"Well, you're not a rag and bone merchant, it's true, but——"
"Considering that to-day's the 12th, and it's just on eleven now, it's too late to tender, even if I wanted to."
"Which you don't! My bright ideas are always nipped in the bud. I say, Bob, was there anything in that story we heard in our mess at Corbie—that idea of yours, you know?"
"Which one?" asked Templeton, pausing for a moment in his task. He was always interested in ideas.
"Well, they said you were showing off one of your inventions to a brass hat—some sort of a door-handle, I think it was—and he got fixed up in a dug-out, and you couldn't release him for three hours or so, and he got no lunch. Everybody said it was a splendid rag."
"Idiots!"
"But wasn't it true? The story ran through the front line trenches for thirty miles or so, and bucked the men up no end."
"It wasn't a rag at all. The fact is, the staff-major was too impatient. He wouldn't wait till I'd finished explaining the idea, and the result was what you might have expected. It was his own fault—the idea's all right."
"What about your gas machine, then?"
"Well, what about it?" The inventor was roused: he stood facing Eves, with the air of a cat whose fur has been rubbed the wrong way.