by Otto Penzler
There began, now, busy days at the factory. In the third floor of their building a machine shop was installed. Three thousand dollars went there. Outside, in a large experimental shop, work was being rapidly pushed on machinery which would make tacks with cross-corrugated heads. Genius Wallingford had secretly secured drawings of tack machinery, and devised slight changes which would evade the patents, adding dies that would make the roughened tops. A final day came when, set up in their shop, the first faulty machine pounded out tacks ready for later covering, and every stockholder who had been called in to witness the working of the miracle went away profoundly convinced that fortune was just within his reach. They had their first patent granted now, and the sight of it, on stiff parchment with its bit of bright ribbon, was like a glimpse at dividends. It was right at this time, however, that one cat was let out of the bag. The information came first to Edward Lamb, through the inquiries of a commercial rating company, that their Boston capitalist was a whited sepulcher, so far as capital went. He had not a cent. The secretary, in the privacy of their office, put the matter to him squarely, and he admitted it cheerfully. He was glad that the exposé had come—it suited his present course, and he would have brought it about himself before long.
“Who said I had money?” he demanded. “I never said so.”
“Well, but the way you live,” objected Lamb.
“I have always lived that way, and I always shall. Not only is it a fact that I have no money, but I must have some right away.”
“I haven’t any more to lend.”
“No, Eddy; I’m not saying that you have. I am merely stating that I have to have some. I am being bothered by people who want it, and I cannot work on the covering machine until I get it,” and Mr. Wallingford coolly telephoned for his big automobile to be brought around.
They sat silently in the office for the next five minutes, while Lamb slowly appreciated the position they were in. If J. Rufus should “lay down on them” before the covering machine was perfected, they were in a bad case. They had already spent over twenty thousand dollars in equipping their office, their machine shop, and perfecting their stamping machine, and time was flying.
“You might sell a little of your stock,” suggested Lamb.
“We have an agreement between us to hold control.”
“But you can still sell a little of yours, and stay within that amount. I’m not selling any of mine.”
Mr. Wallingford drew from his pocket a hundred-share stock certificate.
“I have already sold some. Make out fifty shares of this to L. W. Ramsay, twenty-five to E. H. Wyman, and the other twenty-five to C. D. Wyman.”
Ramsay and the Wyman Brothers! Ramsay was the automobile dealer; Wyman Brothers were Wallingford’s tailors.
“So much? Why didn’t you sell them at least part from our extra treasury stock? There is twenty thousand there, replacing the ten thousand of the old company.”
“Why didn’t I? I needed the money. I got twenty-five hundred cash from Ramsay, and let him put twenty-five on account. I agreed to take one thousand in trade from Wyman Brothers, and got four thousand cash there.”
The younger man looked at him angrily.
“Look here, Wallingford; you’re hitting it up rather strong, ain’t you? This makes six thousand five hundred, besides two thousand you borrowed from me, that you have spent in three months. You have squandered money since you came here at the rate of three thousand a month, besides all the bills I know you owe, and still you are broke. How is it possible?”
“That’s my business,” retorted Wallingford, and his face reddened with assumed anger. “We are not going to discuss it. The point is that I need money and must have it.”
The automobile drew up at the door, and J. Rufus, who was in his automobile suit, put on his cap and riding coat.
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Rayling.”
Lamb frowned. Rayling was sixty miles away.
“And you will not be back until midnight, I suppose.”
“Hardly.”
“Why, confound it, man, you can’t go!” exclaimed Lamb. “They’re waiting for you now over at the machine shop, for further instructions on the covering device.”
“They’ll have to wait!” announced J. Rufus, and stalked out of the door.
The thing had been deliberately followed up. Mr. Wallingford had come to the point where he wished his flock to know that he had no financial resources whatever, and that they would have to support him. It was the first time that he had departed from his suavity, and he left Lamb in a panic. He had been gone scarcely more than an hour when David Jasper came in.
“Where is Wallingford?” he asked.
“Gone out for an automobile trip.”
“When will he be back?”
“Not to-day.”
Jasper’s face was white, but the flush of slow anger was creeping upon his cheeks.
“Well, he ought to be; his note is due.”
“What note?” inquired Lamb, startled.
“His note for a thousand dollars that I went security on.”
“You might just as well renew it, or pay it. I had to renew mine,” said Lamb. “Dave, the man is a four-flusher, without a cent to fall back on. I just found it out this morning. Why didn’t you tell me that he was borrowing money of you?”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was borrowing money of you?” retorted his friend.
They looked at each other hotly for a moment, and then both laughed. The big man was too much for them to comprehend.
