

Mr. Christopher glowed within him. Wherever this man Wallingford went he left behind him a trail of high hopes, a glimpse of a better day to dawn. He was a public benefactor, a boon to humanity. His very presence radiated good cheer and golden prospects.

As they entered the hotel, said Mr. Wallingford:

"Just get the key and go right on up to the room, Eddy. You know where it is. Make yourself at home. Take your knife and try the covering on those last tacks we put in. I'll be up in five or ten minutes."

When Mr. Wallingford came in Mr. Lamb was testing the tack covers with great gratification. They were all solid, and they could scarcely be dug off with a knife. He looked up to communicate this fact with glee, and saw a frowning countenance upon his senior partner. Mr. J. Rufus Wallingford was distinctly vexed.

"Nice thing!" he growled. "Just got a notice that there is an overdraft in my bank. Now, I'll have to order some bonds sold at a loss, with the market down all around; but that will take a couple of days and here I am without cash – without cash! Look at that! Less than five dollars!"

He threw off his coat and hat in disgust and loosened his vest. He mopped his face and brow and neck. Mr. Wallingford was extremely vexed. He ordered a quart of champagne in a tone which must have made the telephone clerk feel that the princely guest was dissatisfied with the house. "Frappé, too!" he demanded. "The last I had was as warm as tea!"

Mr. Lamb, within the past day, had himself begun the rise to dizzy heights; he had breathed the atmosphere of small birds and cold bottles into his nostrils until that vapor seemed the normal air of heaven; the ordinary dollar had gradually shrunk from its normal dimensions of a peck measure to the size of a mere dot, and, moreover, he considered how necessary pocket money was to a man of J. Rufus Wallingford's rich relationship with the world.

"I have a little ready cash I could help you out with, if you will let me offer it," he ventured, embarrassed to find slight alternate waves of heat flushing his face. The borrowing and the lending of money were not unknown by any means in Mr. Lamb's set. They asked each other for fifty dollars with perfect nonchalance, got it and paid it back with equal unconcern, and no man among them had been known to forget. Mr. Wallingford accepted quite gracefully.

"Really, if you don't mind," said he, "five hundred or so would be quite an accommodation for a couple of days."

Mr. Lamb gulped, but it was only a sort of growing pain that he had. It was difficult for him to keep up with his own financial expansion.

"Certainly," he stammered. "I'll go right down and get it for you. The bank closes at three. I have only a half hour to make it."

"I'll go right with you," said Mr. Wallingford, asking no questions, but rightly divining that his Lamb kept no open account. "Wait a minute. I'll make you out a note – just so there'll be something to show for it, you know."

He hurriedly drew a blank from his pocket, filled it in and arose from the table.

"I made it out for thirty days, merely as a matter of business form," stated Mr. Wallingford as they walked to the elevator, "but, as soon as I put those bonds on the market, I'll take up the note, of course. I left the interest in at six per cent."

"Oh, that was not necessary at all," protested Mr. Lamb.

The sum had been at first rather a staggering one, but it only took him a moment or two to get his new bearings, and, if possible, he held his head a trifle higher than ever as he walked out through the lobby. On the way to the bank the capitalist passed the note over to his friend.

"I believe that's the right date; the twenty-fifth, isn't it?"

"The twenty-fifth is right," Mr. Lamb replied, and perfunctorily opened the note. Then he stopped walking. "Hello!" he said. "You've made a mistake. This is for a thousand."

"Is that so? I declare! I so seldom draw less than that. Well, suppose we let it go at a thousand."

Time for gulping was passed.

"All right," said the younger man, but he could not make the assent as sprightly as he could have wished. In spite of himself the words drawled.

Nevertheless, at his bank he handed in his savings-book and the check, and, thoroughly permeated by the atmosphere in which he was now moving, he had made out the order for eleven hundred dollars.

"I needed a little loose change myself," he explained, as he put a hundred into his own pocket and passed the thousand over to Mr. Wallingford.

Events moved rapidly now. Mr. Wallingford that night sent off one hundred and fifty dollars to his wife.

"Cheer up, little girl," he wrote her. "Blackie came here and reported that this was a grouch town. I've been here three days and dug up a thousand, and there's more in sight. I've been inquiring around this morning. There is a swell little ten-thousand-dollar house out in the rich end of the burg that I'm going to buy to put up a front, and you know how I'll buy it. Also I'm going over to-morrow and pick out an automobile. I need it in my business. You ought to see what long, silky wool the sheep grow here."

The next morning was devoted entirely to pleasure. They visited three automobile firms and took spins in four machines, and at last Mr. Wallingford picked out a five-thousand-dollar car that about suited him.

"I shall try this for two weeks," he told the proprietor of the establishment. "Keep it here in your garage at my call, and, by that time, if I decide to buy it, I shall have my own garage under way. I have my eye on a very nice little place out in Gildendale, and if they don't want too much for it I'll bring on Mrs. Wallingford from Boston."