He turned to the woman. “I haven’t five thousand or five hundred dollars with me, but if you’ll come up town, I’ll get five thousand for you.”
Mrs. Rosnosky would not part with the apparatus. Tom would not let it out of his sight. Either Tom had to mount the express wagon, or Mrs. Rosnosky had to come in the motor car. The latter was her choice, and Mrs. Rosnosky had the joy of sitting enthroned in a big blue motor, while we sped up town. The bank had long since been closed, and for swiftness and surety we decided to run up to Tom’s club. There he was able to cash a check. Mrs. Rosnosky bore the gaze of the few men who lingered around the big club windows with a perfect and patronizing equanimity, and, her money in hand, finally descended from the car and returned to her East Side abode, a richer woman.
Tom heaved a sigh of relief as we started off again. “Thank heaven that red and gold nightmare with the wig is gone. She was a clever one, though. Who’d have thought of her recognizing platinum at a glance. I didn’t, I confess, under all that dust. Poor old Denckel, his heart would break if he could see the machine now.”
“Never mind, Tom,” said Dorothy, as he gazed ruefully at the wreck before him. “I think we can get that together again. But how I wish we had the data in the manuscript!”
CHAPTER VII
The wreck of the wave-measuring machine once installed in the laboratory, every energy was bent towards putting it into perfect working condition. A maddening task it was. Thrown hither and thither in the corners of warehouses, the missing parts and waving broken wires of the apparatus, as it first stood on the laboratory table, gave but little promise of final renovation. But the possibilities which it held entranced both Dorothy and Tom. Each day I came up to find them working. Each night they came back to the laboratory for a few more hours’ work. The minds of all of us were turning more and more to our one fixed purpose, the discovery of the man who was trying to stop all war. The stir and tremor of the tumultuous world around, eager for news of the dread tragedies, seemed to be but an outside interest, compared with the tremendous possibilities of running down the individual at the bottom of this gigantic undertaking.
Gradually the chaos began to take on form. Cylinders of shining metal rose above the polish of the base. Revolving hemispheres and cones resumed their original forms or were replaced by reproductions. Broken wires, replaced by new wire, found their connections. Jones was indefatigable. He was forever polishing, adjusting, scraping, and his mild blue eyes behind his big spectacles glowed with enthusiasm, as he sat gazing at the wave-measuring machine and working on one of its parts.