"A little fastening trick. Of no practical use—except, perhaps, for women's corsets!" Holt laughed. Kerrigan was silent.
"Patented?" he suggested, after a while.
"Everything I have is patented," Holt said with a touch of pride.
"May I bring it along," Kerrigan asked, "to show it to a friend?"
"Why, certainly!" Holt nodded. "Now, if you understand that the energy develops in geometric progression—"
And very efficiently did Matthew Kerrigan show Holt's fastening device to his friend—a prominent banker who had never heard of Kerrigan before, but had always money to sink, at a price, in worthy enterprises. Kerrigan returned to Holt.
"There may be something in that little thing of yours. Will you take a hundred dollars for it outright?"
But that intuition which sometimes warns the unworldly minded, and that mulish obstinacy which some men have, made Holt stand out for a share of the profits, and unwillingly Kerrigan and his associate had to allow it.
"It's a hold-up," they complained to each other bitterly, "but we can't do anything about it!"
So Holt was admitted to the profits of his patent, and for a while he dreamed dreams of wealth untellable; a wealth that would enable him to send his motherless three-year-old daughter to boarding-school and college and leave him in peace to work, with all appliances to hand—Stuttapparat and radium and everything—at the problem which had baffled scientific dreamers since the dawn of intelligence.