The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  “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 tomorrow. 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, lit
tle 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 tomorrow 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.”

  “With pleasure, Mr. Wallingford,” said the proprietor.

  Mr. Lamb walked away with a new valuation of things. Not a penny of deposit had been asked, for the mere appearance of Mr. Wallingford and his air of owning the entire garage were sufficient. In the room at the hotel that afternoon they made some further experiments on tacks, and Mr. Wallingford gave his young partner some further statistics concerning the Eureka Company: its output, the number of men it employed, the number of machines it had in operation, the small start it had, the immense profits it made.

  “We’ve got them all beat,” Mr. Lamb enthusiastically summed up for him. “We’re starting much better than they did, and with, I believe, the best manufacturing proposition that was ever put before the public.”

  It was not necessary to supply him with any further enthusiasm. He had been inoculated with the yeast of it, and from that point onward would be self-raising.

  “The only thing I am afraid of,” worried Mr. Wallingford, “is that the Eureka Company will want to buy us out before we get fairly started, and, if they offer us a good price, the stockholders will want to stampede. Now, you and I must vote down any proposition the Eureka Company make us, no matter what the other stockholders want, because, if they buy us out before we have actually begun to encroach upon their business, they will not give us one fifth of the price we could get after giving them a good scare. Between us, Eddy, we’ll hold six tenths of the stock and we must stand firm.”

  Eddy stuck his thumbs in his vest pocket and with great complacency tapped himself alternately upon his recent luncheon with the finger tips of his two hands.

  “Certainly we will,” he admitted. “But say; I have some friends that I’d like to bring into this thing. They’re not able to buy blocks of stock as large as you suggested, but, maybe, we could split up one lot so as to let them in.”

  “I don’t like the idea of small stockholders,” Mr. Wallingford objected, frowning. “They are too hard to handle. Your larger investors are business men who understand all the details and are not raising eternal questions about the little things that turn up; but since we have this tack so perfect I’ve changed my plan of incorporation, and consequently there is a way in which your friends can get in. We don’t want to attract any attention to ourselves from the Eureka people just now, so we will only incorporate at first for one thousand dollars, in ten shares of one hundred dollars each—sort of a dummy corporation in which my name will not appear at all. If you can find four friends who will buy one share of stock each of you will then subscribe for the other six shares, for which I will pay you, giving you one share, as I promised. These four friends of yours then, if they wish, may take up one block of twenty-five thousand when we make the final corporation, which we will do by increasing our capital stock as soon as we get our corporation papers. These friends of yours would, necessarily, be on our first board of directors, too, which will hold for one year, and it will be an exceptional opportunity for them.”

  “I don’t quite understand,” said Mr. Lamb.

  “We incorporate for one thousand only,” explained Mr. Wallingford, slowly and patiently, “ten shares of one hundred dollars each, all fully paid in. The Eureka Company will pay no attention to a one-thousand-dollar company. As soon as we get our corporation papers, we original incorporators will, of course, form the officers and board of directors, and we will immediately vote to increase our capitalization to one hundred thousand dollars, in one thousand shares of one hundred dollars each. We will vote to pay you and I as inventors sixty thousand dollars or six hundred shares of stock for our patents—applied for and to be applied for during a period of five years to come—in carpet-tack improvements and machinery for making the same. We will offer the balance of the forty thousand dollars stock for sale, to carry us through the experimental stage—that is, until we get our machinery all in working order. Then we will need one hundred thousand dollars to start our factory. To get that, we will reincorporate for a three-hundred-thousand capital, taking up all the outstanding stock and giving to each stockholder two shares at par for each share he then holds. That will take up two hundred thousand dollars of the stock and leave one hundred thousand for sale at par. You, in place of fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of stock as your share for the patent rights, will have thirty thousand dollars’ worth, or three hundred shares, and if, after we have started operating, the Eureka Company should buy us out at only a million, you would have a hundred thousand dollars net profit.”

  A long, long sigh was the answer. Mr. Lamb saw. Here was real financiering.

  “Let’s get outside,” he said, needing fresh air in his lungs after this. “Let’s go up and see my friend, Mr. Jasper.”

