A CONQUEST.
When, at length, Phaeton got an answer from the chief engineer
concerning his invention, it seemed rather surly.
"This thing won't do at all, boy," said he. "It can't be made to work
on a large scale." And he handed the drawing to Phaeton, and then
turned his back to him and resumed his work.
Phaeton thrust it into his pocket, and walked out of the shop, quite
crestfallen. When he told us about it, Ned became indignant.
"I don't believe a word of it," said he; "I see through the whole plot.
The chief engineer has entered into a conspiracy with himself to crush
out your invention, because he knows it would do away with all the
fire-engines and hook-and-ladders, and the city wouldn't need a chief
engineer any more, and he couldn't draw that nice little salary of a
thousand dollars just for running to fires and bossing things."
"I didn't know that the firemen got any pay," said I. "I thought it was
only a patriotic duty,--besides all the fun."
"That's just it," said Ned. "The men who do the hard work don't get a
cent; but the chief engineer, who has more fun than any of us,--for he
can choose the best place to see the fire from, and can order the
engines to play any way he likes,--gets a thousand dollars a year."
I thought almost everybody had had a better place than Ned's to see the
Novelty Works' fire, but kept my thoughts to myself.
"I'll spoil that job for him," continued Ned.
"How can you do it?" said I.
"By getting Fay's invention patented, and then having it brought before
the Common Council at their very next meeting. We might let this city
use it free; that would give us a great reputation for patriotism, and
bring it into notice, and then we could make all the other cities pay a
big price for it."
"Wouldn't some people oppose it?" said I.
"Yes, the boys would, because it spoils all the fun of fires; and the
chief engineers would, because it spoils their salaries; but all the
other people would go for it, because it saves millions of dollars'
worth of property. The women, especially, would be friendly to it,
because it saves the scare."
"What do you mean by that?" said I, not quite understanding him.
"Why, you must know," said Ned, "that when a woman wakes up in the
middle of the night and finds the four walls of her room on fire, and
the floor hotter than an oven, and the ceiling cracking open, and the
bed-clothes blazing, she's awfully scared, as a general thing."
"I don't doubt it," said I.
"But Fay's invention puts out the fires so quick, besides keeping them
from spreading, that it saves all that anguish of mind, as well as the
property."
"It seems to me it's a good plan," said I, referring to Ned's proposal
for taking out a patent at once.
"Then we'll go to Aunt Mercy and get the money right away," said he.
"What do you say, Fay?"
This conversation took place in the printing-office. Phaeton, after
telling us the result of his interviews with the chief engineer, had
taken no further part in it, but busied himself setting type.
"I've no special objection," said he, in answer to Ned's question.
"Then let's have your drawing," said Ned, and with that in hand, he and
I set off for Aunt Mercy's.
"I don't feel quite right," said Ned, as we went along, "about the way
Aunt Mercy has always misunderstood these things. This time I am
determined to make her understand it right."
"You mean to let her know that it's Phaeton's invention, and not
yours?" said I.
"That's the main thing," said he. "I've got a good deal of credit that
belonged to him; but I never meant to take it. She has always managed
to misunderstand, somehow, and I could never see any way to correct it
without spoiling the whole business."
"But if you tell her that, will she let you have the money?" said I.
"Not so easily, of course," said Ned; "but still Aunt Mercy's a
good-hearted woman, after all, and I think I can talk her into doing
the generous thing by Fay."
We found Aunt Mercy apparently in an unpleasant mood, from some
mysterious cause. But Ned talked away in a lively manner, and when she
began to brighten up, he gradually approached the subject which he
really had in mind.
"Aunty," said he, sympathetically, "don't you ever feel afraid of
fire?"
"Yes, indeed, Edmund Burton," said she. "I'm afraid of it all the time,
especially since I've had this new girl in the kitchen. It seems to me
she's very careless."
"If your house should take fire in the night, and burn up the stairs
the first thing, how would you get out?" said Ned.
"I really don't know," said she. "I ought, by good rights, to be taken
out of the window and down a ladder by some gallant fireman. But it
seems to me they don't have any such gentlemen now for firemen as they
used to. They're more of a rowdy set."
"They're certainly not very gentle," said Ned. "Did you hear how they
knocked Mr. Glidden's house and furniture to pieces at the last fire?"
"Yes; but why were they allowed to do so?" said Aunt Mercy.
"That's it," said Ned. "Somebody, out of all the people there, ought to
have had sense enough to stop them. As for myself, I wasn't there. I
was going, but was detained on the way."
"If you had been, you'd have stopped them, I've no doubt," said his
aunt.
"I should have tried to, I hope," said Ned. "And now, Aunty, I'd like
to show you a little invention for doing away with all those horrors."
