“What can I do with these?” snorted J. Dupont Evans. “They are the sort that light only on their own box.” From his glance one might have gained the impression that he thought Merriwether Buck a fool.
“Great principle that,” said Merriwether Buck, cackling with hysteria. It was so funny that a dead man should want to smoke a cigar! He would let him play he was alive for fifty seconds longer.
“Principle?” said Evans. “Principle? What Principle?”
“Well,” said Merriwether, with the random argumentativeness of insanity, “it is a great principle. Apply that principle to some high explosive, for instance, and you have no more battleship flare-backs—no premature mine blasts——”
“Say,” the other suddenly interrupted, “are you an inventor?”
“Yes,” lied Merriwether Buck, glibly, although he had never given five seconds' thought to the subject of high explosives in his life. “That's how I know. I've invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite. But it won't explode by contact with fire, like powder. Won't explode with a jar, like dynamite. Won't freeze, like dynamite. Only one way to explode it—you've got to bring it into contact with a certain other chemical the same as scratching one of these matches on its own box.”
“The deuce, young man!” said the other. “There's a fortune in it! Is it on the market at all?”
“No,” said Merriwether Buck, raising his pistol hand slightly and thrusting it a bit forward, under the mask of his coat pocket, “no money to start it going.”
“Hum,” mused the other. “I tell you what you do, young man. You come along to lunch with me and we'll talk the thing over—money and all.”
And the directing deities of New York struck twice on all the city clocks, and striking, winked.