"But if they only have the model, and you still have some of the finished appliances," asked Alice, "can't you get ahead of them yet?"
"I'm afraid not," Russ replied. "You see, the patent office doesn't require models to be filed in all cases now. You can get a patent merely on drawings. They can still get ahead of me."
"Not if you file your drawings now!" exclaimed Ruth.
"Yes, but I'm not ready. You see the machine isn't perfected yet. I am still working on it. But they can file a prior claim, and get a patent on something so near like mine that I would be refused a patent when I applied.
"You see I haven't made any formal application yet. Of course, if it came to a question of a lawsuit, I might beat them out. But I have no money to hire lawyers, and they have. The only thing for me to do is to get that model back before they have a chance to use it to make drawings from. And how to do it I don't know."
"Do you know who that messenger boy was?" asked Alice suddenly of the machinist.
"I never saw him before, Miss—no. He came in a taxicab."
"A taxicab!" cried Russ, excitedly. "You didn't say that before. Did you happen to notice the number?"
If ever Russ Dalwood was thankful it was then, and the cause of it was that Mr. Burton had a mathematical mind in which figures seemed to sprout by second nature.
"I did notice the number," he said. "It isn't often that taxicabs stop out in front here, and I looked from my window as one drew up at the curb. I was working on your patent at the time. I saw the number of the cab, later, as the messenger boy rode off in it with the model."