"Something you want me to furnish money to make a muddle of, I
suppose?" said she.
"Well, yes, if it pleases you," and here Ned produced the drawing of
the fire-extinguisher. "And now I want to tell you, Aunty, that this is
not my own invention, but my brother's; and I think it's about the best
that he's ever made."
"U-m-m-m," said Aunt Mercy.
Ned then proceeded to explain the drawing.
"I see it all quite plainly," said Aunt Mercy, when he had finished.
"My house takes fire----"
"I hope not," said Ned.
"The alarm is given, and this thing is brought out----"
"Just so," said Ned.
"In about a minute it is clapped right down over the house----"
"Precisely," said Ned.
"And smothers the fire instantly----"
"That's it exactly," said Ned.
"And smothers me in it, as well."
Ned was dumbfounded for a moment, but soon came to his senses.
"As to that," said he, "it's to be supposed that you'd run out of the
house just before we put on the extinguisher. But the fact is, you've
suggested an improvement already. I guess Fay must have inherited his
inventive genius from you. Of course we shall have to build the
extinguisher with several flaps, like tent-doors, so that if there
_are_ any people in the house, they can easily escape."
"And you think I ought to furnish that brother of yours the money
necessary to make a proper muddle of this thing?"
"I should be glad if you would," said Ned.
"Well," said Aunt Mercy, "there's a piece of his work in the kitchen
now. I wish you'd step out and look at it, and _then_ tell me what you
think."
Ned and I walked out to the kitchen. There stood the skeletons of half
a dozen chairs--those from which we had taken the rounds to make our
rope-ladder.
"Those look well, don't they?" said Aunt Mercy, who had followed us.
"They belonged to my great-grandfather, and were probably not new in
his time. I had them stored at your house, and yesterday I sent a
furniture man to get them and polish them up for me. He brings them
home in this plight, and tells me the mischief has been done recently,
for the saw-cuts are all fresh. They were priceless relics; I wouldn't
have taken ten dollars apiece for them; and your brother has ruined
every one of them."
Ned was staggered, and I wondered what he would find to say. But he was
equal to the occasion.
"Aunty," said he, "Fay didn't do that----"
"Don't tell me, child; nobody but a boy would ever have thought of such
mischief."
"Very true," said Ned; "it _was_ a boy--two boys--and we two are the
ones."
Aunt Mercy turned pale with astonishment. Apparently it had never
occurred to her that Ned could do any mischief.
"We sawed out the rounds," he continued, "to make a rope-ladder. But we
didn't know the chairs were good for anything, or we wouldn't have
touched them. If there's any way we can put them in again, we'll do it.
I suppose we can get them all--except a few that the policeman carried
off."
Aunt Mercy was still more confounded. "Rope-ladder"--"policeman"--that
sounded like robbery and State-prison.
"Go home, Edmund Burton," said she, as soon as she could get her
breath. "Go home at once, and take away out of my house this bad boy
who has led you into evil ways."
Ned wanted to explain my innocence; but I took myself out of the house
with all possible haste, and he soon followed.
"It's of no use," said he. "Aunt Mercy's heavily prejudiced against
me."
When all this was told at the Rogers's breakfast-table next morning,
Mr. Rogers could not help laughing heartily. He said his sister valued
the chairs far above their real worth, though of course that did not
excuse us for sawing out the rounds.
"But as for patenting your invention, boys," said he, "you need not
trouble yourselves. It has been tried."
"How can it have been tried?" said Phaeton.
"As a great many others are," said his father. "By being stolen first.
The reason why our worthy chief engineer kept putting you off, was
because he thought it was a good invention and wanted to appropriate
it. He had a model built, and applied for a patent through lawyer
Stevens, from whom I have the information. The application was rejected
by the Patent Office, and he had just received notice of it when you
called on him yesterday, and found him so surly. His model cost him
forty dollars, the Patent Office fee on a rejected application is
fifteen dollars, and he had to pay his lawyer something besides. You
can guess at the lawyer's fee, and the express company's charge for
taking the model and drawings to Washington, and then reckon up how
much his dishonesty probably cost him."
"But what puzzles me," said Ned, "is the rejection. That's such a
splendid invention, I should think they would have given it a patent
right away."
"It does seem so," said Mr. Rogers, who never liked to discourage the
boys by pointing out the fatal defects in their contrivances; "but the
Commissioner probably had some good reason for it. A great many
applications are rejected, for one cause or another."
Phaeton had suddenly ceased to take any part or interest in the
conversation, and Ned observed that he was cutting his bread and butter
into very queer shapes. One was the profile of a chair; another was a
small cylinder, notched on the end.
