The Boy Scouts and the Army Airship

by John Henry Goldfrap

One afternoon, not long after the events related in the last chapter, Paul Perkins had a visitor. The caller was Freeman Hunt’s father, a man of past middle age, but flashily dressed notwithstanding the plentiful sprinkling of gray in his hair and carefully trimmed mustache. A diamond ring sparkled on Mr. Hunt’s left hand and a similar stone blazed in his tie. He regarded the wearing of the jewels as advertisements of prosperity, and wore them with the same satisfaction with which he looked upon his new, gaudily furnished house on the hill above the village, and his automobile—also very new—and his numerous other possessions, all of which, like himself, seemed somehow to savor of veneer and to nowhere have the true ring of solid wood.

There was, perhaps, a reason for this. Stonington Hunt had not always enjoyed “ease and a competency.” His earlier years, in fact, had been a hard struggle. He had been a messenger boy for a firm of Wall Street brokers, but, by natural sharpness and shrewdness, had worked himself up till he obtained an interest in the business. Then he branched out. His fortune grew by leaps and bounds, till Stonington Hunt was recognized as a wealthy man. The newspapers had shown up several of his financial transactions as being distinctly shady, but somehow he had always been “smart enough,” as he would have expressed it, to keep to windward of the law. “Smartness,” in fact, was his gospel. He preached it morning, noon, and night to his son. Had Freeman had a different sort of father, he might have been a different sort of boy. But his mother having died when he was but a small lad, he had fallen exclusively to his father’s care. Stonington Hunt had brought his son up to believe it was disgraceful to be poor, and doubly disgraceful to fail in anything one set out to do. Principle, the elder Hunt had none, and he had taught his son that a sense of honor was a useless encumbrance. Such was the man who rang Mrs. Perkins’s front door bell and greeted her with overdone effusiveness.

“Is Paul in?” he asked, after he had introduced himself and expressed his intense gratification at meeting such a charming lady.

Poor Mrs. Perkins, all in a flutter, invited her glittering guest into the front parlor, drew up the shades, which were rarely raised, and rejoined that Paul was still at school, but would be home shortly.

“Perhaps it is just as well,” smiled Mr. Hunt, displaying a row of white, gleaming teeth. “He is but a lad, and I have come to talk over something which, perhaps, a woman of the world, an intelligent woman like yourself, is more competent to discuss than a mere boy.”

“Paul is a mighty bright boy,” remarked Mrs. Perkins, bridling somewhat in defense of Paul, but coloring and simpering with pleasure at the compliment paid to her.

“Exactly,” agreed Mr. Hunt amiably; “a very bright boy. A credit to the town, madam. But Paul has been hiding his light under a bushel, so to speak. He has not been radiating the effulgence of inventive genius as he should; he has been—in short,” concluded Mr. Hunt, “Paul needs bringing out.”

“Bringing out?” gasped Mrs. Perkins, to whom much of this had been so much Greek.

“Just so, my dear Mrs. Perkins, and I—Stonington Hunt—am the man to do it. Why, I understand that at this very moment he has in your stables a remarkable—I may say, a wonderful invention.”

Mrs. Perkins had never heard the wagon house referred to as “stables” before, and, quite carried away by this glittering gentleman’s kindly interest and his magnificent manner, she rejoined that Paul had got “something of some sort” out there.