Such was J. T. Maston. No wonder his colleagues had every confidence in him when he undertook to solve the wildest abracadabrant calculations that occurred to their audacious brains! No wonder that the Gun Club had confided to him the problem regarding the hurling of the projectile from the Earth to the Moon! No wonder that Evangelina Scorbitt was intoxicated with his glory, and had conceived for him an admiration which perilously bordered on love!
But in the case under consideration, the solution of the problem regarding the conquest of the North Pole, J. T. Maston had no flight to take in the sublime regions of analysis. To allow the concessionaries of the Arctic regions to make use of their new possessions, the secretary of the Gun Club had but a simple problem in mechanics to occupy his mind. It was a complicated problem, no doubt, requiring ingenious and possibly novel formulæ, but it could be done.
Yes! They could trust J. T. Maston, although the slightest slip might entail the loss of millions! But never since his baby head had toyed with the first notions of arithmetic had he made a mistake, never had he been the millionth of an inch out in a matter of measurement, and if he had made an error in the last of twenty places of decimals his gutta-percha cranium would have burst its fixings.
It was important to insist on the remarkable mathematical powers of J. T. Maston. We have done so! Now we have to show him at work, and to do that we must go back a few weeks.
About a month before the famous advertisement, J. T. Maston had been requested to work out the elements of the project of which he had suggested to his colleagues the marvellous consequences.
For many years he had lived at No. 179, Franklin Street, one of the quietest streets in Baltimore, far from the business quarter, for in commerce he took no interest; far from the noise of the crowd, for the mob he abhorred.
There he occupied a modest habitation known as Ballistic Cottage, living on the pension he drew as an old artillery officer, and on the salary paid him as the Gun Club secretary. He lived alone with one servant, Fire-Fire, a name worthy of an artilleryman’s valet. This negro was a servant of the first-water, and he served his master as faithfully as he would have served a gun.
J. T. Maston was a confirmed bachelor, being of opinion that bachelorhood is the only state worth caring about in this sublunary sphere. He knew the Sclav proverb, that a woman draws more with one hair than four oxen in a plough; and he was on his guard.
If he was alone at Ballistic Cottage, it was because he wished to be alone. He had only to nod to change his solitude of one into a solitude of two, and help himself to half the fortune of a millionaire. There was no doubt of it. Mrs. Scorbitt would only have been too happy; but J. T. Maston was not going to be too happy; and it seemed that these two people so admirably adapted for each other—in the widow’s opinion—would never understand each other.
The cottage was a very quiet one. There was a groundfloor and a first-floor. The ground floor had its verandah, its reception-room and dining-room, and the kitchen in a small annexe in the garden. Above them was a bedroom in front, and a workroom facing the garden away from the noise, a buen retiro of the savant and the sage within whose walls were solved calculations that would have raised the envy of a Newton or a Laplace.