JOHNNY FLUSHES A SKULKER
Trembling with suppressed excitement, his brow deeply furrowed, Johnny
lifted the lid to the lunch-box, then stared in surprise and disgust. The
box contained, not the precious steel bars of unusual and as yet unknown
composition, but a small twist drill, worth, perhaps, a dime. For a
moment he stared at the thing, then picked it up and thrust it into his
pocket.
“Sneak thief! Petty larceny of the pettiest kind. But, anyway, I’ll
report it to the chief. He may want to do something about it.”
The rest of that night, waiting in the shadow of a gigantic sheet-steel
press, in full view of the vault where rested the remaining bars of
steel, Johnny saw no movement, heard no sound that told him there were
other human beings in the building save himself and the regular night
watchman, who made his monotonous hourly rounds, pausing only to punch a
clock here and there. But motionless and silent as they might be, Johnny
knew there were at least two persons in that building who were there
without leave or license.
To attempt to run down a single individual in the vast plant, with its
labyrinth of aisles, with thousands of machines, drill presses, millers,
forges, moulders, cranes, conveyors, with its seemingly tangled mass of
overhead equipment and its endless underground tunnels, would be equal to
the task of capturing a fish with a hand-net on the bottom of the
Atlantic. To discover the person would be almost impossible, and even if
he were discovered, his capture would be difficult indeed. Only the best
of good fortune could crown such an effort with success.
Johnny knew there were two men. One was he who had attempted to tamper
with the vault’s lock, and the other was the originator of the mysterious
white fire. That the fire was produced by electric currents set to
operate upon certain given contacts, Johnny could not believe. In the
case of the knob to the vault’s door, this might be true, but in that of
the aluminum casting such a theory was impossible, for Johnny knew there
could have been no prearranged electrical contacts.
The casting had been on the floor. Johnny had lifted it to his vise and
had clamped it there. No one had been near it, save he himself, from that
time until the mysterious heat had enabled him to do the work of repair
by welding. How could the heat have come there? That, he could not tell.
Who had created it? He could not even guess. What had been the purpose in
either case? Was he friend or enemy? What would be his next strange
demonstration of power? All these remained unanswered. Of one thing alone
Johnny was positive: The person had been in the building and was there
still.
The thought made him distinctly uncomfortable. “Why,” he thought
suddenly, “if he is our enemy, he has but to burn out the lock to the
vault and the door will swing open of its own weight!”
Then he thought of himself. He had an uncomfortable conviction that this
heat might be applied anywhere—on his own body, like as not. At times he
saw himself racing about the factory tortured by an intolerable heat
which turned his garments to ashes and charred his very flesh. At such
times as these he rose and shook himself free from disturbing fancies.
He tried in vain to remember any great discovery which would make such
intense detached heat possible. He could think of none.
“It’s a discovery! A great discovery!” he whispered at last, “and the
discoverer, instead of bettering the world with it, is playing with it
just to make one person most awfully uneasy and unhappy. And yet,” he
paused to think, “and yet he did send that chap gliding away from the
vault door as if his life depended upon it.”
In spite of all his forebodings, nothing further disturbed the vast
silence of the night, and Johnny was ready, upon the arrival of his
employer in the morning, to make his report. He had decided to tell of
the lunch-box and twist drill episode, but to say nothing, for the
present, of the strange white fire. He felt that his employer would
simply be perplexed and disturbed by this news, without in any way
offering a contribution to the solution of the problem. This was an
affair which a single individual might best work upon alone.
“No,” said his employer, as Johnny displayed the small twist drill and
told how he came into possession of it, “we’re not, as you have already
suggested, interested in that sort of thing. If there is a sneak-thief in
our factory, he will receive his just deserts in due time, and that with
no assistance from us. Our factory is run on the honor plan. Every man is
put upon his honor. If he proves unworthy of the trust, his
fellow-workmen will find it out first of all, and, since the honor of the
entire group is at stake, they will request him to mend his ways or draw
the pay due him and leave. It is useless for him to attempt to deceive
them. He must be on the square or get out.
“In this case,” he smiled, “it is probably not a case of theft at all; it
is very probable that this drill was borrowed by the workman for some
work at home, with the consent of his foreman.”
Johnny blushed uncomfortably.
“Your plan, though,” the manager hastened to assure him, “is a good one.
Keep it up, and you may catch something yet.
“I have said,” he went on, “that we are not interested in petty thefts.
