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.