“How you goin’ to try it? You ain’t got any s-steam.”
Mr. Tidd scratched his head and looked at Mark reproachful-like, as if calling his attention to it was as bad as if Mark had come right up and taken steam away from him that he’d been saving for the purpose.
“It won’t run without steam,” he said, slow and worried. “Without steam a-sissin’ and strainin’ and workin’ it won’t do nothin’. It might just as well be a bag of potaters for all the good it is. Well, well! Um!” After a minute he brightened up like he always did. Worry and Mr. Tidd never could stay together long. “There’s some way out of it,” he said, “some way out of it. The trouble—the trouble seems to be, now I think of it, that no way comes into my head.”
He sighed and pulled a volume of the Decline and Fall out of his pocket and commenced to read. In less than a minute he’d forgotten all about us and the turbine and the steam and everything else in the world but those old Roman folks that went tearing and rampaging all over the world without much regard for anybody’s feelings, so I’ve always thought. How Mr. Tidd, a gentle, nice man, could be fond of such characters as those Romans was a mystery to me. He used to read pieces out of the Decline and Fall to us, and in the course of a year I calculate we heard most all of it. I can’t remember that those folks ever did anything but fight. From morning till night they were picking on somebody. What I’d like to know is, if the whole nation was always fighting, who tended the post-office and ran the stores and looked after things at home? Quite likely the womenfolks had to do that while their husbands were gallivanting around in Gaul or Egypt or other foreign parts. To my mind those Romans were a ridiculous lot.
“If you haven’t got steam here,” I said, trying to puzzle it out, “I guess you’ll have to take your model where steam is.”
“What’s that?” Mr. Tidd asked, looking up from his book. “What’s that? Oh yes. Of course.”
“Don’t you know anybody that’s got steam that’ll lend some to you?”
Mr. Tidd thought. Then he slapped his knee. “There’s Mr. Whiteley over at the power-plant. Him and me has got pretty friendly, one way and another. He’s got steam. Now, do you s’pose he’d be willin’? Do you?”
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t,” I told him; and Mark nodded his head once or twice to show he agreed.
The upshot of it was that Mr. Tidd went to see Mr. Whiteley and got permission to set up his turbine in a corner of the room where the engines and things were to give it a trial. When we found that out—I mean Binney and Plunk and me—we were all as wrought up about it as though it was our father doing the inventing.