  In ten minutes the automobile had reported. Each man, before he left the room, slipped a handful of covered carpet tacks into his coat pocket.

  Chapter V

  The Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company Forms Amid Great Enthusiasm

  The intense democracy of J. Rufus Wallingford could not but charm David Jasper, even though he disapproved of diamond stick-pins and red-leather-padded automobiles as a matter of principle. The manner in which the gentleman from Boston acknowledged the introduction, the fine mixture of deference due Mr. Jasper’s age and of cordiality due his easily discernible qualities of good fellowship, would have charmed the heart out of a cabbage.

  “Get in, Dave; we want to take you for a ride,” demanded Mr. Lamb.

  David shook his head at the big machine, and laughed.

  “I don’t carry enough insurance,” he objected.

  Mr. Wallingford had caught sight of a little bronze button in the lapel of Mr. Jasper’s faded and threadbare coat.

  “A man who went through the battle of Bull Run ought to face anything,” he laughed back.

  The shot went home. Mr. Jasper had acquitted himself with honor in the battle of Bull Run, and without further ado he got into the invitingly open door of the tonneau, to sink back among the padded cushions with his friend Lamb. As the door slammed shut, Ella Jasper waved them adieu, and it was fully three minutes after the machine drove away before she began humming about her work. Somehow or other, she did not like to see her father’s friend so intimately associated with rich people.

  They had gone but a couple of blocks, and Mr. Lamb was in the early stages of the enthusiasm attendant upon describing the wonderful events of the past two days—especially his own share in the invention, and the hundred thousand dollars that it was to make him within the year—when Mr. Wallingford suddenly halted the machine.

  “You’re not going to get home to dinner, you know, Mr. Jasper,” he declared.

  “Oh, we have to! This is lodge night, and I am a patriarch. I haven’t missed a night for twenty years, and Eddy, here, has an office, too—his first one. We’ve got ten candidates tonight.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Wallingford gravely. “It is more or less in the line of a sacred duty. Nevertheless, we will not go home to dinner. I’ll ge
t you at the lodge door at half past eight. Will that be early enough?”

  Mr. Jasper put his hands upon his knees and turned to his friend.

  “I guess we can work our way in, can’t we, Eddy?” he chuckled, and Eddy, with equally simple pleasure, replied that they could.

  “Very well. Back to the house, chauffeur.” And, in a moment more, they were sailing back to the decrepit little cottage, where Lamb jumped out to carry the news to Ella. She was just coming out of the kitchen door in her sunbonnet to run over to the grocery store as Edward came up the steps. He grabbed her by both shoulders and dragged her out.

  “Come on; we’re going to take you along!” he threatened, and she did not know why, but, at the touch of his hands, she paled slightly. Her eyes never faltered, however, as she laughed and jerked herself away.

  “Not much, you don’t! I’m worried enough as it is with father in there—and you, of course.”

  He told her that they would not be home to supper, and, for a second time, she wistfully saw them driving away in the big red machine.

  Mr. Wallingford talked with the chauffeur for a few moments, and then the machine leaped forward with definiteness. Once or twice Mr. Wallingford looked back. The two in the tonneau were examining the cloth-topped tacks, and both were talking volubly. Mile after mile they were still at it, and the rich man felt relieved of all responsibility. The less he said in the matter the better; he had learned the invaluable lesson of when not to talk. So far as he was concerned, the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company was launched, and he was able to turn his attention to the science of running the car, a matter which, by the time they had reached their stopping point, he had picked up to the great admiration of the expert driver. For the last five miles the big man ran the machine himself, with the help of a guiding word or two, and when they finally stopped in front of the one pretentious hotel in the small town they had reached, he was so completely absorbed in the new toy that he was actually as nonchalant about the new company as he would have wished to appear. His passengers were surprised when they found that they had come twenty miles, and Mr. Wallingford showed them what a man who knows how to dine can do in a minor hotel. He had everybody busy, from the proprietor down. The snap of his fingers was as potent here as the clarion call of the trumpet in battle, and David Jasper, though he strove to disapprove, after sixty years of somnolence woke up and actually enjoyed pretentious luxury.