Immediately on discovering his loss—which was soon after having reached his office—Flint, in something like a fright, telephoned down to the Oakwood Heights laboratory and instructed Herzog, in person, to make a careful search for it and to report results inside an hour. Even though some of the essentials of his plan were written in a code of his own devising, Flint paled before the possible results should the book fall into the hands of anybody intelligent enough to fathom its meaning.
"Damn the luck!" he ejaculated, pacing the office floor, his fists knotted. "If it had been a pocket book with a few thousand inside, that would have been a trifle. But to lose my plan of campaign—God grant no harm may come of it!"
Waldron, slyly observing him, could not suppress a smile.
"Calling on God, eh?" sneered he. "You must be agitated. I haven't heard that kind of entreaty on your lips, Flint, since the year of the big coal strike, when you prayed God the gun-men might 'get' the strikers before they could organize. Come, come, man, brace up! Your book will turn up all right; and even if it doesn't there's no cause for alarm. It would take a man of extraordinary acumen to read your hieroglyphics! Cheer up, Flint. There's really nothing to excite you."
The Billionaire thus adjured, sat down and tried to calm his agitation.
"Rotten luck, eh?" he queried. "But after all, Herzog is likely to find the book. And even if he doesn't, I guess we're safe enough. The very boldness of the plan—supposing even that the finder could grasp it—would put it outside the seeming range of the possible. It's hardly a hundred to one shot any harm may come of it."
"All right, then, let it go at that," said Waldron. "And now, to business. Suppose, for example, you've got a perfectly unlimited supply of oxygen-gas and liquid. How are you going to market it? Just what details have you worked out?"
Flint pondered a moment, before replying. At last he said:
"Of course you understand, Wally, I can't give you every point. The whole thing will be an evolution, and new ideas and processes, new uses and demands will develop as time passes. But in the main, my idea is this: The big producing stations will steadily extract oxygen from the atmosphere, thus leaving the air increasingly poorer and less adapted to sustaining human life.
"I shall store the oxygen in vast tanks, like the ordinary gas-tanks to be found in every city, only much bigger. These tanks will be fed by pipe-lines from the central stations, thus."