CHAPTER XXI
That night at dinner I asked Hiram how much he knew about gasoline engines, and he looked up at me sharply.
"Not very much; very little, in fact. The Gold-Beater gave me a car once—a pretty good one—and I was learning about motors fairly fast when something happened. I knew motors needed water, oil and gasoline, and that when I did certain things it went, and sometimes it moved pretty fast. That was the trouble—I met a bigger car and we both went over in a man's front yard. I lost two wheels and other things—I never saw it again. The Gold-Beater and the insurance company settled somehow.
"Do you know," he continued after a pause, "I don't blame the Gold-Beater much—two thousand was my share for putting an innocent pedestrian in the park on the bad side—I wonder he didn't get the marble heart sooner." As he said this his lips curled with self-criticism.
"How soon will you have the motor ready to start? I am going to be very busy to-morrow. Can you and the captain manage to start it alone?"
"To-morrow at noon we will have everything ready for a try-out and if I don't feel safe we will not attempt to start without you. Don't want to take any chances; there's too much at stake," he insisted with rare judgment.
"Everything is fair in love and war," is the libertine's comfort in the case of a love contest—and in war it depends on the kind of an enemy we have. In this war any means of obtaining evidence against our enemy was justified. That was my firm belief. That night Becker & Co.'s office was entered as planned and his safe opened. While there was plenty of evidence that he was trading illicitly and with the enemy, I was disappointed in finding no evidence of his thieving propensity, except a letter he had received that day from the captain of a Swedish ship, Sparticide, then in port, who in poor English explained that he had "received the sample and thought it would do, though the price was altogether too high. If he would pack in half barrels and deliver as suggested, he would take the lot for cash, delivered alongside."
This letter was carefully copied and replaced.