We are not. This perhaps makes you wonder that you are employed as you
are at the present time. But this is quite another matter. The taking of
those two bars of steel, insignificant as they may seem—a few pounds in
all—is of great importance to us, since, as I have explained to you, it
may mean the revealing of a valuable secret.
“The question of one’s right to keep a commercial secret is a delicate
one. From a moral standpoint it depends entirely upon the type of secret.
Unquestionably there are some secrets which no one has a right to keep.
Many great secrets have been thrown open to the world as soon as they are
discovered. Radium is a case in point. If our nation were at war with
some other nation at the present time, it would undoubtedly be our duty
to share our secret steel process, should we be so fortunate as to
unravel all its mysteries, with the Government. Since we are not at war,
it does not appear to be our duty.
“The law allows us to retain our secret until it has been patented.
However, if another should discover it, we would hardly be in a position
to claim a share in the patent right, since no one can prove that the
other person did not possess the secret first.
“You will see then, that any person who attempts to discover our secret
can hardly be classed as a criminal; he is simply playing the game in a
rather unfair way. There have been secrets enough carried from one
manufacturing plant to another. Retaining one’s commercial secrets and
reaping advantages from them is part of the romance of business. You will
find few manufacturing plants, big or little, but have their secrets. In
one with the magnitude of our own there are many secrets; the one you are
guarding is but one of them.”
“But—” Johnny began, then hesitated.
“But what? Come on; let’s hear what’s on your mind.”
“Don’t you think it’s really one’s duty to give the whole world the
benefit of his secrets?”
“In time, yes. But not at once, unprotected by patents. We have spent a
great deal of money in discovering these secrets. We have a right to get
that money back with a fair profit.”
“I see,” said Johnny.
“And you are ready to go on with the search?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Report to me when there is any new development. Good morning, and
better luck next time.”
That night the electro-magnet trap caught nothing. Johnny went to work
with a sense of defeat disturbing his usually well-composed mind. Had the
two bars of steel been carried at once from the factory, and were his
well-laid plans to come to naught? Would the steel be tested and
analyzed, the formula discovered and patented by the intruder?
“At least,” he told himself, “I can guard securely that which is left.
“Mr. Jordan,” he said to the aged keeper of the vault by day, as he came
to take his post for the night, “can’t they work that steel as it is?”
“What steel?” The old man gave him a sharp look.
“You know,” Johnny smiled.
“Oh!” the other laughed. “No, it doesn’t seem to respond properly to the
heat they have tried on it; it crumples up like mud when they try to work
it. And when it comes to analyzing it, there’s an element or two they
don’t understand. It’s as if the stuff was from a meteor dropped out of
the sky.”
Johnny thought of these things on the watch that night. “I’d like to have
a piece to experiment with,” he told himself. “This white fire, now; I
wonder how that would affect it. Fine chance to try that,” he laughed to
himself, “First place, no steel; second place, no white fire.”
A week passed with no reappearance either of the mysterious white fire or
the stranger who had attempted to tamper with the lock of the vault.
Johnny was growing uneasy. It was true that his pay had been increased
enough to enable him to put away a generous sum at the end of the week
toward the paying of his debt of honor. But the task was growing
monotonous, and, besides, there was no opportunity to work on his chummy
roadster that was to have been built up from salvage.
But one dark night, when the wind was banging at the steel-framed windows
of the plant, and rain beat upon the skylights in great torrents,
adventure came stalking his way in the form of a crouching, skulking
human who made his way, all oblivious of Johnny hidden by the shadow of a
forge, to a dark corner of the forge-room, where he rattled about in a
pile of imperfect forgings. He had just turned and was about to skulk
away when Johnny’s lips framed a word.
The word was not uttered, for like a flash it came to him that in that
particular spot there was no opportunity to head the man off and capture
him.
He thought of the strange entrance to the scrap-conveyor tunnel which had
been shown him by his employer. The conveyor was not running. Once he had
dropped down upon it, he could stoop and run forward upon its surface
some two hundred feet. He would then come out at a place in the direction
in which the man was going. In that spot a trick-wall might be made to
rise and head him off. He would be trapped!
A few silent steps and Johnny was upon the spot above the scrap-conveyor.
His hand went up to the light wire. Straight down he dropped. The next
minute he was racing along the conveyor.
At the end of this race he took a long breath and waited. There would be
a struggle, he knew that. The best man would win; there was no one to
aid.
With a sharp intake of breath, he touched a button, a trap flew open.
With a leap he cleared the opening and fell sprawling. His estimate of
time had failed him. The skulking stranger had tripped over him and they
had gone down together!