“We are both cutting our eye teeth,” Lamb decided. “I wonder how many more he’s borrowed money from.”
“Lewis, for one. He got fifteen hundred from him. Lewis told me this morning, up at Kriegler’s.”
Lamb began figuring. To the eight thousand five hundred of which he already knew, here was twenty-five hundred more to be added—eleven thousand dollars that the man had spent in three months! Some bills, of course, he had paid, but the rest of it had gone as the wind blew. It seemed impossible that a man could spend money at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a day, but this one had done it, and that at first was the point which held them aghast, to the forgetting of their own share in it. They could not begin to understand it until Lamb recalled one incident that had impressed him. Wallingford had taken his wife and two friends to the opera one night. They had engaged a private dining room at the hotel, indulging in a dinner that, with flowers and wines, had cost over a hundred dollars. Their seats had cost fifty. There had been a supper afterward where the wine flowed until long past midnight. Altogether, that evening alone had cost not less than three hundred dollars—and the man lived at that gait all the time! In his home, even when himself and wife were alone, seven-course dinners were served. Huge fowls were carved for but the choicest slices, were sent away from the table and never came back again in any form. Expensive wines were opened and left uncorked after two glasses, because some whim had led the man to prefer some other brand.
Lamb looked up from his figuring with an expression so troubled that his older friend, groping as men will do for cheering words, hit upon the idea that restored them both to their equilibrium.
“After all,” suggested Jasper, “it’s none of our business. The company is all right.”
“That’s so,” agreed Lamb, recovering his enthusiasm in a bound. “The tack itself can’t be beat, and we are making progress toward getting on the market. Suppose the man were to sell all his stock. It wouldn’t make any difference, so long as he finishes that one machine for covering the tack.”
“He’s a liar!” suddenly burst out David Jasper. “I wish he had his machinery done and was away from us. I can’t sleep well when I do business with a liar.”
“We don’t want to get rid of him yet,” Lamb reminded him, “and, in the meantime, I suppose he will have to have money in order to keep him at work. You’d better get him to give you stock to cover your note and t
ell Lewis to do the same. We’ll all go after him on that point, and get protected.”
David looked troubled in his turn.
“I can’t afford it. When I took up that five thousand dollars’ worth of stock I only had fifteen hundred in the building loan, and I put a mortgage on one of my houses to make up the amount. If I have to stand this thousand I’ll have to give another mortgage, and I swore I’d never put a plaster on my property.”
“The tack’s good for it,” urged Lamb, with conviction.
“Yes, the tack’s good,” admitted Jasper.
That was the thing which held them all in line—the tack! Wallingford himself might be a spendthrift and a ne’er-do-well, but their faith in the tack that was to make them all rich was supreme. Lamb picked up one from his desk and handed it to his friend. The very sight of it, with its silken covered top, imagination carrying it to its place in a carpet where it would not show, was most reassuring, and behind it, looming up like the immense open cornucopia of Fortune herself, was the Eureka Company, the concern that would buy them out at any time for a million dollars if they were foolish enough to sell. After all, they had nothing to worry them.
David Jasper went up to the bank and had them hold the note until the next day, which they did without comment. David was “good” for anything he wanted. The next day he got hold of Wallingford to get him to renew the note and to give him stock as security for it. When J. Rufus came out of that transaction, in which David had intended to be severe with him, he had four thousand dollars in his pocket, for he had transferred to his endorser five thousand dollars of his stock and Jasper had placed another mortgage on his property. The single tack in his vest pocket had assumed proportions far larger than his six cottages and his home. It was the same with Lewis and one of the others, and, for a week, the inventor struggled with the covering machine.
No one seemed to appreciate the fact that here their genius was confronting a problem that was most difficult of solution. To them it meant a mere bit of mechanical juggling, as certain to be accomplished as the simple process of multiplication; but to glue a piece of cloth to so minute and irregular a thing as the head of a tack, to put it on firmly and leave it trimmed properly at the edges, to do this trick by machinery and at a rate rapid enough to insure profitable operation, was a Herculean task, and the stockholders would have been aghast had they known that J. Rufus was in no hurry to solve this last perplexity. He knew better than to begin actual manufacture. The interference report on the first patent led him to make secret inquiries, the result of which convinced him that the day they went on the market would be the day that they would be disrupted by vigorous suits, backed by millions of capital. He had been right in stating that a patent is of no value except as a basis for lawsuits.
