“Well, Mr. Lockyer,” he went on, rising, “I must be going. But I am stopping in the village, recollect, so that if you change your mind, or Uncle Sam doesn’t appreciate the boat, we stand ready to negotiate for her.”
“I won’t forget,” laughed the inventor, “but really, Mr. Ferriss, you are wasting your time. Either the United States gets her, or, if she isn’t good enough for Uncle Sam, I’ll sink her to the bottom of Long Island Sound.”
“Fine talk! Fine talk!” chuckled the amiable Mr. Ferriss, as he stepped into the noisy, bustling yard, so effectually cut off from outside observation by its high fence with the spikes on top. “But our figures will look mighty comfortable to you when you are on the brink of ruin. And you will be if the Lockyer doesn’t come up to government requirements.”
“Time enough to talk about that when the crash comes,” laughed the young inventor gaily enough. But as Ferriss’s portly, expensively dressed form vanished through the door he sank into a chair, and sat staring at the opposite wall, deep in thought. Things were coming to a crisis at the Lockyer boatyard.
Channing Lockyer was in his twenty-fifth year. Just twelve months before this story opens he had been left a considerable fortune by his father, who during his lifetime had done all he could to discourage his son’s “fantastic mechanical dreams,” as he called them. With the money in his possession, however, young Lockyer, with the true fire of the inventor, had started out to realize his fondest hope, namely to build a practicable submarine boat capable of making extended cruises without the drawback of the accompanying “parent boat.”
Compressed air had solved the problem of running his engines, but the use of the new driving force had necessitated the invention of an entirely novel type of motor. But young Lockyer—a graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, by the way—had perseveringly overcome all difficulties, and now, in the long, narrow shed over in one corner of the enclosed yard, stood the realization of his dreams. Through some friends of his late father’s the young man had succeeded in “pulling the wires” at Washington. As a consequence, after many wearisome delays, Lieutenant Archer Parry and a picked crew were to be sent to Grayport to make an extended series of tests with the new craft.
But in “pulling his wires” Lockyer had necessarily to allow a part of his secret to leak out. Now, at Washington “walls have ears,” and it was not long after he received the glad news that at last the Navy Department had decided to look into his type of boat, that Jasper Ferriss, promoter and partner in the Atlas Submarine Company, had come to young Lockyer with a proposal to sell his plant, stock, and experimental boat outright, for a sum that fairly staggered the inventor, who had, as Ferriss had hinted, run through almost his entire fortune in making his experiments.
Now, Lockyer was not ignorant that the Atlas people, having failed to sell their own gasolene and electric-driven boats to the government, were making diving torpedo boats for a certain Far Eastern power. He came of old Revolutionary stock, and the idea of selling his boat, the offspring of his brain and inventive power, for possible use against his own country was absolutely repugnant to him; wherefore Lockyer, as we have seen, had informed the Atlas concern in no uncertain terms that he would have nothing to do with their offers, flattering though they might seem. Jasper Ferriss had, however, perseveringly hung on, hoping against hope that something might happen to make the inventor change his mind. The news he had just received that a naval experimental force had actually been ordered to start for Grayport came as a rude shock to him.
In fact, after leaving Channing Lockyer, Mr. Ferriss took the first train to New York. In the Broadway offices of his firm a stormy scene followed his narrative of his failure to close a deal with Lockyer.
Camberly—Watson Camberly, the other partner of the firm—a middle-aged man of the same aggressive type to which Ferriss himself belonged, took him sharply to task.