As soon as breakfast was over, Phaeton took his hat and disappeared. He
went up to his aunt's house, and asked to see the mutilated chairs.
"I think they can be mended," said he.
"Of course they can," said his aunt. "The cabinetmaker can put in new
rounds, but those wouldn't be the old rounds, and he'd be obliged to
take the chairs apart, more or less, to get them in. I don't want
anything new about them, and I don't want them weakened by being pulled
apart. Unless they are the same old chairs, every splinter of them,
that stood in Grandfather's dining-room, they can have no value for
me."
"I think I could put in the old rounds without taking the chairs
apart," said Phaeton; "and if you'll let me, I'll take one home and try
it."
"Try what you like," said Aunt Mercy. "You can't make them look any
worse than they do now."
So Phaeton took up one of the ancient chairs, inverted it and placed it
on his head as the easiest way of carrying it, and marched home.
His next care was to secure the missing rounds. He came over to our
house and got the rope-ladder, and then went to the police-station and
had the good fortune to recover the piece which the over-shrewd
policeman had carried off as evidence. This gave him the whole
twenty-four rounds, and it did not take him long to select from them
the four that had been sawed from the particular chair which he had in
hand. Ned and I had done our work hurriedly, and somewhat roughly, and
no two were sawed precisely alike. We had sawed them so that stubs,
perhaps an inch long, were left sticking out from the legs.
Phaeton procured a fine saw, and sawed one of the rounds in two,
lengthwise, thus splitting it in halves, each of which, of course, had
one flat side and one curved side.
Then he sawed in each of the two stubs which had originally been parts
of that same round, a notch, or "shoulder," which cut away about half
of the stub,--the upper side of one and the lower side of the
other,--carefully saving the pieces that came out of the notches.
Then he put the two halves of the round together, as they were before
being sawed apart,--except that he slid them by each other, lengthwise,
a distance equal to the length of the notches in the stubs.
[Illustration: HOW THE CHAIR WAS MENDED.]
Now, as he held the reconstructed round in its place in the chair, it
just fitted, and there was sufficient overlap on the stubs to make a
secure fastening possible. Near each end there was a small vacant
space, into which the pieces that had been cut out to make the notches
in the stubs exactly fitted.
Phaeton procured a pot of glue, and fastened the pieces together and in
place. To give the work greater strength, he carefully bored a hole
through the stub and the overlapping end of the round, put in a piece
of large copper wire, a trifle longer than the hole, and, holding a
large hammer against one end, gently pounded on the other with a
tack-hammer, till he had flattened it out into a rivet-head; then
reversed the hammers, and made a head on the other end.
Finally, as he had no vise or hand-screws, he placed a strip of wood on
each side of the mended round, tied a piece of strong cord in a loose
hanging-loop around each end, put a stick through, and twisted them up
tight,--the sticks resting against the legs of the chair, which
prevented the cords from untwisting. He thus made what a surgeon would
call a couple of tourniquets, to hold his work firmly together while
the glue was hardening.
Ned and I had watched all these operations with intense interest.
"I tell you what 'tis," said Ned, "Fay sometimes makes mistakes when he
goes sailing off in the realms of imagination with his inventive
genius, like that fire-extinguisher; but when you come down to a real
thing that's got to be fixed, and nobody else can fix it, he's right
there every time."
Phaeton treated the other three rounds of the chair in the same manner,
and then set it away for the glue to harden. When that had taken place,
he took off the tourniquets, scraped and sand papered the rounds, so as
to leave no unevenness at the edges of the pieces, and then varnished
them.
Waiting for that varnish to dry was one of the severest trials of
patience we ever endured. But it was dry at last, and of course Ned and
I were proud to go with Phaeton when he carried home his work.
He left the chair in the hall, where Ned and I also remained, and went
in first to speak to his aunt.
"Seems to me things are mightily changed," said Ned, in a humiliated
tone, "when Fay walks in to see Aunt Mercy, and I stay outside. But I
suppose it's all right."
We heard his aunt say to Phaeton:
"I'd given up looking for you. I thought you'd find you couldn't do it;
but I know you tried hard, poor boy, and I'm just as much obliged to
you."
Presently Phaeton came out and got the chair, and this time we went in
with him.
He set it down before his astonished aunt, and carefully explained to
her the whole process, showing her that not a splinter of any but the
original wood had been used.
That cobbled-up old chair went straight to Aunt Mercy's heart, and
seated Phaeton in her affections forever. She made us stay and take tea
with her, and after tea we took home the other five chairs, to be
similarly treated; Phaeton marching first with two on his head, then
Ned with two more, and I bringing up the rear with the odd one on my
head.
[Illustration: TAKING HOME THE CHAIRS.]