There was only one thing which offset his shrewdness in realizing these conditions, and that was his own folly. Had he been content to devote himself earnestly to the accomplishment even of his own ends, the many difficulties into which he had floundered would never have existed. Always there was the pressing need for money. He was a colossal example of the fact that easily gotten pelf is of no value. His wife was shrewder than he. She had no social aspirations whatever at this time. They were both of them too bohemian of taste and habit to conform to the strict rules which society imposes in certain directions, even had they been able to enter the charmed circle. She cared only to dress as well as the best and to go to such places of public entertainment as the best frequented, to show herself in jewels that would attract attention and in gowns that would excite envy; but she did tire of continuous suspense—and she was not without keenness of perception.
“Jim,” she asked, one night, “how is your business going?”
“You see me have money every day, don’t you? There’s nothing you want, is there?” was the evasive reply.
“Not a thing, except this: I want a vacation. I don’t want to be wondering all my life when the crash is to come. So far as I have seen, this looks like a clean business arrangement that you are in now; but, even if it is, it can’t stand the bleeding that you are giving it. If you are going to get out of this thing, as you have left everything else you were ever in, get out right away. Realize every dollar you can at once, and let us take a trip abroad.”
“I can’t let go just yet,” he replied.
She looked up, startled.
“Nothing wrong in this, is there, Jim?”
“Wrong!” he exclaimed. “Fanny, I never did anything in my life that the law could get me for. The law is a friend of mine. It was framed up especially for the protection of J. Rufus Wallingford. I can shove ordinary policemen off the sidewalk and make the chief stand up and salute when I go past. The only way I could break into a jail would be to buy one.”
She shook her head.
“You’re too smart a man to stay out of jail, Jim. The penitentiary is full of men who were too clever to go there. You’re a queer case, anyhow. If you had buckled down to straight business, with your ability you’d be worth ten million dollars to-day.”
He chuckled.
“Look at the fun I’d have missed, though.”
But for once she would not joke about their position.
“No,” she insisted, “you’re looking at it wrong, Jim. You had to leave Boston; you had to leave Baltimore; you had to leave Philadelphia and Washington; you will have to leave this town.”
“Never mind, Fanny,” he admonished her. “There are fifty towns in the United States as good as this, and they’ve got coin in every one of them. They’re waiting for me to come and get it, and when I have been clear through the list I’ll start all over again. There’s always a fresh crop of bait-nibblers, and money is being turned out at the mint every day.”
“Have it your own way,” responded Mrs. Wallingford; “but you will be wise if you take my advice to accumulate some money while you can this time, so that we do not have to take a night train out in the suburbs, as we did when we left Boston.”
Mr. Wallingford returned no answer. He opened the cellar door and touched the button that flooded his wine cellar with light, going down himself to hunt among his bottles for the one that would tempt him most. Nevertheless, he did some serious thinking, and, at the next board-of-directors’ meeting, he announced that the covering machine was well under way, showing them drawings of a patent application he was about to send off.
It was a hopeful sign—one that restored confidence. He must now organize a selling department and must have a Chicago branch. They listened with respect, even with elation. After all, while this man had deceived them as to his financial standing when he first came among them, he was well posted, for their benefit, upon matters about which they knew nothing. Moreover, there was the great tack! He went to Chicago and appointed a Western sales agent. When he came back he had sold fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of his stock through the introductions gained him by this man.
J. Rufus Wallingford was “cleaning up.”
Chapter VII
Wherein the Great Tack Inventor Suddenly Decides to Change His Location
“In two weeks we will be ready for the market,” Wallingford told inquiring members of the company every two weeks, and, in the meantime, the model for the covering device, in which change after change was made, went on very slowly, while the money went very rapidly. A half dozen of the expensive stamping machines had already been installed, and the treasury was exhausted. The directors began to look worried.
One morning, while Ella Jasper was at her sweeping in the front room, the big red automobile chugged up to the gate and J. Rufus Wallingford got out. He seemed gigantic as he loomed up on the little front porch and filled the doorway.
“Where is your father?” he asked her.
“He is over at Kriegler’s,” she told him, and directed him how to find the little German saloon where the morning “lunch club” gathered.
Instead of turning, he stood still for a moment and looked at her slowly from head t
o foot. There was that in his look which made her tremble, which made her flush with shame, and when at last he turned away she sat down in a chair and wept.
At Kriegler’s, Wallingford found Jasper and two other stockholders, and he drew them aside to a corner table. For a quarter of an hour he was jovial with them, and once more they felt the magnetic charm of his personality, though each one secretly feared that he had come again for money. He had, but not for himself.
“The treasury is empty,” he calmly informed them, during a convenient pause, “and the Corley Machine Company insist on having their bill paid. We owe them two thousand dollars, and it will take five thousand more to complete the covering machine.”
