“I'll give you a last chance,” Walter said. “Either you do what I want, or I won't do what you want. Don't ask me again after this, because——”
Adams interrupted him fiercely. “'Ask you again!' Don't worry about that, my boy! All I ask you is to get out o' my room.”
“Look here,” Walter said, quietly; and his lopsided smile distorted his livid cheek. “Look here: I expect YOU wouldn't give me three hundred dollars to save my life, would you?”
“You make me sick,” Adams said, in his bitterness. “Get out of here.”
Walter went out, whistling; and Adams drooped into his old chair again as the door closed. “OH, my, my!” he groaned. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy! The way of the transgressor——”
CHAPTER XVI
He meant his own transgression and his own way; for Walter's stubborn refusal appeared to Adams just then as one of the inexplicable but righteous besettings he must encounter in following that way. “Oh, Lordy, Lord!” he groaned, and then, as resentment moved him—“That dang boy! Dang idiot!” Yet he knew himself for a greater idiot because he had not been able to tell Walter the truth. He could not bring himself to do it, nor even to state his case in its best terms; and that was because he felt that even in its best terms the case was a bad one.
Of all his regrets the greatest was that in a moment of vanity and tenderness, twenty-five years ago, he had told his young wife a business secret. He had wanted to show how important her husband was becoming, and how much the head of the universe, J. A. Lamb, trusted to his integrity and ability. The great man had an idea: he thought of “branching out a little,” he told Adams confidentially, and there were possibilities of profit in glue.
What he wanted was a liquid glue to be put into little bottles and sold cheaply. “The kind of thing that sells itself,” he said; “the kind of thing that pays its own small way as it goes along, until it has profits enough to begin advertising it right. Everybody has to use glue, and if I make mine convenient and cheap, everybody'll buy mine. But it's got to be glue that'll STICK; it's got to be the best; and if we find how to make it we've got to keep it a big secret, of course, or anybody can steal it from us. There was a man here last month; he knew a formula he wanted to sell me, 'sight unseen'; but he was in such a hurry I got suspicious, and I found he'd managed to steal it, working for the big packers in their glue-works. We've got to find a better glue than that, anyhow. I'm going to set you and Campbell at it. You're a practical, wide-awake young feller, and Campbell's a mighty good chemist; I guess you two boys ought to make something happen.”