Mrs. Tidd was just the kind of person I thought she would be. She cooked lots of things and cooked them good; and, no matter how often Mark wanted to eat, she never said a word. Plunk and Binney Jenks and me got to going there a lot, and there was always cookies and pie and things. Of course, we didn’t go specially to eat, but knowing we’d get something wasn’t any drawback. I liked Mrs. Tidd, and sort of admired her, too. She was always working at something and managing things and keeping track of Mr. Tidd and Mark. I never heard her complain, and I don’t remember ever seeing her sit down except in the cool of the evening after supper.
I don’t want you to get the idea that Mr. Tidd was lazy or shiftless, because he wasn’t. He was just queer, and his memory was as long as a piece of string, which is the way we have in Wicksville of saying there was no knowing just how long it really was. Lots of times I’ve seen Mr. Tidd start out to do a job of work and forget all about it before he got a chance to commence. He was sure to forget if Mrs. Tidd didn’t take the Decline and Fall away from him before he went out of the door. Even that didn’t make it certain, because something to think about might pop into his head all of a sudden, and if it did he had to sit down and think about it then and there. He was a machinist complicated by inventions. Every time he saw you doing anything he’d stop right there and invent a better way for you to do it; and mostly the new ways he invented wouldn’t work.
It was an invention that had brought all the Tidds to Wicksville. Mark told us about it. It seems like Mr. Tidd had been inventing a new kind of machine or engine or something that he called a turbine. He’d been working on it a long time, making pictures of it and figuring it out in his head, but he never had a chance to get right down to business and actually invent it till a little while before they came to our town. Then an aunt of his up and died and left him some money. He quit his job right off and came to Wicksville, where it was quiet and cheap, to finish up doing the inventing. When he got it done he wouldn’t need a job any more because it would make him rich. We used to go out in the barn, where he was tinkering away, and watch him for hours at a time, and he never paid any more attention to us than as if we weren’t there at all. But he was careful about other folks and wouldn’t let them step a foot inside of the door. He was afraid somebody would see what he was up to and go do it first, which would have been a mean trick.
Mr. Tidd wasn’t what you call suspicious; he wasn’t always expecting somebody that he knew to do something to his engine, and I guess any man that had wanted to could have got into the workshop and looked it all over to his heart’s content by talking to Mr. Tidd for an hour or so and listening to him tell about the Roman Empire, and how it split down the middle and went all to smash. He was the kind-heartedest man in the world, I guess, and never could see any bad in any one—not in any one he really saw. He had a sort of far-away idea that there was bad folks, and that some of them might want to steal his invention, but if he had seen a man crawling through a window of the barn he’d have found some excuse for him. Anybody could fool him—that is, they could have if Mrs. Tidd hadn’t been there; but she kept her eye on him pretty close and saw to it he didn’t let any strangers come fooling around. If everybody had been as careful as she was this story wouldn’t have happened.
The real beginning of things didn’t look like anything important at all. It happened one afternoon when Mark Tidd and Plunk and Binney and me were hanging around the depot platform waiting for the train to come in. We didn’t expect anybody we knew to come, and there wasn’t any reason for our being there except that there wasn’t any reason for our being anywhere else. Plunk and I sat on one of those baggage-trucks that run along straight for a while and then turn up a hill at the end; Binney sat on a trunk; and Mark was on the platform, because that was the safest place for him and wouldn’t break down. It was hot and sleepy, and we wished we were somewheres else or that something exciting would happen. It didn’t, so we just sat there and talked, and finally we got to talking about Mr. Tidd’s engine. We’d seen him tinkering around it, and he’d told us about it, so we were interested.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” says Binney, “if it worked when he got it done! Us fellers could say all the rest of our lives that we knew intimate a inventor that was as big as Edison.”
We never had thought about that part of it before; but what Binney said was so, and we got more anxious than ever for things to turn out right.
“If it does,” says Plunk, “Mark’ll be rich, and maybe live to the hotel. Think of bein’ able to spend a dollar ’n’ a half every day for nothin’ but meals and a place to sleep.”
Mark he didn’t say anything, because he was drowsy and his head was nodding.
“Mr. Tidd says it’ll reverlutionize the world,” Binney put in. “He says if them Romans had had one of his gas-turbines the empire never’d have fell.”