“Did you know that he was spending some time in San Molinas?” Mason asked.
“Yes, I did,” Waid admitted. “I knew he was there quite a bit of the time. He telephoned to me several times from San Molinas.”
“I knew that also,” Charles Sabin interposed. “I didn’t know what he was doing there, but Dad was peculiar that way. You know, he’d go into a community, completely lose his identity, take an assumed name, and just mingle with people.”
“Have you any idea why he did it?” Mason asked. “That is, was he after anything in particular?”
“As to that, I couldn’t say,” Charles Sabin said. “Of course, in considering father’s character, you must take into consideration certain things. He’d been a highly successful business man, as we judge standards of success; that is, he had amassed a comfortable fortune. He had nothing to gain by adding to his material wealth. I think he was, therefore, thoroughly ripe for some new suggestion. It happened to come through Uncle Arthur. Uncle Arthur lived somewhere in Kansas — at least he did two or three years ago, when father visited him; and I know that his philosophies made a profound impression on Dad. After Dad returned, he said that we were all too greedy; that we worshiped the dollar as the goal of our success; that it was a false goal; that man should concentrate more on trying to develop his character.
“You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possible — that too many men were trying to get lots of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible.”
“Just how did he figure the depression was caused, in terms of tokens?” Mason asked, interested.
“By greed,” Sabin said. “Everyone was gambling, trying to get tokens without work. Then afterward, when tokens ceased to represent honest work, men hated to part with them. A man who had performed slipshod work in return for a token hated to part with that token in exchange for the products of slipshod labor on the part of another laborer. In other words, the token itself came to mean more than what it could be exchanged for — or people thought it did, because too many people had become economic counterfeiters.”
“That’s interesting,” Mason said. “By the way, how many people lived in the house?”
“Only two of us, Mr. Waid and I.”