“Why,” he went on persuasively, “you know as well as I do that the government is notoriously slow pay. By the time the red tape is unwound at Washington you’ll be penniless, and the boat a rust-eaten wreck. Our concern, on the other hand, offers you a fat figure, down on the nail. Come, say the word and I’ll write you a check now.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Mr. Ferriss,” smiled Channing Lockyer, as the other’s be-diamonded hand sought his breast pocket to produce his check book—the magic volume which could have told many tales of its adventures with Jasper Ferriss.
“My answer to you and your concern regarding your proposition is No,—first, last and all the time,” he went on.
“Why?”
Jasper Ferriss was angered. Despite his experience and skill in putting through all manner of “deals” requiring the exercise of the nicest diplomacy, he could not help showing his chagrin. He showed it in the way his black brows contracted till they met in one thick band across his puffy, florid countenance. Showed it, too, in the quick way in which he rubbed his blue, clean-shaven chin, with its triple folds of fat, and in the sharp, impatient beat of his patent leather boot on the floor of the dusty shipyard office in which they sat talking by Channing Lockyer’s battered old desk, with its litter of blueprints and plans.
“Why?”
The question was shot out as if it had been a projectile.
“Why?” echoed Channing Lockyer. “Because your firm proposes to build submarines of my type for a foreign power—a power that may some day be at war with us. I believe—it may be an inventor’s conceited folly—but I believe that with a fleet of Lockyer submarines the power controlling them will be absolute mistress of the seas. Naturally, as a descendant of Jefferson Lockyer, I don’t want to see any country but my own with such powerful engines of war at its disposal.”
The confidence of inventors in their works was not new to Jasper Ferriss. But somehow the enthusiasm of this tall, pale young man, with the workman’s clothes and the long, nervous fingers, infected him. But it made him burn with an ardent desire to secure possession of the secret of the Lockyer submarine for his own company. However, while Channing Lockyer had been talking the other had managed to control his irritation, and now could speak with his accustomed smoothness.
“I understand and honor your feelings, Mr. Lockyer,” he said suavely, “but a man’s first duty is really to himself, especially to a man in your position. But when is the government going to test your craft?”