Benson had by this time lost all hope of finding anything like continuity in the big man’s mind, but he answered the query.
“Yes, I was near enough; Stribling was up on the tank and I passed the cans up to him, one at a time—and spilled the stuff all over me doing it. There wasn’t any name on them. They were just plain square tin cans; that’s all.”
Sprague got up and crossed over to Benson’s chair.
“Spilled it on you, eh? Is this the stain of it on your coat?” he asked; and when Benson nodded: “It’s too bad to spoil a perfectly good working-coat that way. Suppose you let me have it and I’ll see if I can’t take those spots out of it.”
Benson obeyed, half-contemptuously, and, together with the two who had taken no part in the colloquy, looked on curiously while the expert, who had apparently lost all interest in everything save the coat-cleaning, swiftly treated the stained patches with various chemicals, put the resultant washings into a beaker and began to add ingredients from sundry bottles on the laboratory shelves, holding the beaker to the light after each fresh addition to note if there were changing colors in the solution.
At the close of the rapidly conducted experiment he poured a little of the solution into a tiny test-tube, which he proceeded to heat over the flame of a small alcohol lamp. This part of whatever experiment he was attempting appeared to be unsuccessful. Almost immediately the test-tube cracked with a miniature explosion, scattering bits of broken glass and extinguishing the flame of the little lamp.
Sprague tossed the neck of the shattered glass tube aside and returned the brown-duck shooting-coat to its owner. Benson put it on, and was curious enough to say: “Did you think you could find out what Stribling’s protective mixture was from those grease-spots?”
“Mere force of habit,” laughed the chemist, putting on his own coat. “I’m obliged to analyze everything I get hold of, you know; it’s a sort of disease with me, I guess.”
“But could you tell what it was, just from those discolored washings?” queried Maxwell.
“Perfectly. Mr. Stribling’s ‘patent’ is a compound in which the chief ingredient is a grease derived from the spent lye of the soap-makers, and one of the principal uses of which in the arts is, as Mr. Stribling says, to keep oils, and other things, from drying out.” Then, more pointedly to the superintendent: “I suppose you’ll go up to the tunnel and look the job over, making our careful young friend Stribling entirely happy, won’t you?”